Some fast thoughts on Business Reviews

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Someone sent me an email asking about how I recommend running business reviews (cadence, who attends, format, etc). I jotted down a fast response and thought I’d share it here. 

My main overarching point is that everything about business reviews should be iterative from what metrics you review to the format of the meeting to who attends. It is not something you do once and get right. It takes time to find a format that really serves it’s purpose and feels good... and then your business evolves so your business review has to as well. 

Ok here are some fast thoughts on business reviews:

1) Cadence: this is completely subject to your business and how fast the metrics move. At one company I worked with, we did this monthly because the metrics genuinely only moved once a month. Many businesses do it weekly or quarterly. There is no “right answer”: think about the cadence of your business, how fast things change, what timing you can have reliable and useful updated data. Eventually, you also want to ensure you time these meetings with things like your All Hands (since you should share high level data with the whole company) and your board meeting (so you don’t have to create a separate process for these). Hopefully this goes without saying but business reviews should be separate from leadership meetings.

2) What to include: You want to include presentations / data from the areas of the business that when added together answer the CEO-level question "how are we doing?" "are we going to meet our goals?" "If not, why not?" Metrics are unique to every business; it takes time to find a version that works great; and it should be iterative.

3) Format: The typical format is that business leaders prepare slides and present them, and leaders ask questions. You can also have someone "agnostic" like the head of business operations prepare and present the slides but business leaders need to be prepared to answer questions, so they need to be deeply immersed in the data that's presented (this can get / feel political, just fyi). I've also tried a version where people record Looms and then the live session is just a Q&A. There is no perfect format, and I generally believe it's good to try something and constantly iterate. If you are not changing the format of your business review every 6 months, it is probably outdated and you might be missing stuff. 

4) Who attends: I think there's two separate things here: 1) who is primarily asking questions and engaging in dialogue with the business leads and 2) who is listening. I'm a fan of keeping #1 small and #2 big. I think business context is good for everyone to hear (everyone can be whole leadership team, leadership team plus their deputies, optional invite for whole company if you are small, etc). This list will also evolve many times. Keep an eye on it. Someone should own ensuring that new hires are added. In order to keep this manageable, the way I've done it before is to have the CEO and a small number of other execs asking verbal questions and then have a healthy chat going in the Zoom chat (the presenter will need to assign someone to monitor chat). Again, there's no perfect way to do this, and it's super important to just get into a mindset of trying things and iterating. 

last point: never lose sight of the point of these meetings. They are not for show. They are a forum for the CEO and a small set of leaders to govern the business and ensure that it is on track. It is a forum to ensure that you are reviewing the early indicators (you will need to iterate to know what these are) that give you a sense of any issues that might arise and help you catch stuff early.