Concept
The weekly owner review
The weekly owner review is one protected hour, the same time every week, spent on the business rather than in it. Its agenda is fixed: a few honest numbers, the money split, one written process improved, one growth question, and the year's plan checked.
The review combines several books' ideas into one routine, and it is the habit BookYol's Start Your Business road ends with. Its core is Michael Gerber's instruction to work on the business, not in it: without a fixed hour, the founder slips back into the daily work and the business drifts into a job. The agenda is fixed so that the hour cannot drift into doing the work. Numbers come first: how many people bought, how many bought again, what each cost to reach and what each paid, the kind of behavioural measures Eric Ries prefers to vanity metrics. Then the money split, which Mike Michalowicz's Profit First runs on the tenth and twenty-fifth of each month. Then one page of the operations manual, written or improved. Then any growth decision, tested with Paul Jarvis's question from Company of One: better, or just bigger? Then the one-page plan, checked against the picture of the year at its top. An hour is enough, and it deserves the protection of a customer appointment.
A real-life example
The owner of a small bookshop in Çanakkale holds her review on Monday mornings before opening. In March the numbers show that school orders bring most of her repeat customers while the café corner barely pays. She writes a one-page process for school orders, drops the café's pastries, and leaves the year's target at the top of her plan unchanged.
How to use it
- 1Book the same hour every week and treat it as a customer appointment.
- 2Run the fixed agenda: numbers, money split, one manual page, any growth question, the plan.
- 3End by writing one thing that could now happen without you.