Daily checks keep you informed. They do not, on their own, tell you whether the business is drifting, because a single day never looks that different from the one before it.
That is what a weekly review is for. It is short, it is boring, and it is the thing most owners skip.
Pick a fixed slot
Friday evening or Monday morning both work. What matters is that it is the same time every week and it does not move for anything short of an emergency. A review that happens "when there is time" happens in quiet weeks and gets skipped in busy ones, exactly backwards.
The five questions
1. What did we bill this week, and how does it compare with last week? One number, one comparison. Direction matters more than the amount.
2. What did we collect? Billing is not cash. If billing rises while collection stays flat, you are financing your customers.
3. Which deals moved, and which did not? Anything that has sat in the same stage for three weeks is stalled, whatever the pipeline says.
4. What did we commit to that did not happen? Not to assign blame, to catch the pattern. The same commitment slipping repeatedly means the workload or the process is wrong, not the person.
5. What is the one thing that must happen next week? One. If you list six, none of them will be the priority.
Write the answers down
This is what makes it compound. Reviewing four weeks of answers takes two minutes and shows things no single week reveals: collection slipping steadily, one salesperson consistently ahead, a customer quietly ordering less each month.
Involve the team, briefly
Fifteen minutes with the team on the same five questions turns it from a report into a conversation. People raise blockers they would never put in writing, and everyone hears the same numbers, which does more for alignment than most meetings.
Why it works
Nothing here is clever. The value is entirely in the consistency: problems get caught while they are still small, which is the only time they are cheap to fix.
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