Learn the art of conducting Business Review Meeting

In the organization, one of the effective forums for engagement or one of the time-waster can be  REVIEW MEETINGS !. The conclusion depends on the way the business head or the leaders conduct the meetings. 

Conducting a purposeful and Result driven review meeting is an art, and the business head and other leaders can learn with conscious effort.

Let us discuss some of the insights about the review meetings and the solutions approach to make it effective.

Mindset related to review meetings:

some people look at the meeting as wasting of time and believe that the meeting is not going to help. Eventually, they never conduct any meeting, and even if it requires some decision to be taken, they use to call the individuals over the phone or 1-1 conversation and again convey the discussion to someone else. In this process, actually, the business head or leader's personal productivity is getting affected.

I observe that the mindset behind this, the business head is not interested or has not learned the art of conducting review meetings. The reason can be fear of facing people in a forum, not able to hold the review meeting effectively. This root cause needs to be understood and challenged.

Hence, the mindset and belief about the meeting need to be changed. Meeting need to be seen as a forum of related people to discuss, take decision collectively, and in the process, communication issues, the time delay can be avoided. Once the mind shift happens, the leader is in a position to learn the art of conducting reviews.

Fixed Meeting Reviews as much as possible :

In a smart organization, one good pattern, we can see is the fixed meeting reviews on a daily / weekly basis. For example, the sales review meeting will be every Monday at 2pm, Production review meeting every day at 9.30 am, and so on.

When you have a habit of fixing the meeting reviews on a daily / weekly basis at a fixed time, it improves the planning process of all the stakeholders, and the accountability to the meeting outcome will improve eventually as the agenda, and people's responsibilities are almost fixed.

When you call for ad-hoc meetings, the people may not be prepared for the agenda, data may not be available; eventually, the effectiveness of the meeting will also be less. It does not mean that we should not have an Adhoc meeting, as it depends on the business situation. It needs to be understood from the right perspective.

Be clear on the meeting purpose - Business or Technical Review?

I have seen in many organizations, the business head diverts the review purpose by going in microanalysis or shifting the focus to technical aspects. For example, in one of the monthly P&L review meetings, the purpose of the review should be reviewing the previous month's sales performance, expenses, and profitability and to discuss the future action plan. The discussion calls for high-level decision making on specific business-related issues. Rather than focusing on the business issues, the business head and the engineer get into the details of rejections, tool design, and engineering dimensions, and the whole meeting purpose is defeated. The other people's time also was wasted. If the technical aspect is important and to be discussed, nothing wrong in that, that can be done offline along with the respective people in a detailed manner. The business head decision is essential in the business review meeting, and he must be conscious of his/her focus on business and technical aspects.

As a business head, you need to be conscious about working on macro and micro details and need to be aware of switching in and switching out.

The other disciplines of conducting review meetings:

• start on time and finish it on time
• Go by the data or fact, less on opinion and emotional aspects
• Respect each one to voice their concerns, ideas, and suggestions
• Focus more on the decision /actions
• Be patience when others are talking
• Learn the art of questioning and giving feedback with the intention of curiosity and improvements than finding fault and blaming.

The facilitation skill of the chair is important in making the meeting more effective or just time wasters. The good news is that facilitation skill can be learned through awareness and practice!

Why P&L Analysis must be done EVERY MONTH?

One of the best management practices, most of the smart CEO or business head use to do every month is review P&L (Profit & loss) statement along with the key people. In fact, some organizations have a habit of reviewing P&L before 10 the of every month and accordingly all the financial accounting is completed, and the process of bill collection and accounting is set in place.

Benefits of doing P&L Analysis every month:

1. As a business head, notionally, you come to know the business profitability either positive or negative in the month .that give you more response time to take countermeasures in the subsequent months.

2. Analysis of P&L every month will give you a lot of insight about your profitable product mix. For example, in one month, an organization made High turnover compared to the previous month, but the Operating margin is lesser than the previous month. When analyzing the expenses, there is not much variance between months. However, when the team analyzed further on the product mix, they realized that even though they produced more of a particular product, say X, the price was low. The team had realized that more you produce product X, more loss the organization makes. This kind of analysis will give a lot of insight about your product mix and accordingly, you can take a call on optimizing the product mix.

3. Also, when you analyze P&L along with cost variance of each expense, that improves the cost consciousness in the organization, and in fact, you can take countermeasures to control the cost. We are witnessing in many organization,, where the business head reviews the P&L every month, the culture of the organization also moves towards cost consciousness.

Limiting factors of not doing P&L review every month :

1.one of the reasons people use to say is P&L statement may not reflect the real numbers as there is variation in inventory accounting, tax provision, depreciation, etc.

Yes. As said this P&L statement is just notional and indicative of your operational performance only. In the year-end, with all provisions, your auditor will make right P&L including right accounting principles. This monthly P&L will give you an instant picture of your business performance so that you can take timely actions.

Regarding inventory accounting, when you regularly do every month, will get eventually normalised. You need to ensure that you are using a standard format and input/output mechanism and the source must be the same. For example, if you are using TALLY software, use the same source and format/assumptions to prepare P&L statement every month

2. Lack of discipline on accounting all the bills on time and preparing P&L statement on time.

Rather than blaming the people and system, it is the discipline of the business head in showing interest to analyze the P&L every month before 10th matters a lot!!



The point is reviewing P&L analysis is a prime responsibility of business head, and it must be done every month for taking corrective action on business performance on time!