How to Conduct High-Value Monthly Business Reviews

Monthly business reviews (MBRs) are a great way to track your progress against your strategic and operating plan, make adjustments to align your team, and capitalize on opportunities in the marketplace. Most importantly, consistently conducting high-value MBRs helps you and your leadership team to create a culture of commitment and high performance.

Purpose: The Monthly Business Review (MBR) process is designed to ensure the effective execution of an organization’s strategic and operating plan.

Each month, we want to step back from day to day activities to assess several questions:

• How well are we executing on our plan?
• What issues or obstacles do we need to address?
• What opportunities have arisen that we may want to pursue?
• What adjustments, if any, do we need to make to the plan or our approach?

Who: The leader and team who are ultimately responsible and accountable for the creation and execution of the plan (at the company or department level). Typically this meeting involves the CEO and his/her direct reports.

What: A standing meeting, approximately ninety minutes to two hours in duration. The MBR follows a structured agenda to review performance, assess issues and opportunities, and make adjustments to the plan as appropriate. As a standing meeting, the MBR becomes part of the operating rhythm of the organization and creates a functional structure for managing the performance of the business.

When/Where: As soon as practical after the close of a prior month – once financial results can be assembled and reported – typically scheduled between the 5^th and the 15^th of the month. Ideally in person, but can be conducted virtually with team members calling in if travelling. It can be tempting to reschedule this meeting or excuse absences due to various events – but doing so erodes the discipline and accountability of the process.

Starting Point: Recognize that the MBR process is an evolution towards greater communication, accountability, and effectiveness. As you become more effective in preparing for and conducting this meeting over time, less meeting time will be spent on informational updates and more time will be spent on issues, opportunities, and strategic thinking. Be aware that this type of disciplined MBR may be new for your organization, and may create some discomfort around accountability as the organization becomes more focused on meeting commitments in the plan. A MBR debrief is built into the agenda, so you can make this meeting more effective over time.

Tone: A good MBR creates a supportive environment for the leadership team to monitor performance and to constructively address issues and opportunities. When performance is not in line with the plan – either objectives or action plans are not being met – then it is important to get to a true understanding of underlying root causes, whether it is people, systems, processes, and to identify solutions which address these issues.

At times, external events will impact plan performance – changes in customer behavior, competitive actions, or other market conditions. It is important that the leadership team discerns if performance is genuinely impacted by the market, in which case a strategic shift may be required, or if it is due to internal issues, in which case different action may be required.

Pre-work: To prepare for each MBR, each plan owner needs to:

• Review your One Page Plan – or whatever strategic planning document you are using – and the plans of your colleagues
• Update your scorecards and progress reports

How are you tracking on objectives? How are you tracking on action plans?

• Prepare your 5 minute review

Scorecard/progress reports Success Stories Issues/Opportunities for team discussion

• General company information, such as financial results, can be circulated (or accessed) (ideally 48 hours in advance of the meeting.)
• Have copies available of the plan(s) to refer to during the meeting as necessary.

MBR Suggested Agenda:

15 minutes:

• Gathering & welcome
• Review financial & operating performance for prior month
• Review progress on company-wide or department-wide action plans

30-45 minutes:

• Individual team member reports: 5 minutes each

5 minutes:

• Prioritize issues/opportunities for discussion:
• Identify top 1-2 issues/opportunities for immediate discussion
• Table/schedule remaining issues for resolution as full group or sub groups

30 minutes:

• Work top 1-2 issues to resolution

10 minutes:

• Specify any action items or plan adjustments resulting from the MBR
• Debrief MBR – how well did this meeting serve its purpose?

Plus – what worked well?

Delta – what will make it better next time?

• Confirm schedule for next MBR

If you consistently conduct Monthly Business Reviews, you will discover that you develop much greater commitment, communication, and clarity.

One word of warning – the MBR process does shine a bright light on performance issues, so if you have a mismatch on your leadership team and things are simply not getting done, the MBR process will reveal it. Actually, it will reveal what everyone already knows but may not want to talk about – but that is a topic for a different post.

One final note: If you do not have a current strategic and operational plan in place, you need to develop this plan immediately – prior to implementing the MBR process. I recommend the One Page Business Plan as a simple and effective tool to capture both strategic and operational commitments on one page – with this approach, each person on the leadership team for a company or function develops their own one-page plan – which is aligned to the overall business plan.