Apero's WBR ritual

The Weekly Business Review

I'd like to introduce you to a concept that I think is one of the most important organizational innovations of the 21st century: the Weekly Business Review, or WBR for short.

The WBR is a ritual. You ask the same questions every week to the same group of people, who each individually respond, in writing, beforehand.

Then, you sit, in silence, and read, together(!) your answers to those questions. No talking is allowed, but commenting and questioning in the doc is vigorously encouraged.

This meeting lasts for about 45 minutes to an hour. You know you have done it right when there isn't really anything to talk about at the end of the reading, as discussion items were hammered out in comments.

The six questions

Here are the questions my team answers every week in our WBR, which we do on Thursday afternoons, just reading and writing comments in our shared Google Doc, and responding to those comments, like maniacs:

1. What was your top priority for this week? Did you accomplish it? If not, how are you adjusting?

2. How many prospects / clients did you speak with this week? What did you learn from them? Did they say anything that made you change your mind? Did you learn of new problems?

3. What is the most important question to answer? What is the fastest way to answer it?

4. What are your top 1-3 obstacles for moving faster? Are there any resources you need right now that you aren't getting?

5. What went well? What didn't go well? What could be improved?

6. What is your top priority for next week? Let's keep this concrete.

That's it. If you run a GTM org, I would put these questions into the status of canon. If your leadership team can't each individually answer these questions in ways that compel you, they probably should not be in a leadership position on your team. Here is what I think about each of these questions.

What each question forces

Question 1 forces accountability on the prior week's commitments.

Question 2 forces you to focus on customers and selling. It also opens you up to reflect on updates to your mental models derived from conversations. And it makes sure everyone else knows where you are coming form.

Question 3 forces your to prioritize and benignly neglect everything else. It inspires you into 10x thinking, or "given I think [something] is them most important problem, how can I throw the kitchen sink and all the spaghetti I ever owned at solving it?" That is a good way to think about GTM problems.

Question 4 invites help. It addresses blockers and allows everyone else to see those blockers. It creates a shared understanding of what is slowing your execution down, if anything.

Question 5 provides a pulse on how you are doing, emotionally. Celebrations, self-aware places for improvement, unanticipated failures. The question behind the question is, are you learning fast enough?

Question 6 invites you to commit to the most important things for next week, out in the open, driving accountability and alignment on your priorities.

Why WBRs work

WBRs are incredible for a few reasons:

• They allow you to have multiple conversations at once, when in a typical spoken meeting you can only have one conversation at a time. Ten conversations is ten times the decision-making throughput.

• They force you to put the full context of your idea down on paper, vs. what is voiced over when presenting a deck. This means that others can scrutinize your full thinking, and vice versa. Often, this exposes fuzziness of a proposed course of action.

• They record a change log of decisions made and learnings across a business over time, making the entire business chronologically inspectable. This is helpful for training agents and small language models on your evolving business context.

• They are a moment of compelled, and collective introspection, which is sometimes hard to do during the blocking and tackling execution of a week's work.

When I was at Clipboard Health working in the GTM New Verticals team, I was introduced to the ritual of the Weekly Business Review. It has completely changed the way I think about running my company, and any GTM engagement we do together with clients. I don't know that I would have made it half as quickly to where I am without it.