A quarterly business review meeting is a great way to realign your team towards success. Time to adopt a bird year’s perspective, review the past and plan for the future! This is your chance to excite everyone about the why, not just the how. Your team shouldn't just get instructions from you. They should know why you are moving in a certain direction. This bottoms up collaboration is a great way to boost morale. 

• You should schedule this meeting in advance - I recommend at least 2 weeks! This gives everyone a chance to come prepared. You should share project reviews, and business metrics in advance. 
• Don’t forget to review the previous quarter - Learn from what’s happened in the past. Celebrate successes and review failures.
• Share lessons learned - If something worked, can it be replicated? Any new insights that the team found? This agenda item should come not just from you, but also from the team members. Time to crowdsource!
• Be sure of expected outcomes - Before you start the meeting, everyone should be aligned on what will make this definition successful. I like this format “Our goal of this meeting is to finalise our 2 most important metrics for the quarter. We also have to finalise the v1 of individual goals”
• Don’t let it get sidetracked - Such meetings have a tendency to get sidetracked. People get lost in small debates. It’s your job to keep the agenda flowing! 

#1 - Review last quarter (15 mins)

1. What was the biggest win of last quarter? 
2. Did anyone go above and beyond their normal duties? Time to praise them.
3. What was the top thing you did really well as a team?
4. Which metric were you able to move really well?
5. End with the Start stop continue format - What should you start doing this quarter that you didn’t last time? What should you stop? And what should you continue?

#2 - Team goals for coming quarter (45 mins)

1. Knowing our north star metric, and the annual goals, what should we focus on this quarter?
2. Will that move the needle in the right direction?
3. Is the goal SMART - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound

• E.g. “We want to increase our revenues by 30%, and decrease our customer churn rate by 20% this quarter”
• To do this we will have to set up more sales meetings, optimise our demo conversions, reduce the app loading time and launch X Y Z product features.

1. Is the goal achievable? Or is it too stretched?
2. What research do we need to ensure that this is a good decision?
3. Let’s do a forward looking post-mortem. Let’s assume this quarter failed. What could be the top reasons according to you? What should we avoid?

This is called Inversion, and is one of my favourite frameworks to make better decisions. 

#3 - Individual goals (25 mins)

1. How does this translate into individual goals? Go around the room to start discussing SMART goals for everyone.
2. What does everyone need from the team to hit these goals? What are the dependencies and blockers?

If a team member’s goal is still too fuzzy, park it on the side for now. Set up a 1-on-1 meeting with them, finalise it there, and update the team later!

Next steps, action items & summary (5 mins)

Cross the Ts and dot the Is. Go through the goals again and check if everything is in order. Make a list of pending action items and any follow ups that need to be done. And don’t remember to send the minutes to everyone!

I know that doing a quarterly business meeting in just 90 minutes sounds difficult. But you should aim for that! If everyone comes prepared, and sends their inputs in advance, the actual meeting will be super smooth.