It’s scorecard time!

If you’re new here, I share my quarterly results in this newsletter and hold myself to the same accountability I ask of other founders and teams. This one is a few weeks later than usual because Q3 closed right as the last edition went out. Here’s where we left things at midyear.

By financial metrics, Q3 was Empower’s best quarter ever. Revenue was up nearly 3x compared with Q3 last year, and net income was up more than 3x. At the same time, I only hit one of my big three Rocks (🤨).

When your financial results and goal outcomes tell two different stories, it’s time to investigate why before running into the next quarter. Below, I’ve shared both my scorecard and four questions I asked myself to dig deeper into the past quarter’s results. These can also guide you the next time you’re analyzing performance.

I focused on three objectives last quarter:

My first reaction to this scorecard was frustration. Two misses, and they look similar to misses from Q2. That’s the downside of doing this in public. I can’t tiptoe away when the same box goes unchecked twice.

Then I looked at it the way I’d look at the quarterly performance of one of Empower’s partners. I’m not sure the goals were the problem. Part of it was on me, but timing also played a role.

When I started Empower, I assumed Q1 would be the busy season. Budgets get set in Q4 (have you started yet?), and by January, founders need to hit the ground running. Two years in, the reality is different. The most business has closed mid-Q2 through Q3. I thought last year was a fluke. This year, it became a pattern. I didn’t know that when I set the three goals. But those objectives I missed required more bandwidth for go-to-market and business development. A lot of work landed June-September, so I barely had capacity outside of delivering for partners and selective networking.

This was the narrative I went through myself. Four key questions that forced more thinking about what happened and why I missed. You can go through the same exercise the next time you need to deconstruct what happened.

A missed goal is valuable information. Intentionality about understanding what happened before moving to the next thing helps you get better for the next go-round.

Not surprisingly, I’m now planning for mid-year to be the busy season going forward. I’m also looking for more leverage on my time (says every entrepreneur, right?). Part of that is automation, and I’ve recently built new workflows already saving me time and focus. The other part is assessing the inflection point at which I potentially bring on additional human support.

I spent a week in California at the beginning of October, part work and mostly personal time. I came home with more energy than I’ve had in months. I’m having conversations building real momentum, and I have a strong plan for how I want business to shape up in 2027. Look out for the preview in December 👀.

We’re in the final stretch of the year, and the holidays will make these two months feel even more compressed. If you’re not thinking about 2027 yet, now’s the time. Start examining 2026 performance through the lens of the four questions I posed above.

What’s one thing you can learn that you’ll carry forward next year?

What’s one thing you’ll leave behind?

If you do the exercise, I want to hear where you land.

Lastly, if you’re feeling stuck on forward-level thinking, or you can’t get your core team aligned on the direction or priorities, we should chat. One of the most fun engagements this year was an all-day strategic planning onsite where I really dug into one particular business with the founder and strengthened the forward direction.

I’m holding three spots for full-day on-sites with others seeking similar support between now and early January. Reply to this email if you’d like to learn more!

Devin Lee helps agency CEOs stop being the bottleneck in their own businesses. Devin goes deep into how an agency’s work gets delivered, builds the systems and automations the whole team runs on and stays through training until the changes stick.

Q: When did you know you were destined to build a business?
A: “Not until at least a few years of owning one! Despite my degree literally being in Business (of art and design), and choosing to write a business plan (for an ice cream truck geared towards music festivals called Dionysus Ices) as my senior thesis, I always said I would NEVER want to run my own business. It felt like there was just too much risk involved and it seemed way too scary. Fast forward six years later, at the ripe age of 27 - All other normie career paths I was handed had hit dead ends. I spent several years working in digital marketing agencies sitting at a desk and feeling deeply depressed. I spent a few years in the Montessori world - loving the world, but not seeing much upward mobility (aka, I got tired of being broke as a Guide's assistant, and I didn't want to be a Guide, and I didn't want to go back to working in an office - even for a school). During this time I read Marie Kondo's The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. What really changed my life was the realization that I could get paid for being so freaking organized. Since there wasn't exactly a job opening for a ‘really organized person,’ I had no choice but to start my own Home Organizing business. I was absolutely terrified for the entire first year (or two) - but I quickly realized there was no going back.”

Q: What’s the most unexpected thing (+/-) that’s happened along your entrepreneurial journey?
A: “All of the soft skills you HAVE to get really good at to run a successful and sustainable business. Things like: extreme confidence in myself, the ability to chat and connect with people to really understand their needs, being OK with the unknown, demanding excellence from myself because the buck stops with me, and all kinds of other things I would never have learned if I was still just following the leadership of a manager.”

Q: When did you hit your first scaling challenge, and how did you overcome it?
A: “2025. I said yes to way too many projects, many of them too small to be worth my time, and stacked up contractors to keep up. I didn't spend time preparing my business to onboard new contractors nor did I spend enough time vetting them before bringing them on. So I stopped taking on any small projects, took on just a few at a much higher rate, and kept one contractor so I could vet her and grow with her in a more sustainable way.”

Q: If you were starting all over, what’s one piece of advice you would give yourself?
A: “SKIP the free lead magnets, no one downloads them! Instead, start writing great email content and talk about it everywhere so people want to sign up.”

Q: Do you have one ask or offer you would like to share with the Empower community?
A: “My ask: intros to agency CEOs (SEO, PR, social, branding, design) with a team of two to 10 who still have everything running through them. If they can't take on more clients because they're the bottleneck, I'd love to meet them. My offer: if your project management tool is mostly decoration, find me at devinlee.com and I'll tell you what I'd fix first.”

Q: A fun one, what’s your all-time favorite restaurant and where is it located?
A: “Kaiten Sushi Toriton in Tokyo, Japan”

Check out her website here. Devin also writes a weekly email. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox.