How to Run KPI and Strategic Meetings That Actually Change Decisions

When it comes time to sell a business, all sellers claim that they run the business on processes and systems. However, every sophisticated buyer knows that this is unlikely and discounts the price to reflect the likelihood of a lot of manual intervention. The reason for this discounting rests mainly in the lack of evidence that systems and processes exist. Documentation provides the evidence and, when collected over dozens of months through frequent meetings, that documentation can make a meaningful impact on the exit price of your business.

No one wants to buy a dumpster fire. Especially when the founders are likely to end up with a lot of cash and little reason to stick around and help the buyer. This means earnouts, holdbacks, escrows, and other contingencies on the exit price. But when a buyer can see clear processes and witness management spending a majority of their time on strategic items, with all tactical items handled by other leaders, confidence builds fast, along with the exit price.

In addition to providing great proof for systems and processes at work, these meetings offer useful venues for the management team to get the time-leverage needed to focus on the strategic over the tactical. The types of meetings needed for your company will vary by business type, but in most cases include the following at a minimum:

• KPI review meeting - monthly or weekly
• Budget and financial meeting - monthly
• Strategic initiative meeting - monthly

The goal: Create a meeting rhythm for your company to gain management leverage and document the systems and processes you put in place.

How can Golden Section Assist? Golden Section's venture partner can assist here.

Steps

Prerequisites: Strategic Planning, Budgeting, KPI Creation and Executive Execution at a minimum.

1. Prepare: Decide on the meeting rhythm for you and your team. The more frequent the meeting the faster the rhythm of the company. In the early days, weekly might be best. But the rhythm should also take into account the frequency of data collection which might only accommodate monthly meetings (budget vs actual for instance).
2. Pick a time & create the invites: Set a time for your meetings and send out invites to the team members responsible to attend. These meetings should be attended by each team member as a hard and fast rule with no exceptions. As a result, pick a time that is unlikely to get interrupted by client engagement or other things (early morning for instance). Once set, don't change, don't cancel, don't accommodate.
3. Set roles for the meeting: Your meetings should have the following roles at a minimum:
   • Leader - most likely you.
   • Scribe - the taker, holder, and distributor of the minutes and action items.
   • Time manager - the person responsible to ensure the pace is met.
4. Run your meeting.
   • Always start the meeting promptly on time and note the start time in the minutes (this is vital).
   • Use the same format for each meeting. For instance, departmental KPI meetings should follow the same process (ideally one that is logical like marketing to sales to operations to finance) and report on the same things.
   • Rigorously keep the pace. Any conversations that start to dive into a discussion need to be sidelined and a specific meeting created for that item. The rule of thumb in these meetings is similar to good email practice: act, schedule, or destroy.
   • Store the minutes that need to contain the following at a minimum:
   • Quantitative nature of the report for each KPI or budget area (i.e. the data of the meeting)
   • Action items promised in the meeting and an owner for each item.
   • Past action items from prior meetings and current status.
   • Ask for feedback on the meeting and a score for the meeting (1 out of 5, how on target was this meeting) and store the score (avg is fine) in the minutes.