Quarterly Tasks Every Owner Should Have on Autopilot
Running a small business means living in the trenches. Folks like me love to espouse the need to work “on your businesses” while you’re juggling sales, operations, marketing, people, and cash, plus whatever issues you have at home! Much easier said than done.
But what separates effective small business owners from reactive ones is a disciplined quarterly rhythm. Consistency is key. Here are the ten tasks every small business owner should put on autopilot every 90 days. If you have a bookkeeper, this should be their job. If you’re still doing this yourself, get yourself a bookkeeper!
1. Check Your Cash
Start with the basics. How much money is in the bank? Do you know how much is coming in next month? What’s going out? If not, now’s the time to start tracking this. There’s a simple tool here that will get you started.
This is one of your most important functions as an owner. You have to know if you can cover payroll, taxes, and suppliers in the near future.
2. Review Sales & Pipeline
How much did you sell this quarter? What’s in the pipeline? Are leads moving forward or sitting idle? If you’re a typical industrial or B-to-B business, you should be tracking three things:
- New booked business – how much new business did you sell, or “book”, this period? This is a measure of the sales team’s effectiveness.
- Orders Shipped – how much product or service was delivered and invoiced during the period. This is a measure of the operation’s effectiveness.
- Current backlog – how much business do you have “in the bag” in the sense that you’ve made the sale (booked it), but haven’t yet shipped it or counted the revenues. This is a typical goldilocks situation. If it gets too low, you could have an operation that’s twiddling their thumbs soon. If it gets too high, you might be taking too long to deliver and making customers unhappy. The art is always in the interpretation, not the generation, of the numbers.
3. Inspect Key Metrics and Profitability
Track a handful of KPIs that matter to your business. Don’t drown in data. Combine leading (activity) and lagging(results) indicators, and include basic financial performance like gross margin and net profit. Like so many things, this will be somewhat unique to your business:- A local coffee shop might track: daily foot traffic, average spend per customer, and food cost as a percentage of revenue.
- A retail clothing store could monitor: sales per square foot, inventory turnover rate, and return percentage.
- A real estate agent might track open house traffic or website visits.
- A SaaS business might look at: churn rate, monthly recurring revenue (MRR), and customer acquisition cost (CAC).
- A small manufacturing firm might track: machine utilization rates, units produced per labour hour, and on-time delivery rate.
- A professional services business could measure: billable hours per consultant, average project margin, and client satisfaction scores.
- A cleaning company might monitor: average tenure of clients, average revenue per job, and % of cleaning jobs with complaints.
The trick is to choose the right metrics for your business. There’s no one right set of measures. You need to identify the key success factors of your industry, and measure those.
PRO TIP: Create dashboards for daily or weekly tracking.
What’s Your “One Big Number”
For slightly larger businesses, I suggest the owner identify their “one big number”. I don’t mean big as in large, but rather in importance. Every CEO has a pile of things that they have to keep on their radar, but it helps if they can reduce their entire operation to “ONE BIG NUMBER” that identifies that one most important thing. You can’t use the bottom line because that applies to everyone. It has to be an operational or financial measure, ideally a leading indicator, since that allows for earlier intervention when needed.
For businesses with a long sales cycle it might be win rate or sales velocity. Any high-growth company will be looking at revenue or subscriber (or some other) growth metric. A clothing retailer might look at GMROI (Gross Margin Return on Investment (it’s just what it sounds like!).
One interesting example from my past is the perspective of the CEO of a cannabis grower. Since the industry, sadly, seems to focus on THC potency above all else, I posit that such CEO should care most about their cost to produce a milligram of THC.
4. Review Human Resources & Training
Even with a small team, take a step back to assess performance, development needs, and hiring plans. Are you set up to support growth? Who needs support or recognition? Who is vital to the team and would leave you in a tough position if they left?
Deal with these issues now.
5. Check In With Customers
It doesn’t matter if your business serves hundreds or thousands of retail customers or only a handful of high-value, high-touch clients. The questions are still the same:
- Do they believe that you deliver good value?
- Do or would they recommend you to others?
- Do they intend to continue doing business with you?
The specific questions and how you get the answers will be unique to your business. It might be very unscientific, unstructured, and highly personal or you might use tools like feedback surveys, online reviews and NPS scores to identify trends and opportunities.
6. Review Marketing, Website & SEO
Your quarterly review should look at whether you’re achieving the goals of your marketing plan. You have one, right?! If you had plans for advertising, or content creation, or any other marketing activity that didn’t happen, analyze why.
In many small businesses, marketing is an add-on function to an individual’s main job, and can suffer as a result. Whatever the reason, identify why and resolve the bottleneck.
7. Assess IT, Security & Digital Tools
The cloud has made many business functions a lot easier. You might think that this means that you needn’t worry about backing up key data. While cloud services typically have their own backups, it’s essential to understand the shared responsibility you may have. In 2019 Salesforce customers lost data after a major outage. And many custom applications are still hosted on site, where you’ll need to ensure that off-site backups are being created. Do you have the necessary cybersecurity and access controls. Are passwords changed regularly? Almost none of us do. This is a good time to audit what you have and cancel unused software.8. Inventory Management (if applicable)
You don’t all carry inventory, and those that do will have different approaches. This is the time to review turnover, shrinkage, and stockout frequency, and adjust reorder points to optimize slow-moving SKUs. You might ask if there is any part of your business that can take advantage of dropshipping (items are shipped directly from the supplier to the customer), allowing you to eliminate some inventory cost.9. Premises Audit
What is the state of your physical operations? Do the inside and outside of your premises look clean and tidy? Do they make you proud and reflect your values? Appearances matter. A professional-looking environment will breed professionalism just as having crap all over the floors everywhere sends the message that the little things are not important.- Do the walls need painting or carpets need cleaning or replacing?
- Do you have appropriate and sufficient signage?
- Are the appropriate safety measures in place?
- Do you have or should you create a maintenance schedule?
10. Review SOPs, Innovation & Growth Readiness
Are your systems ready to support more growth? What’s outdated? What’s undocumented? Use this checkpoint to sharpen your processes. Choose one area to document or refine in the next quarter. Here’s some help.Systematize It or It Won’t Stick
If it’s not on your calendar, it doesn’t exist. Make these quarterly reviews recurring events. Delegate where possible. Build a dashboard (even a simple spreadsheet) that brings everything together. And keep it lean. If your quarterly review takes more than half a day, you’re overcomplicating it. This isn’t busywork. It’s the difference between running your business and being run by it.If you liked this, you might like this related post about the importance of systems.
