Many companies invest far too much time and energy into meetings that don’t hold any real value. However, a monthly business review is one thing you don’t want to neglect. Monthly business reviews are one of the easiest ways you can ensure your plans are on track and your company is meeting its objectives.
As well as being a powerful project management tool for established companies, monthly review meetings are vital for startups finding their feet. They provide a regular window for assessing and analyzing performance. More importantly, they open the floor to questions and insights that can be used to plan for the future.
Need some help putting together a winning monthly business review template? We’ve got you covered.
What is a Monthly Business Review?
Monthly business reviews are meetings where teams come together to assess how performance actually stacks up against strategic goals. The main focus of a monthly review meeting agenda should be metrics. You need to be looking at target metrics and measuring them against actual performance.
In an ideal world, this performance review will establish that you’re on the right track. Monthly business reviews are also a time for reflection, allowing you to readjust the goalposts if previous targets have been too ambitious.
Other times, monthly reviews will identify hurdles that are holding you back. Rather than compromise customer satisfaction you can use this as an opportunity to action items to get your plans back on track.
What is the Importance of a Monthly Business Review Report?
Monthly business reviews have the obvious benefit of letting you know how well your company is doing. However, they’re also useful for improving focus and enhancing internal communication.
They highlight the importance of key metrics, making it easier for employees and teams to achieve individual goals and larger objectives. While quarterly business reviews are useful in a broader context, increasing the interval period to once a month keeps everyone more engaged.
What’s more, monthly business review reports encourage individuals to take ownership. Whether you’re welcoming everyone to the table or focusing on departments and line managers, monthly reviews allow you to share knowledge. If a particular team runs into trouble, useful insights can be brought in from other areas of the business to provide potential solutions.
Monthly business reviews also allow you to react more quickly to problems as they arise. Even if a proposed solution doesn’t prove particularly effective, you’re only one month away from assessing it and deciding on a new course of action if needed.
How Do I Write a Monthly Business Review?
If this is your first time preparing for a monthly business review, putting together an agenda can seem daunting. You can use your QBR template as a general guideline, but there are other things you’ll want to consider. For a flawless monthly business review, aim to focus on these five key areas:
Take a Look at the Financials First
A good monthly business review hinges on numbers. These are the most useful metrics you have to assess performance and measure the health of your business. Balance sheets, profit and loss statements, and cash flow are all valuable reference points. These provide you with a bird’s-eye view of how well your operation is performing financially.
If any red flags appear, you can start looking into things like expenses and specific accounts to identify any anomalies. As well as comparing to previous metrics, you need to consider your forecasts. If you haven’t been collecting revenues as planned, you may need to readjust your cash flow forecasts accordingly.
Is it Time to Reevaluate Goals and Milestones?
With that out of the way, you can focus on goals and milestones. Have you achieved everything you set out to do in the previous month? Next, think about what you have planned for the next four weeks. Are these goals still realistic? Are the teams and resources you have in place sufficient to achieve them?
You might decide it makes sense to make changes to team structures or readjust priorities. Project briefs may have also changed, requiring a reshuffle behind the scenes. This monthly reevaluation is crucial if you want to remain agile and isn’t usually possible if you rely on insights from a quarterly report.
What About Long-Term Goals and Strategies?
Once short-term goals have been looked at, you can concentrate on long-term ones. Most of the time, these won’t shift from month to month and established companies should only need a few minutes to go over things.
However, this isn’t necessarily true of younger companies, where business models tend to be less defined. As startups find their feet in competitive markets, long-term goals, and business strategies may be more flexible.
Leave Time for Discussion
As with any successful meeting, you’ll want to allow time for people to come forward with any points for further discussion. Topics can include anything from resource allocation to suggestions for new ways of working.
If you want to encourage the best insights, leave plenty of time for open-ended discussion. If you’re dealing with remote teams and departments who rarely communicate outside of formal meetings, this time can be incredibly valuable.
Establish Meeting Guidelines with Time To Spare
Once you’ve drafted an agenda and presentation template, commit to a locked-down date and time and share it with everyone who’ll be participating. Where possible, stick to the same time and day of the week, every month.
This way, all the metrics you’ll need can be prepared and delivered for review. However, you’ll want to submit your agenda with at least a week to spare. This leaves plenty of time to review submissions. If anything significant comes up, you’ll be able to adapt your agenda accordingly.
Enhancing the Visual Appeal of Your Monthly Business Review Template with Gloww
While monthly business reviews can be incredibly useful to your organization, they’re only valuable if you can engage attendees and encourage participation. With Gloww, it’s easy to adapt your monthly business review meetings.
Take Advantage of Real-Time Collaboration Features
Need to find a solution to a problem? With Gloww, you can hold brainstorming sessions and encourage participants to share ideas with virtual sticky notes.
If you’re looking for suggestions on how to improve, think about using digital whiteboards to encourage remote teams to collaborate on ideas. Have attendees already prepared documents and PowerPoint templates? With Gloww, these files can be readily shared with everyone else.
Engage Your Audience with Interactive Activities
With Gloww, there’s no shortage of interactive elements to keep everyone engaged. Use world clouds and polls for instant feedback. Looking for more in-depth insights? Make use of surveys instead. A Q&A feature also lets individuals ask burning questions, without disrupting the flow of your meeting agenda. Discover Gloww interactive features now.
You can even think about using quizzes to ensure everybody’s been paying attention. To keep things tied to your agenda, frame your questions around things like sales numbers and other metrics that have been covered during the meeting.
Customize Your Webinar’s Visual Elements to Match Your Branding
With Gloww, it’s easy to customize your video conferencing sessions. You can add visual elements to make each session more appealing. Personalize each slide with your corporate colors or add your business logo.
What Do the Gloww Quarterly and Monthly Business Review Templates Include?
Need more convincing that Gloww’s the perfect choice for those monthly and quarterly business review sessions? Below are just a few of the things included in our templates, such as the virtual quarterly business review template:
Interactive Poll
A great monthly business review requires input from all participants. With Gloww’s interactive polls, you can generate instant feedback from all attendees.
PPT/PDF Uploads
PowerPoint presentations and PDF documents are staples of any quarterly or monthly business review. With Gloww, you can incorporate PDF documents and PPT slides with ease.
HD/YouTube Video
Need to incorporate HD videos into your monthly review presentation? Whether it’s a customer testimonial or training video, you can with Gloww.
Objectives
Every monthly business review should reinforce those key objectives. With Gloww, you can keep things on track and spotlight your objectives with user-friendly slides.
OKR
Objectives and key results (OKRs) are essential for goal-setting and achieving milestones. With Gloww, you can include eye-catching presentation slides to capture those all-important OKRs.
Quarter’s Results
Reinforcing your results from the last month or quarter is important, whether you’ve done well or need to improve. It’s easy to capture this information with charts or a series of slides with Gloww’s templates.
Retrospective
Good project management is all about learning from past mistakes and improving for the future. With Gloww, course correction couldn’t be simpler. Include a retrospective that flags what needs to stop, what you should continue, and what new initiatives need to be introduced.
Quarter’s Highlights
Use Gloww to shine a light on your success from the previous month or quarter. Focus on new product or service launches, major milestones, and more.
Employee Shout Outs
Now’s also a good time to applaud the best performers in your company. Include slides to celebrate the most sales, employees with the best customer feedback, and more.
Start Using Gloww for Monthly Business Reviews Today
If you’re tired of depending on second-rate video conferencing solutions for monthly business reviews, it’s time to get started with Gloww.
Incredibly accessible and boasting plenty of user-friendly templates, you can start putting together a first-class monthly review session in moments. You can customize each slide to your liking, incorporate interactive elements, and ensure every piece of essential information is captured.
Interesting in boosting morale and lifting your employees’ spirits up after your productive monthly business review? Check out our virtual work happy hour and virtual team trivia.
Eager to get started? You can start using Gloww for free today. If you’re interested in learning more about our premium features, why not take a look at our pricing plans? If you’re keen to discuss more about Gloww and how it can help you, drop us a message via the online contact form.
