A CEO told me recently that he has almost the same leadership meeting every month.
Sales explains what happened in sales. Marketing explains marketing. Finance brings the numbers. Everyone knows their own part.
And then he spends the next few days putting it all together in his head.
I hear this quite often, in different versions.
The problem isn't the reports. Most companies have more than enough of those. The problem is that someone still has to sit over them and decide what really matters.
Why did sales slow down? Is it a sales problem, or did marketing bring in weaker leads? Is one weak month just noise, or the start of something? What did we change the last time this happened? Did it help?
In a company of 30 or 50 people, this work usually lands on the CEO. And it's a surprisingly big job.
I do it for a few companies now. Once a week I go through what happened, compare it with previous weeks and come back with a few things the CEO should look at.
Sometimes the answer is “do nothing.” Sometimes it's one thing that quietly got worse for a month and nobody noticed, because every team was looking at its own numbers.
I think there are a lot of companies that are big enough to need this, but still too small to have someone doing it full time.
If this sounds familiar, write to me.