Nobody can tell you exactly where your business will be in two years. I certainly can’t. But I’ve found a surprisingly reliable way to get a preview, and it doesn’t involve forecasts, vision boards or a strategy offsite. It involves turning around.
Instead of staring at the horizon, look at the road behind you. Specifically, the last 90 days.
The honest 90-day review
Ask yourself a few plain questions. Are you making more money than you were three months ago? Are you spending more of your week on work you actually enjoy? Do you have more freedom, or less? Are you enjoying your life, or just getting through it?
The answers are usually one of three: yes, no or sorta. Most MSP owners I speak with land on sorta. Revenue is fine. The team is busy. Tickets get closed. Yet the owner is still the escalation point for everything, still writing proposals at 10pm and still promising themselves that next quarter will be different.
Here’s the uncomfortable part. Sorta is not a resting place. It’s a direction.
Your trajectory is already set
The easiest way to see where you’ll end up is to take what you did over the last 90 days and extend the line. Picture repeating the same actions, and just as importantly the same inactions, every single day for the next two years.
The Copilot licence you bought but never rolled out properly. The SharePoint clean-up you keep deferring. The documentation that lives in one tech’s head. The pricing review you haven’t had time for. None of these feel urgent today. Multiply them by 730 days and they become the shape of your business.
So where does that line take you? Somewhere great? Somewhere not so great? Or just okay? Be honest, because okay compounds too.
Use the tools to read the road
This is one place where I find Microsoft 365 Copilot genuinely useful, not as a magic fix but as a mirror. Your last 90 days are already sitting in Outlook, Teams, Planner and your Excel reports. Picture asking Copilot to summarise what consumed your calendar this quarter, which client conversations kept recurring, or what you committed to in meetings and never followed up. The patterns are often obvious once someone lays them out in front of you.
Then do the same for your team. Where are the repeated questions? Which processes in your PSA or SharePoint keep generating rework? A short, honest review like this tells you more about your future than any five-year plan.
Small changes in direction matter more than big declarations. I wrote earlier about how worthwhile change accumulates in Give It Time to Become Something, and that applies here. Shift the daily habits and the two-year destination moves with them.
If you’re already heading somewhere great
Maybe your review comes back as a clear yes. More revenue, better clients, more freedom. Brilliant. Keep doing what’s working.
But between you and me, I reckon there’s a way to get you there faster. It usually comes from removing the busywork that still drags on your best people, rather than adding more effort. Automate the repetitive reporting with Power Automate. Let Copilot draft the first pass of the QBR deck. And as I said in Stop Acting Like the Business You Have Not Built Yet, stop carrying overhead you don’t need yet.
Take an hour this week. Look back at the last 90 days, then extend the line. If you don’t like where it ends, today is the cheapest day to change the angle.
