Why an Annual Review Is the Most Overlooked Step in Business Owner Planning
By Thomas J. Perrone, CLU, CIC | Founder, New England Consulting Group of Guilford, Inc.
Ask most business owners how their planning is doing, and they’ll tell you it’s fine. They’ll say it with confidence, too — the same way most of us would say we feel healthy on any given day. But ask that question in the middle of a CT scan, and the confidence tends to disappear. The difference isn’t your health. It’s what you can’t see.
Business owner planning works the same way. The plans you built years ago may have looked airtight the day you signed them. But time passes, tax law changes, your business changes, and your family’s needs change — and none of that shows up on the surface. The documents still sit in the drawer looking just as official as they did the day you filed them. What they don’t tell you is whether they still fit.
We get the documents completed and executed, feel good about it, and then one morning realize it’s been five years — or more — since anyone looked at them again.
A Familiar Story
This pattern shows up constantly — with my clients, and with the professional colleagues I work alongside every day. The planning gets done. Everyone feels the relief of finally having “taken care of it.” Then life takes over, and the plan quietly ages in place while the world around it keeps moving.
The real risk isn’t skipping the planning altogether — most owners eventually get that part done. The risk is discovering, years later, that Washington has rewritten the rules, your business has grown or changed shape, your family situation is different, and no one ever flagged it. If any of those shifts would have changed your strategy, the only real question worth asking is: when would you have wanted to know?
Building the Fix Into the System
This is exactly the problem I built the GWT Planning System® to solve. GWT stands for Growth, Wealth, and Transition — the three areas every business owner’s planning needs to work together, not in isolation. But good structure alone isn’t enough. A plan that’s well designed on day one and never revisited is still a plan that goes stale.
So, from the very beginning, the GWT Planning System® was built with an automatic annual review woven directly into it — not an optional add-on, but part of how the system runs. Every year, that review happens. Sometimes it’s in person. Sometimes it’s a phone call. Sometimes it’s a Zoom conversation. The format isn’t the point. The consistency is.
That built-in review does three things for every client:
- It catches tax and legal changes coming out of Washington before they quietly undermine a strategy that used to work.
- It keeps the plan aligned with the business itself, which rarely looks the same from one year to the next — revenue, staffing, ownership, and value all shift.
- It accounts for changes at home — a marriage, a health event, a child’s changing role in the business, a shift in retirement timing.
The Most Critical Part of Planning
Over more than fifty years of doing this work, I’ve come to see this as the most important part of what I do — not just putting the right plan in motion but making sure it stays right as everything around it keeps changing. A plan is not a document you finish once. a relationship you maintain.
If you can’t remember the last time your plan was reviewed against today’s tax law, today’s business, and today’s family circumstances, that’s worth changing before it becomes a costly surprise. The goal isn’t to redo the planning every year — it’s to know, every year, exactly where you stand and where you could be.
The goal isn’t to redo the planning every year — it’s to know, every year, exactly where you stand and where you could be.
If it’s been a while since your plan had a real second look, let’s put one on the calendar.
Questions? Call me. My Calendar
Download Your Free GWT Report- Learn how the GWT Planning System® can be your pathway to solid up to date planning and help you with decisions for the future: Click
Check this Article out:
