Most profit leaks are not hidden. They are just unchecked. A tool nobody uses keeps billing, a batch of estimates sits without follow-up, and a few missed calls a week go unanswered. A short monthly review catches these before they turn into real money. Here is the 30-minute agenda we use with clients, and how to run it in your own business.
Why monthly, and why only 30 minutes
Quarterly reviews are too slow. By the time you notice a problem, you have paid for it three times. Weekly reviews are too heavy for most owners, and they tend to get skipped once the busy season starts. Monthly is the right rhythm: often enough to catch drift early, rare enough that it does not feel like a burden.
Keeping it to 30 minutes matters just as much. A long meeting invites discussion that goes nowhere. A short, fixed agenda forces you to look at the same few numbers every month, make a handful of decisions, and get back to work. Consistency is what makes it valuable, not depth.
What to pull before the meeting
The review only works if the numbers are ready before anyone sits down. Ask your office manager or bookkeeper to prepare a one-page summary a day ahead. It does not need to be pretty. It just needs to be the same format every month so changes stand out.
If some of these numbers are hard to pull, that is useful information too. A shop that cannot easily see how many calls were missed last month probably cannot manage them either. Start with whatever you can get, and add the missing pieces over the next few months.
- Last month’s card and bank charges for software and subscriptions
- Vendor invoices compared with the agreed rates
- Missed and unanswered calls, with how many got a callback
- Open estimates older than 14 days and their total value
- Number of past customers contacted for maintenance or repeat work
The 30-minute agenda
Run the same agenda every time, in the same order. Spend comes first because it is the quickest to review, then follow-up, then decisions. If a topic needs more than its time slot, note it and schedule a separate conversation instead of letting it take over the review.
- Minutes 0 to 5: last month’s action items, done or not done
- Minutes 5 to 12: spend review, new or changed charges
- Minutes 12 to 22: follow-up review, calls, estimates, past customers
- Minutes 22 to 28: decide on two or three actions
- Minutes 28 to 30: assign an owner and a due date to each
Running the spend review
For spend, you are only looking for what changed. Scan for new charges, higher amounts on existing charges, and anything renewing in the next 30 days. For each one, ask a simple question: do we still need this at this price? If the answer is unclear, the default should be to pause or downgrade until someone makes the case for keeping it.
For example, a roofing company might spot a second scheduling tool that a sales rep signed up for during a busy week. That is a two-minute conversation in the review. Left alone, it is a few hundred dollars a year that nobody ever decides to spend.
Running the follow-up review
The follow-up half of the review is where most recovered revenue comes from. Look at three things: how many calls were missed and whether they were returned, how many estimates are sitting without a second touch, and whether past customers are being contacted for maintenance or repeat work.
You are not trying to fix every lead in the meeting. You are checking whether the process is working. If the number of unreturned calls jumped, something changed: a staffing gap, a broken forwarding rule, or a phone setting. If open estimates are piling up, the follow-up sequence may have stopped. The review tells you where to look.
End with decisions, not discussion
The last few minutes are the most important. Pick two or three actions, no more, and give each one an owner and a date. Write them down where everyone can see them, and open next month’s review by checking them off. That loop is what turns a meeting into results.
Over a few months, the review gets faster because there is less to catch. That is the sign it is working. Spending stays where you set it, follow-up stays consistent, and problems show up while they are still small.
Protect the time on the calendar. Pick a fixed slot, such as the second Tuesday of every month, and treat it like a customer appointment. If the owner cannot attend, let the office manager run it and send a short summary. A review that happens without you is far better than one that gets skipped.