An operating review is a regular, structured look at how the firm is actually running — workflow, capacity, deadlines, client issues, projects and margins — with clear actions and owners. Run monthly, documented and shared, it becomes the engine of continuous improvement.
What to cover
- Workflow and deadlines: what’s on track, what’s stuck, and why
- Capacity: where the team is stretched or underused
- Client issues: problems, risks and anything affecting experience
- Projects and priorities: what’s moving and what’s slipping
- Commercials: margins, pricing and where time is going
How to run it well
Keep it regular (monthly works for most firms), keep it honest, and keep it short. The point isn’t a status meeting — it’s decisions. Every issue should leave the review with an owner and a next step.
Document and follow through
Capture the outcomes in one place and check them at the next review. A review that isn’t written down and followed up is just a chat. Done consistently, it’s how a firm compounds small improvements into a much better-run business.
The monthly operating review is a core part of the Optivo Monthly COO.
The agenda, in the order that works
The order is not arbitrary. Put the numbers first and the discussion is grounded; put discussion first and the numbers become ammunition for a position somebody already held.
| Item | Time | The question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| The five numbers | 10 min | What is true this week? |
| Deadlines at risk | 10 min | What breaks if nothing changes? |
| Capacity next month | 10 min | What can we honestly promise? |
| Actions from last time | 10 min | Did we do what we said? |
| One improvement | 20 min | What are we fixing, and who owns it? |
An hour, monthly, with a shorter weekly version covering only the first three. The single biggest determinant of whether it survives is that fourth item — a review that never checks whether the last set of actions happened teaches everybody that the actions are optional, and it will be quietly dropped within a quarter.
The five numbers
Work in progress. Lock-up, being the days between doing work and holding the cash. Capacity committed against capacity available. Deadlines at risk in the next thirty days. Fees won and lost since the last review.
They are not the only useful numbers, and a practice with a mature system will want more. But these five between them answer whether the practice is solvent, busy, on time and growing, which is the whole of what a monthly review needs to establish before it can usefully discuss anything else.
Manual is fine to start. A rough number you look at every month beats a precise one you see in March, and building the perfect report is the most popular way of never starting. If you want the fuller set, the twelve numbers worth tracking covers what to add once the habit exists.
What makes it fail
It becomes a status meeting. Everyone reports what they have been doing, an hour passes, nothing is decided. The test of an operating review is whether a decision was made; if the answer is routinely no, it is a meeting about work rather than a meeting that changes work.
It is cancelled when busy. Which is exactly when it is needed, and the cancellation is usually the first visible symptom of the thing the review would have caught.
Everything is amber. If nothing is ever red, the reporting is political rather than accurate, and the review is now generating false comfort — worse than no review, because it costs an hour and produces confidence.
It has no owner. Somebody has to prepare the numbers before the meeting rather than during it. Fifteen minutes of preparation is the difference between a decision and a discussion about what the numbers mean.
Who is in the room
Everyone who owns a piece of the operation and can commit to changing it. That is usually smaller than the instinct suggests — four to six people. Larger than that and it becomes a briefing, because people stop speaking freely.
The harder question is whether all the partners attend. If partner behaviour is part of what needs to change — review habits, pricing exceptions, work held personally — then they have to be there, and somebody needs the standing to raise it. In a founder-led practice that is often nobody, which is one of the honest reasons these reviews stay superficial.
Documenting it so it compounds
One page, same format every time: the five numbers, the decisions made, the actions with an owner and a date. Not minutes — nobody reads minutes.
Circulate it the same day. The value is not the record; it is that an action with a name and a date attached, visible to everyone, behaves entirely differently from the same action agreed verbally. And twelve of those pages is a year of operational history, which is the closest thing a practice gets to institutional memory about how it runs.
After a year, the pattern in those pages will tell you something the individual meetings could not: which problems keep returning. A recurring item is not a failure of effort — it is a signal that the cause is upstream of where you have been fixing it.
Common questions
How often should we run an operating review?
Monthly suits most firms — frequent enough to catch problems early, spaced enough to see real change. A lighter weekly check on priorities works alongside it.
Who should be in the review?
The owner or leadership team, plus whoever owns the operation. Keep it small enough to make decisions and clear enough that actions have named owners.
Where does your firm actually stand?
Score it across the ten things a COO would look at first. Three minutes, an honest read on where you’re strong and where you’re exposed, and a 90-day plan for the areas holding you back.
Or book a confidential call if you’d rather just talk it through.