The weekly rhythm
A weekly rhythm keeps the business steady between reviews. It works because it is short and because it looks at the same four things every time.
Weekly figures are noisy; the trend line matters more than any single week.
Four figures
- Orders and revenue against the same week last year
- Cash position and the next two weeks of outgoings
- Stock alerts: lines about to run out and lines not moving
- Service backlog: unanswered messages and open returns
What not to look at weekly
Conversion rate, acquisition cost and margin per group move too slowly and too noisily to be judged over seven days. Reacting to weekly movement in those figures produces changes that cancel each other out.
Fifteen minutes
The rhythm survives because it is short. A weekly session that grows into an hour is skipped within two months, and the skipped weeks are always the busy ones where it would have helped most.