Weekly Business Review [Google Sheets or Excel Template]

If you are a leader, you need to be a numbers person.

Businesses are complex systems subject to the Elephant Problem. A well-run Weekly Business Review helps you get the right people together in one place, every week at a set time, to look at the most important data on a regular cadence, and have an open and challenging discussion about what critical decisions must be made as a team. It’s an expensive meeting. It requires, very often, manual data handling, and it will absolutely raise more questions than answers — some of them very difficult to face. It’s not always a nice time, but it is an incredibly valuable time.

Here I am selling my template WBR deck so that you can easily create your own WBR.

Your deck needs the full truth.

1. Do not attempt to keep some information opaque or behind closed doors if it feeds up to your primary company metric or leading indicators. This means margin (even if it’s sensitive), it may mean headcount or overheads, and it will certainly be more information about your revenue than feels good at first.
2. If you don’t have a number, you need to face that reality. Yes, it may be manual to get it, that’s by design. These are critical numbers and if you cannot interact with them easily then none of you can: it’s exposing a problem. If you cannot pull the numbers due to technical or data limitations, we need to look at that gap every week and acknowledge what it means.
3. Do not fall trap into getting the numbers your systems automatically give you. Be critical, ask what you really need to make good decisions, and continue asking those questions every week. If your numbers are on the sheet solely because they’re easy to get, you may be missing crucial insights to some hidden corners of your operations.

More about the WBR meeting here: https://jessicamayzwaan.medium.com/becoming-a-numbers-person-why-you-need-a-weekly-business-review-wbr-fc4da1648c10