A quarterly review that ends with no decisions is a status meeting wearing a suit. The deck got assembled over two evenings, presented to the four people who already knew everything, and closed with "so, anything else?" — forty hours of quarters spent describing the last one. The version below is one page read in advance and one hour in the room, and it is built to change what next quarter looks like.
1. The read-first memo. Circulated 24 hours ahead, written in 45 minutes from data you already have: the scorecard (five numbers, target vs actual), three things that worked with what they cost, three things that broke and whether a system or a human caught it, the stop-list proposal, and the draft of next quarter's three bets. If the memo does not go out on time, the meeting cancels itself.
2. The 60-minute agenda. 0–10 scorecard walk (amber gets a question, red gets an owner and a date — green gets nothing); 10–25 what worked and what broke, two minutes each; 25–35 the stop list, where every surviving activity needs a name and a date to die; 35–50 the three bets, each with a countable outcome, an owner and a kill condition; 50–55 the money table; 55–60 the scribe reads every decision aloud.
3. The scorecard. Five numbers, not fifty — the five a buyer of your company would look at first: revenue or billable utilization, cash runway in months, top-client retention, on-time delivery, and one number unique to your trade. Green means nothing, amber gets a question today, red gets an owner and a date today. A red number with no name next to it at 60:00 is the meeting's only true failure.
4. The stop list. A five-person team cannot add a priority; it can only subtract. Every recurring activity that produced nothing measurable goes on the list with the hours it eats; each stop gets an owner and a date inside 30 days, plus a one-shot resurrection clause. The honest measure of a QBR is not what was decided — it is what died.
5. The money table. Four rows: cash in and the two clients who were most of it (concentration above 40% is its own flag); cash out with the three biggest expenses marked grew or flat (grew faster than revenue = a question next memo must answer); runway in months; and the obligations landing next quarter. The annual ops budget reforecast reads this table.
6. Decisions in the room. Every decision gets a line in the decision log before anyone stands up — what, who, when, and what it kills. The readback is where "I thought we agreed the opposite" dies at the cheapest possible moment. Undecided items get an owner and a decision date in the log, never the air.
7. Three bets with kill conditions. Three, not seven. Each: countable outcome, one owner, a date inside the quarter, and a kill condition — "if X has not happened by Y, we stop and say so in the next review." The kill condition is the cheapest thing to grant and the hardest to ask for later; granting it in advance is what makes it a bet instead of a donation.
A worked example. A seven-person bookkeeping agency ran its quarter as a 42-slide deck: two evenings of assembly, three hours of meeting, zero decisions. The switch to one memo and 60 minutes ran 58 minutes and killed two recurring projects on the spot — the weekly client newsletter nobody opened (11 hours a quarter) and the monthly metrics deck nobody read. Three bets went on the wall with kill conditions: migrate six payroll clients to the new tool by week 8 (worth $9,400 a year in billable time), hire the part-time bookkeeper by week 6, move two chronically late retainers to upfront deposits — cash collection cycle 47 days to 31 by quarter end. The next QBR produced five decisions, two stops, and the shortest minutes in company history.
The deck version of the same review is easy to price: two evenings of assembly, three hours of presentation, and a quarter that starts exactly like the last one.
The full template — the read-first memo, the timed agenda, the scorecard rules, the stop list, the money table and the three-bets format — is on my ops-notes site: Quarterly Business Review Template.
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