Operations · Money
The one-page monthly review
The habit that separates businesses that grow from businesses that just stay busy. Ninety minutes, one page, six lines. That's it.
Most first-year owners keep records. Most second-year owners still keep records but stop reading them. The gap between those two behaviours is the difference between a business that grows and a business that stays busy.
The review is not a plan. Plans want to fix everything. A monthly review just asks what happened last month, honestly, on one page.
Six lines is enough. (1) Revenue this month vs. last month. (2) Cash position now vs. thirty days ago. (3) The biggest surprise, positive or negative, and what caused it. (4) One thing to do more of next month. (5) One thing to stop doing. (6) One thing to try that you haven't yet.
Ninety minutes on the last day of the month. Not four hours. Not a whole afternoon. Ninety minutes. Anything longer is why you stop doing it in month five.
Write it down and keep it. A folder — physical or digital — with twelve monthly reviews for the year is the closest thing a small business has to a memory. When something goes wrong in month nine, month five's review usually has the early sign in it.
Read the last one before writing the next. Two minutes. Did what you said you'd do more of get done? Did what you said you'd stop, actually stop? A review that never references the previous one is a diary; a review that does is a discipline.
Inside the Study Desk, Business Operations installs the monthly close and the one-page review together, in a way that survives busy months because it never depends on anything the busy month kills first.
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