Key takeaways
- Half a day, off site, with the numbers prepared in advance, is enough for a company under $10M.
- Review last quarter against what you said you would do, not against how it felt.
- Leave with no more than three company priorities, each with an owner, a measure and a first step dated within two weeks.
- The quarterly plan feeds the weekly meeting. If the weekly page does not show the priorities, the plan is already dead.
Most quarterly planning meetings are either a long lunch where everyone agrees things should be better, or a brutal day that produces a forty-line plan nobody looks at again. The useful version sits between the two. It is short, it is honest about the last ninety days, and it produces a very small number of commitments that then show up on the weekly page every week until they are done.
Here is the format we run with leadership teams across British Columbia, including the preparation that makes the day work and the follow-through that makes it matter.
Preparation, one week before
The meeting is only as good as the numbers brought into it. A week before, whoever holds finance prepares the quarter's results against the plan. Revenue, gross margin, cash, collections, and the operational numbers from the weekly page summarised for the quarter. Each function head writes one page on what they committed to, what happened, and what they learned. Nobody presents slides. Everyone reads the pages before the day.
The owner adds one page on the market, the big customers and anything on the horizon the team should know. If a fractional executive holds a seat, they prepare their function's page like everyone else.
Keep each page to one side of paper. The discipline of fitting the quarter on a page is most of the thinking, and it means the room spends its time on decisions instead of on reading.
The morning, honest review
The rule for the morning is that nobody defends. A priority that was not done is information about capacity or about the priority. Teams that cannot say that out loud in the room cannot plan.
- An hour on the numbers. What did we say, what did we do, where is the gap and why. The why is the point, not the blame.
- Thirty minutes on the priorities we set last quarter. Done, partly done or not started, and what that tells us about how we plan.
- Thirty minutes on people. Who grew, who is struggling, which seats on the org chart are empty or overloaded.
- Thirty minutes on what the customers told us this quarter, from complaints, reviews, lost deals and sales calls.
The afternoon, choosing three
After lunch the team lists everything that could be done next quarter and then cuts it to three company priorities. Three, not seven. Each one is written as an outcome with a measure, has one owner who is in the room, and has a first step dated within two weeks. Below the three sit the functional priorities, no more than two per function, which must support the company three or be dropped.
The hardest part of the afternoon is the cutting. Owners want to keep everything. The question that helps is which three, if done, would make the others easier or unnecessary.
Write each priority on the wall in a sentence a new employee could understand, with the measure beside it. If the sentence needs explaining, it is not yet a priority.
Leaving the room
Before anyone leaves, the three priorities and their measures are added to the weekly page as lines with owners. The org chart is updated with any seat changes agreed. The decisions on hiring, spend and stopped work are written down with dates. And the team agrees what is communicated to the wider company and by whom, within the week.
The whole thing fits in a half day because the preparation was done and because the decision was to choose three things rather than to discuss everything.
Follow-through is the actual plan
A quarterly plan lives or dies in the weekly meeting. If the three priorities are lines on the weekly page with this week's progress against them, they get done. If they live in a document from the planning day, they do not. The owner's job between quarters is to protect those lines from being pushed off the page by whatever is urgent this week.
Common mistakes are planning without the numbers, letting the owner set the priorities before the room has spoken, choosing seven priorities because three feels too few, and skipping the quarter's review because last quarter was uncomfortable. Our fractional executives often chair this meeting for owners who want an outside hand on the format, and our team prepares the numbers page when finance is thin.