Your peak trading performance is a cosmetic treatment for a problem that lives in the baseline and you are reviewing the cosmetics quarterly while the problem compounds underneath them.
Peak periods produce numbers that are real, hard-won, and commercially significant. They are also numbers that obscure the structural health of the business by concentrating demand, promotional intensity, and team focus into periods that are not representative of how the commercial system performs the rest of the time.
The baseline, what the business produces in the weeks between peaks, with no promotional support, no heightened awareness, no seasonal demand tailwind, is where the real diagnostic picture lives. A business with a strong commercial architecture has a baseline that grows. A business that is dependent on peaks to hit annual targets has a baseline that is flat or quietly declining while the peak performance masks it in the annual numbers.
I have been in annual reviews where peak performance was the headline and baseline performance was the footnote. The footnote was the finding. The headline was the comfort.
Strip the peak weeks out of your annual performance data and look at what remains. What you see is the commercial system without the promotional medication. That is the patient you are actually treating.
Related reading