Start, Stop, Keep: The Quarterly Review That Actually Changes How You Run Your Business
There’s a review most entrepreneurs never do.
Not the financial review. Not the pipeline check. Those happen, even if inconsistently. The review I’m talking about is the honest one , the one where you look at how you’re actually spending your time, your attention, and your energy, and ask: is any of this working the way I intended?
Start, Stop, Keep is a framework for that review. It’s simple enough to do in an hour. It’s rigorous enough to change how you operate for the next 90 days. And it has a way of surfacing things you already know but haven’t said out loud yet.
What Start, Stop, Keep Is
The framework is exactly what it sounds like. You go through everything you’re doing, individually or with your team, and you sort it into three buckets.
Start: Things you’re not doing that you should be. New behaviors, new commitments, new practices that the business needs.
Stop: Things you’re doing that aren’t working, aren’t worth the energy, or actively get in the way. This is the hardest list to write honestly.
Keep: Things that are working. The practices, habits, and behaviors worth protecting, continuing, and building on.
The framework comes out of team retrospectives, used in agile and scrum environments to help teams improve after each cycle. But entrepreneurs don’t need a software development context to use it. You need a quarterly rhythm, a clear head, and the willingness to be direct with yourself.
Why Entrepreneurs Avoid This Review
The reason most business owners don’t do this regularly isn’t that they’re unaware of the framework. It’s that honest review is uncomfortable.
Stopping something you’ve been doing requires admitting it wasn’t working. Starting something new requires accountability to a decision you haven’t made yet. And keeping something means you’re actually choosing it, instead of just doing it by default.
Gary Keller makes a useful observation in The ONE Thing: most people have a to-do list, but almost nobody has a “stop doing” list. They add to their obligations constantly and rarely subtract. The result is a calendar that’s full and a business that’s scattered.
Start, Stop, Keep forces the subtraction. That’s what makes it uncomfortable, and that’s exactly what makes it valuable.
How to Run the Review
Set aside 60 to 90 minutes. Not a stolen half hour between calls. An actual block with no interruptions. This is strategic time, not operational time.
Start with Stop. Counter-intuitive, but starting with what you’re cutting sets the right tone. Go through your week. What meetings are you in that produce nothing? What tasks are you doing that someone else should own? What habits, practices, or behaviors are you maintaining out of inertia rather than intention?
Write them down without filtering. You can decide later whether you’re actually going to stop. Right now, just name them.
Move to Start. What do you know the business needs that you keep deferring? What’s on your “someday” list that’s been there long enough to qualify as avoidance? What would you be doing if you weren’t busy doing everything else?
One rule here: keep the Start list short. Three to five things maximum. A Start list with twelve items is a wish list, not a commitment. Pick the ones that actually move the needle and let the rest wait.
Finish with Keep. This list is easy to rush, but don’t. Taking inventory of what’s working is how you protect it. When things get busy, the first things to disappear are often the practices that were making everything else work. Naming them explicitly means you’re choosing them, not just doing them when there’s time.
Connecting Start, Stop, Keep to the DRIP Matrix
Dan Martell’s DRIP Matrix from Buy Back Your Time sorts your activities into four categories: Drain (low skill, low joy), Replace (low skill, high joy, or high skill, low joy), Invest (high skill, activities you can delegate by building someone up), and Produce (high skill, high joy, the work only you can do).
Start, Stop, Keep maps directly onto this.
Most of what belongs on your Stop list is work that Drains you. You’re doing it because nobody else is, but it’s costing you energy you don’t get back.
Your Keep list should be anchored in what Produces results: the high-skill, high-joy work that moves the business forward and only you can do.
Your Start list is often about the Invest category: what do you need to begin doing so that, 90 days from now, someone else is running that function?
When you run Start, Stop, Keep through the lens of DRIP, it stops being just a reflection exercise and starts being a resource allocation decision.
What Happens After the Review
The review is only useful if it produces action.
Your Stop list needs a plan. For each item: when does it stop? Who does it go to, if it goes anywhere? Is it a task to delegate, a meeting to cancel, a habit to break?
Your Start list needs a schedule. A Start item without a date and a first step is just an intention. Intentions don’t change businesses. Decisions do. Pick a date, identify the first action, and put it on the calendar.
Your Keep list needs protection. For each item: what would make this go away? What’s the most likely threat to this practice? How do you ensure it stays when things get busy?
This is where Start, Stop, Keep becomes a management tool instead of just a reflection ritual. The output isn’t insight. The output is changed behavior.
Running It With a Team
If you have a team, the Stop list becomes especially powerful when everyone contributes.
The things your team is doing that don’t work are often invisible to you because they’re downstream. You see the output, not the friction. When your team names what should stop, you’re getting information you couldn’t get otherwise.
The guidelines for running it with a team: everyone contributes independently first, then shares. Protect the Stop list from becoming a blame session, it’s about activities and practices, not people. And make sure the leader goes first on the honest items. The willingness to model transparency is what makes the team willing to match it.
The Discipline Behind the Framework
Start, Stop, Keep only works if you run it consistently. Once a quarter minimum. Some entrepreneurs run a lighter version monthly, saving the full version for quarterly strategic reviews.
That same start-stop-keep discipline gets even sharper week to week — a simple weekly accountability tracker can catch drift long before your next quarterly review does.
The discipline isn’t in the framework itself. It’s in protecting the time to do it, being honest when you get there, and following through on the changes you commit to.
What the framework gives you is structure for a conversation you need to have with yourself anyway. The alternative is running the same patterns without ever stepping back to assess them, which is how good businesses get stuck and how busy entrepreneurs stay that way.
Ninety days is long enough for decisions to produce results. It’s short enough to course-correct when they don’t.
That’s the whole game. Run the review. Make the changes. Measure what happens. Run the review again.
Adam Dellos is the founder of Being In Action Coaching & Consulting, working with business owners and leaders who are ready to build their business by design, not by default.
