The Weekly Owner Meeting

Operations: Deliver and run the business

“Our time is our life.”

Say you run a roofing company and your week runs you instead of the other way around. Every morning something is on fire, so you put out the fire, and by Friday you could not say whether the business is better or worse than the Monday before. You were working hard the whole time. You just never sat down and looked at the whole thing at once.

That is what a weekly owner meeting is for. It needs no staff at all. It is a fixed appointment between you and your business, thirty to forty-five minutes, at the same time every week, with the same questions. If you have a partner or a manager, they join. If you work alone, you hold it with yourself, and that counts.

Working in the business versus working on it

The whole meeting turns on this difference. Working in the business is doing the jobs, answering the customers, fixing the problems. Working on the business is deciding what those jobs should be, whether the process still fits, and what needs to change. The first one gets done because customers are waiting. The second one only gets done if you put it on the calendar and protect it.

Most of your week is the first kind, by design. A weekly meeting exists to carve out a small, protected block of the second kind. Ask yourself honestly: when did you last spend an hour thinking about how the business works rather than just making it work?

A simple agenda that fits on one page

Keep the same order every week so it becomes a habit rather than a debate. Here is the shape I would use.

• Numbers first: cash in the bank, money owed to you, money you owe, and the leads and sales from the week. Just the few figures that tell you whether you are on track.
• Last week’s commitments: what did you say you would do, and did it get done? Be plain about the ones that did not.
• This week’s jobs and capacity: what is booked, what is at risk, who is stretched, and which supplier or delivery could cause a problem.
• Customers: any complaint, late payment or unhappy person that needs a decision from you.
• One problem to solve: pick the one issue that keeps coming back and decide something about it.
• Three commitments for next week, written down, with a name and a day beside each.

Then stop. The discipline is in the ending as much as the starting. A meeting that runs long turns into a complaint session, and you will quit holding it. I have put a ready-made version of this agenda, with a weekly and a monthly format, in the Owner Meeting Agendas download on the Resources page. Use it as written or trim it to what your business needs.

The numbers part deserves care. Choose a small handful of figures and look at the same ones every week, so you begin to see the pattern. Over a few months you will learn what a normal week looks like, and that makes an abnormal week obvious on the day it happens rather than a month later.

One more thing about the meeting itself. Keep a single page of notes and keep every page, in order. After a couple of months you can flip back and see which problems came up again and again, and which commitments you kept. That record is quietly one of the most honest views of your business you will ever have, and it takes no extra effort beyond writing three lines each week.

Put a recurring appointment in your calendar for the same time each week, and treat it like a customer you cannot reschedule. At the first meeting, write down your cash, what is owed to you, what you owe, your leads and sales, and three commitments for the coming week. That is the whole meeting. Refine it after a month.

Thirty to forty-five minutes a week, plus about ten minutes beforehand to pull the numbers. Setting it up the first time takes an hour or so. It costs nothing beyond the download, which is free, though the real cost is the discipline of showing up when the week is busy, which is exactly when it matters most.