What Should I Be Looking At With My Trusted Employees in A Regular Business Review Meeting?

Visualise, if you can, what it is that you would like everyone walking away from that meeting to take away with them. This is my check list:

Financial Performance

Has financial information been provided to the meeting so that each person attending walks away understanding how their area of responsibility and the business as a whole is performing and how it needs to perform financially in the month ahead? A simple monthly profit and loss calculation – sales, gross margin and operating profit margins should be available with year to date and same month last year comparisons is a good place to start. Keep it simple to begin with, use what the financial system you have has to offer in terms of standard reports. Remember – rubbish in leads to rubbish out, so it is worth looking into those reports to pick up how well your bookkeeping is being recorded. Small businesses often don’t make full use of the capabilities of the book keeping software they have. This is straightforward to fix. As businesses grow, the range and depth of the monthly analysis and target tracking can expand. Start by keeping it simple and building on the habit of looking closely at least every month at what the financials are with the people you hold accountable. A business advisor will help you to decide what is important to focus on, summarise the key financial information on one page and provide versions which can be shared within the business.

Customers

Somewhere in the meeting, customer issues and opportunities should be addressed. Sales is the first customer metric people think of. However, customer retention, customer acquisition, lifetime value of customer, customer satisfaction (e.g. Net Promoter Score) are all things you can measure which are worth looking at to see if they provide the kind of customer perspective you want your team to leave that meeting with.

Products and Suppliers

In the overall “Who, What, How and Why” of a business, this involves managing the “What” piece. Monthly, quarterly, and/or annual objectives should ideally be set on this and tracked at the monthly meeting.

Employee engagement

Typically this looks at recruitment, retention, training and employee satisfaction/empowerment. There are a variety of measures which can address each of these.

Key Risks and Issues

It can be useful to have a one page summary of the key risks and issues which the business is faced with and which everyone is “on the same page” about.

Strategic / New Opportunities

This is the time in the meeting where ideas and opportunities are brought forward for discussion and decision. If a team member wants to bring something to the table, they should be facilitated to do so. They need to approach the meeting owner in advance so that the agenda change and time required is notified to everyone in advance.

Action Items

Actions should be summarised at the end of the meeting and actions taken at the previous meeting reviewed first at the next meeting.