Quarterly business review template: one page, one hour

Most small-company QBRs are status theater: a deck assembled over two evenings, presented to the four people who already knew everything in it, ending with the phrase "so, anything else?" and no decisions. The deck is not the problem — it is the symptom. A deck exists to be presented, so the meeting becomes a presentation. A review exists to change what next quarter looks like, so the meeting should be a decision machine with a sixty-minute clock. The template below is the second kind: one page read in advance, one hour in the room, and at least five decisions written down before anyone stands up.

This is the template: the read-first memo that kills the deck, the timed agenda, the five-number scorecard with the amber/red rules, the stop list (the highest-paid ten minutes of the quarter), the one-table money view, decision-log discipline written in the room, and three bets with kill conditions.

1. The read-first memo (replaces the deck)

Circulated at least 24 hours before the meeting, one page, written in about 45 minutes using data you already have. Five parts:

• The scorecard — five to seven numbers, target vs actual, colored. This is section 3 below; it is the only part of the memo that must be exactly right.
• Three things that worked — each with what it cost. "Worked" without a cost invites you to do it forever at any price.
• Three things that broke — each with one line on whether a system or a human caught it. Systems get built; humans get thanked.
• The stop list proposal — the recurring activities that produced nothing measurable this quarter, with the hours each one eats. You are proposing; the room disposes.
• The three bets draft — next quarter's three countable outcomes, drafted before the meeting so the hour is spent arguing about them, not inventing them.

The memo is the meeting. If it does not go out 24 hours ahead, the meeting cancels itself — a QBR without pre-reading is a status meeting wearing a suit.

2. The 60-minute agenda (timed, printed on the memo)

3. The scorecard: five numbers, not fifty

Pick the five numbers a buyer of your company would look at first. For most small teams that is: revenue (or billable utilization), cash runway in months, customer churn (or top-client retention), delivery on-time rate, and one number unique to your trade — support first-response, defect escapes, pipeline coverage. Every number gets a target and an actual, computed from data you already keep. The color rules are the whole point:

• Green means nothing. No discussion, no slide, no celebration segment. Green numbers had their reward all quarter.
• Amber gets a question today. One question, one answer, one line in the log.
• Red gets an owner and a date today. Not "we'll keep an eye on it." A red number without a name next to it by 60:00 is the meeting's only true failure.

If a scorecard number cannot be computed from data you already collect, that is the finding: either build the counter (see the daily operations checklist) or admit the number does not run your business.

4. The stop list: capacity is won by subtraction

A five-person team cannot add a priority; it can only replace one. The stop list is the section that pays for the meeting. Rules for it:

• Every recurring activity that produced nothing measurable this quarter is proposed for the list — reports nobody reads, meetings that happen because they always happened, tools maintained out of guilt.
• Each stopped item needs a name (who stops doing it) and a date to die, inside the next 30 days. A stop without a date is a New Year's resolution.
• One resurrection clause: anything stopped can come back once, with a cost cap and a review date. Twice is forever.
• If the stop list is empty two quarters running, the problem is not the list — it is that nobody is measuring what work produces.

The honest measure of a QBR is not what was decided; it is what died.

5. The money table (one table, four rows)

• Cash in this quarter, and the two clients or products that were most of it. Concentration above 40% is its own red flag.
• Cash out, and the three biggest expenses, each with one word: grew or flat. Anything that grew faster than revenue gets a question next quarter's memo has to answer.
• Runway in months at current burn — the number that makes every other number honest.
• Debt and obligations — loans, annual licenses landing next quarter, the ops budget lines coming due. Surprises here are self-inflicted.

6. Decision-log discipline: write it in the room

Every decision made in the hour gets a line in the decision log before the meeting ends: what was decided, by whom, when, and what it kills. The scribe reads them back at 55:00 — the readback is where "I thought we agreed the opposite" dies, at the cheapest possible moment. Items not decided get an owner and a decision date in the log, which is the difference between a parked item and a hope.

7. The three bets for next quarter

Three, not seven — a small team that is betting on seven things is betting on nothing. Each bet is one sentence with four fields: the countable outcome (a number, not a vibe), the owner (one name), the date (inside the quarter), and the kill condition ("if X has not happened by Y, we stop and say so in the next QBR"). The kill condition is what makes it a bet instead of a hope: it pre-agrees the exit, which is the single hardest thing for an owner to grant and the cheapest thing to grant in advance.

8. Rules that keep it to one hour

• No slides. The memo is the artifact. If someone builds a deck anyway, it goes in the parking lot with a name on it.
• One decision-maker. Consensus is for restaurants. The owner decides; the room advises.
• The parking lot has names. Every parked item gets an owner and a channel, or it did not happen.
• Cancel-culture for no-decision quarters. If a QBR produces fewer than five decisions and one stop, next quarter's is shortened to the scorecard walk. The meeting earns its hour.
• Same page every time. The template does not evolve per quarter; it gets replaced at most once a year, deliberately.

9. Five review numbers

• Memo-on-time rate (memos out ≥24h ahead / QBRs — target: every one; the first late memo predicts the first bad quarter).
• Decisions per QBR (target: five or more; two is a status meeting with better catering).
• Stop-list completion (stopped items actually dead by their date — a stop that survives the quarter is the quarter's real failure).
• Bets with kill conditions (target: 3/3; an unconditional bet is a donation).
• Minutes to run (the 60-minute bar; consistently over means the memo is not being read, which means the meeting is doing the reading's job).

Where this fits

The QBR is the top of a ladder that starts daily: the daily operations checklist feeds the numbers, the decision log keeps the decisions from evaporating between quarters, the annual ops budget template is where the money table rolls up to, and once a year the annual security review takes the security slot the QBR deliberately does not cover. If you want an outside pair to run the review and hand back a prioritized fix plan, that is the Small-Team Ops Audit; and when the scorecard's red numbers are operational rather than commercial, the Custom Incident Runbook turns them into procedure.

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