# Yearly Cadence — Captain's Template

> Drop this into `~/command/cadence/yearly/template.md` in your Command Kit.

## 📜 The big retrospective

Yearly is the slowest cadence and the one most operators skip. **Don't.**

## 🎙️ The 10-hour interview format (Max's pattern)

Each yearly review at MaxShip is a 10+ hour conversation — voice notes + recorded calls answering hundreds of questions across every venture. The output is a finalized report formatted for AI consumption that becomes the input to next year's strategy.

The questions that produce the report:

### Wins
- What did we ship that exceeded expectations?
- Which bets paid off — and was it skill or luck?
- Which customer / partner relationships compounded?
- What discipline actually held all year?

### Losses
- What did we ship that flopped — and why?
- Which bets failed — and was the bet wrong, or the execution?
- What partnerships unraveled?
- What discipline broke when we got busy?

### Learning points
- What pattern showed up across multiple ventures?
- What surprise from a customer reshaped what we thought we were doing?
- What new tool / model / methodology changed our work this year?

### Key partners
- Who showed up for us? How do we deepen that?
- Who didn't? What's the honest read of why?

### Finance
- Revenue, burn, runway, churn (where applicable)
- Cost / vendor / line-item review
- ROI on big bets — labor and capital

### What's working / not working for the business
- Per venture: what's compounding, what's draining
- Per venture: what stays, what gets paused, what gets killed

## 📦 The output

Take the 10+ hours of voice + writing and produce **a finalized report formatted for AI**. Drop it in `~/command/strategy/yearly-{year}.md`. Next year, every Claude conversation has this context.

That's the compound: this year's review becomes next year's Command.

## 🎨 Annual themes + big bets

After the retrospective, set the next year:

- [ ] **Annual theme** — one frame that holds the year. Not a goal. A direction.
- [ ] **3 big bets** — the ventures or initiatives that would change the company shape if they hit
- [ ] **Yearly tax / legal / admin chores** — schedule them into the calendar so they don't ambush you

## 🔁 The risk of skipping

Most captains running quarterly cadence skip yearly because *"it's just four quarterlies."* It isn't. Yearly is where you ask: **what kind of company are we becoming?** Quarterly can't answer that — too close to the rotor blades.

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Maintained at `/log/cadence/yearly` on max-ship.com.