A Guide to Weekly, Monthly and Quarterly Business Reviews
When you're a new company, you're tracking your metrics by the day. Often, the main metrics are revenue and burn rate. But as you grow, questions around process and metrics arise.
When I started my first SaaS company, there were three numbers I always knew: monthly recurring revenue, burn rate and money in the bank.
Those first months revolved around testing, learning and tweaking our product and sales process until we could increase monthly recurring revenue. We were always trying to keep burn rate low.
Because we were a small company with less than 5 employees, we hosted daily standups where I was always transparent around these three numbers and our development sprints. The engineers focused on completing story points (which were attributed to features we needed to build) and the rest of us were laser-focused on increasing the monthly recurring revenue number each day (but more realistically, as is typical with mid-market and enterprise sales, it changed once every few weeks).
If you can not measure it, you cannot improve it. - Lord Kelvin
Once we grew to ~10 employees, our daily company standups turned into daily team standups and one weekly business review with everyone at the company. Breaking our touchpoints down into product/engineering and sales/marketing/customer success helped teams stay focused while ensuring we still had dedicated time each week to be together. This ‘standup by department’ + weekly business review lasted a long time.
Fast-forward a few years, after we sold the company, we began working for a larger business that had a few hundred employees. With more people came additional layers of management. With management came more responsibility and more reviews to ensure teams were on the right track.
Managers hosted weekly business reviews with their teams.
Directors hosted weekly business reviews with their Managers.
VPs hosted Monthly Business Reviews with their Managers.
C-Suite hosted Monthly Business Reviews with their VPs.
The Board hosted Quarterly Business Reviews with the C-Suite.
Managers and Directors were left to make meaningful change to the numbers with their teams week over week. They were close enough to the problems to know possible solutions, test them and make an impact. They looked at the numbers and continued these testing loops week over week.
Then monthly, VPs and the C-Suite would refocus the company’s strategy and direction and give insight into the new numbers to beat and possible paths to get there. Then Managers and Directors would get back to work with their teams.
Some key pointers to hosting business reviews at any level:
Align on the most important data to track for your business (sales #s, sprints, etc.).
Compile data & create WBR/MBR slides.
Automate this data collection so you don’t have to spend more than 30 minutes a week/month pulling this together.
Circulate slides 24 hours in advance.
Require that everyone pre-read the slides.
Don’t read the slides in the meeting — Keep the conversation about solutions.
Require that everyone who attends the meeting comes to the meeting with one idea to answer the question: what can your team do this week to move the needle in your key metric?
If someone doesn’t talk/contribute in the meeting, they’re not allowed to the next one. Everyone has valuable ideas — share them.
What are your favorite tips for hosting Business Reviews?
Comment for a sample SaaS Business Review Template
