The thirty-minute weekly review that makes every system you own worth having

Why weekly, and not monthly or daily

Monthly is too late. By the time a month of enquiries is in front of you, the ones that went unanswered in week one have hired someone else, and the fix you make now lands on the month after next. A monthly review tells you what happened. It cannot change it.

Daily is noise. One slow Tuesday means nothing. One bad review means nothing. If you look every day you react to weather, and the reaction is usually to change something that was working.

A week is the shortest stretch in which a pattern is a pattern. Enough enquiries to see how fast they were handled, enough bookings to compare against the week before, few enough that every unanswered one still has a name attached and can still be rescued.

• Monthly: a post-mortem. Useful for the accountant, useless for the front desk.
• Daily: weather. You will change things that did not need changing.
• Weekly: a pattern you can still act on. The lost enquiry from Thursday is still reachable on Monday.

The six things to look at, in order

The order matters more than it looks. The first three are about this week's money. The next two are about next month's. The last one is the only output.

1. Enquiries in, and how fast each got a first real reply. Not the count alone. Each one, and how long it sat before a person (or a system on your behalf) said something useful. "Thanks, we will be in touch" is not a real reply. If most took a day, that is the whole story of the week, and the speed-to-lead calculator will show you what that delay is likely costing at your volume.
2. What is sitting unanswered right now. Not last week. Right now, at the moment you are looking. Every enquiry, quote, message or callback with nothing sent back. Write down the oldest one and how old it is. This is the single number that catches the most problems.
3. Bookings or jobs against last week. Same seven days, side by side. Up, down or flat, and one line on why, if you know. If you do not know, that is the note.
4. Reviews in and reviews answered. How many arrived, on which profile, and how many have a reply from you. An unanswered review is a public unanswered enquiry, and everyone reading it can see the silence.
5. What competitors changed this week. Their prices page, their services list, their opening hours, a new offer. Not what you think of them. What they changed. This is where Competitor watch earns a place: you give it up to three competitor pages and an email, it confirms the address, and it sends one email a week listing what changed on those pages in plain text, added lines and removed lines. It does not analyse or advise. Reading the two minutes of diffs is your job.
6. The one thing to fix before next Monday. One. Named, small enough to be done in a week, chosen from the five answers above. This is the only thing the review produces.

Where each number actually lives

The reason most owners do not do this is not discipline. It is that the six numbers live in six places, and hunting for them costs an hour before the thinking starts. Name the place for each one, once, and the hunt becomes a routine.

The thirty-minute agenda

Alone, this is a notebook and a coffee. With two people, it is the same agenda read out loud, and the person who runs the front desk answers questions one, two and four, because they already know. Either way, thirty minutes, and it ends when the last step is written, not when the discussion runs out.

1. Minutes 0 to 3. Read last week's note. Was the one thing fixed? Yes, no, or half. No discussion, just the answer.
2. Minutes 3 to 10. Enquiries in and first reply times. Go through them one at a time if there are fewer than thirty. Mark the ones that waited more than an hour for a real reply.
3. Minutes 10 to 15. What is unanswered right now. Open the list, name the oldest one, and decide who replies to it today, before the meeting ends if it is that old.
4. Minutes 15 to 20. Bookings against last week, and reviews in and answered. Two numbers each. Any unanswered review gets a name next to it.
5. Minutes 20 to 25. Competitor changes. Read the digest or the three pages. Note anything about price, hours, services or offers. Ignore the rest.
6. Minutes 25 to 30. Choose the one thing to fix before next Monday. Write it as a sentence with a name on it. Close the notebook.

What you will be tempted to look at, and what actually moves next week

Every dashboard, analytics tab and social app is built to show you a number that goes up. Almost none of those numbers change what happens next week. The left column below is what you will drift toward. The right column is what to look at instead.

When a number is bad: one fix, not a plan

A bad number produces an urge to redesign the business. Resist it. The review works because it produces one small change a week, fifty times a year, and each one is checked the following Monday. A plan produces nothing until it is finished, and it is never finished.

The fix has to be small enough that it is unreasonable not to have done it by next week. If it is bigger than that, the fix for this week is the first step of it, and only that.

• Enquiries waited too long for a first reply: the fix is a rule, not a system. This week, whoever sees the enquiry first sends the first real reply within the hour, even if the full answer comes later. The seven day enquiry plan is what to do after that first message.
• Something old is sitting unanswered: reply to it before the meeting ends. Then the fix is finding out how it got missed, which is usually a channel nobody owns.
• Bookings dropped against last week: do not touch prices, do not launch an offer. Look at the enquiries first. Fewer enquiries is a different problem from the same enquiries booking less, and the fix is different.
• Reviews arrived and sat unanswered: answer them today, and the fix is a standing time in the week when it happens, or a system that drafts the reply for someone to approve.
• A competitor changed something that matters: note it, and give it a week. One change on one page is not a trend. Two weeks running, it is a conversation, not a reaction.

The trap of reviewing what is easy to measure

The numbers that are easiest to see are the ones somebody else decided to show you. The social app shows reach because reach is what it sells. The website tool shows visitors because visitors are what it counts. The number that decides your week, how long an enquiry waited before a real person said something useful, is not on any default dashboard, because it lives in the gap between two systems.

So the review has to be built from the six questions, and the sources found to fit them, not the other way round. If you start from what the tools show, you will end up reviewing what the tools want reviewed.

• Easy and useless: visitors, reach, impressions, average anything.
• Hard and decisive: time to first real reply per enquiry, the oldest unanswered item, reviews with no answer, and bookings against the same week last week.
• The tell: if a number would not change what anyone does this week, it does not belong in the review, however satisfying it is.

How the review changes once systems are in place

The first few months, the review is a hunt. Six places, six numbers, an hour of finding before thirty minutes of thinking. That is fine, and it is worth doing anyway, because the hunting is what tells you which numbers are hard to get, and those are the first things to automate.

Once the systems are built, the numbers arrive instead of being hunted for. The CRM logs the first-reply time on every enquiry without anyone timing it. The missed calls get a text back and appear in one list. The reviews land in the same place as the enquiries. And a Monday digest assembles last week from all of it before anyone is awake, which is the fifth job in the five jobs a system does overnight. The review does not go away. It gets shorter, and all thirty minutes go on the last two questions.

This is also why the review is what makes automation worth having. A missed-call text-back that nobody checks the log of will break one day and stay broken. What a broken automation actually costs is mostly the cost of nobody looking. The weekly review is the looking.

• Before systems: the review is where you find the numbers. Expect an hour, and write down which numbers were hardest to find.
• The order to build in: the same order as the questions. Capture and first reply, then follow-up, then the digest. The 90 day roadmap walks through it in that sequence.
• After systems: the numbers arrive on Monday morning. The review is where you read them, and it is the only reason to have built them.

Where this connects

Competitor watch is the companion tool for question five. Give it up to three competitor pages and an email address, confirm the address, and once a week it sends a plain-text list of what changed on those pages: lines added, lines removed. That is all it does. It does not analyse the change or tell you what to do about it, and it is not meant to. It removes the five minutes of hunting so the two minutes of reading happens.

The review looks the same in every trade, and the numbers come from different places. For a multi-location operator, the six questions are asked per site, and the interesting answer is usually the one site that is out of line with the others. In retail, question three is footfall and transactions against last week, and reviews carry more of the weight. In home services, question one is the missed calls, and the oldest unanswered item is nearly always a quote that went out and never got followed.

If you have never held the review and want the enquiry side fixed first, the seven day enquiry plan is what to do with each enquiry after the first reply, and the 90 day roadmap is the order in which to build the systems that make the numbers arrive on their own.