A Step-by-Step Guide to the Perfect Quarterly Offsite

As we're nearing the end of the quarter, many of you will soon be gathering for your first quarterly offsite of the year.

Reviewing the months behind you and planning for those in front of you is a great way to stay focused, aligned and accountable as a team.

Ideally, you'll get out of these meetings with a renewed sense of purpose and a set of clear goals that everyone agrees on.

When I facilitate quarterly meetings for my clients, I always use the same playbook.

It's very straightforward, and ensures alignment across all parts of the business, every time.

So if you want to tighten up your own quarterlies, or are looking for some guidelines on how to start doing them—here is my full, step-by-step playbook for the perfect quarterly meeting.

Overview

First off, let's get clear on the goals of a quarterly session.

It's a moment for the management team to get together, reflect on the past quarter, take any learnings on board, and plan for the next quarter.

I recommend all my clients to organize these sessions at an external location.

Far and away, the thing that derails these sessions the most is when people are distracted. Solve this by taking the day-to-day distractions out of the equation, and going off-site.

The ideal length for these sessions is one full day. Taking a full day ensures that there is enough time to review, reflect and plan ahead. It also prevents people from rushing the meeting to get back to other tasks-at-hand.

Now, let's dive into the nitty gritty.

Quarterly Meeting Agenda

Total time: 6hr 30min

💩 Shoot the shit (15 minutes)

As people are settling in, have everyone share their expectations for the day.

On top of this, everyone shares 1 business and 1 personal win from the last quarter.

With everyone now in a positive mood, you move on to the review of the quarter.

✅ Review last quarter (30 minutes)

Whether you're using Rocks, OKRs or some other way of prioritizing, tally what got done, and calculate the percentage. Remember, you're aiming for 80% done each quarter.

Discuss why goals were missed, and any other learnings specific to the last quarter.

🔍 Review & revise long-term plan (45 minutes)

No strategy should be static in the face of change. So go through all the elements of your strategy and see if they need to be updated.

If you follow my framework or anything similar, you'll have a one- or two-page document that contains everything relevant to your strategy. This is the time to go through it and amend where necessary.

If you don't have a document like this, I advise you to at the very least do a sanity check on the following elements of your company:

• Your core values
• Your company vision
• Your company mission
• Your core product or service
• Your top level marketing strategy
• Your goals for the year

❗️ Tackle key issues (150 minutes)

All of my clients use an issue list, which is quite simply a list of all the issues, challenges and opportunities that pop up in the company and are relevant to the leadership team. You can read a previous post on the issues list and issue solving here.

Often, these issues will be relevant to your quarterly Rocks, and it's good practice to work on those issues during the quarter (see my Perfect Weekly Meeting post)

But some things are bigger than your quarterly priorities, and require prior discussion.

The perfect time to do this is during your annual planning session and, you guessed it, during your quarterly meetings.

So, here's how to get started:

Start by taking 10-15 minutes so that everyone can make a shortlist of issues they would like to tackle during the session.

Then pick 3 high priority issues to start with. Don't debate this too much, just select three that feel important.

Then, go through each in the following order: Identify the real, underlying issue; Discuss potential solutions; Solve the issue insofar as that's possible and commit to follow-up steps (IDS).

When you've concluded your 3 issues, pick 3 more. Rinse and repeat for the duration of the problem-solving session.

🎯 Establish next quarter goals (120 minutes)

All of my clients work with quarterly priorities, or Rocks, to help keep them focused, aligned and accountable. You can read a previous post on Rocks here.

First, agree on the revenue and profit percentage.

Next, have everyone write down 3-7 priorities for the next 90 days. These should be things that are critical to staying on track towards your annual goals, and often include solutions from the problem-solving session.

Add all lists together, and Keep, Kill, or Combine (KKC) each item until you have a list of 3-7 Rocks for the quarter. The smaller the team, the narrower your focus should be.

Assign owners to each Rock and make them SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, timely). Owning a Rock means you are responsible for driving that Rock to completion, not that you'll be the one doing all the work it entails.

If people feel like they'll have time left in the quarter, they can define personal Rocks for themselves, usually from the priorities that didn't make the company Rock list.

🔜 Next steps (15 minutes)

Clean up your issue list. Anything that has been solved or is covered in a Rock can be removed.

Next, split the issues that are left between issues relevant to the quarter (you'll want to discuss these on a weekly basis), and issues not relevant to the quarter (you'll revisit these in the next quarterly meeting).

Then, create to-do's or action items for anything that needs doing right away, and for communicating outcomes from the meeting to relevant people.

🎁 Wrap up (15 minutes)

Finally, conclude the meeting.

Going around the table, have everyone share 1) their thoughts and feelings regarding the session, 2) whether their expectations have been met, and 3) a 1-10 rating for the meeting.

And that's it.

A full day of reflecting, planning and problem solving, resulting in clear goals for next quarter.

I hope this playbook will help you have more effective quarterly offsites.

And if you're using a different format, let me know what I'm missing!

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Hi, I'm Martijn van Zwieten 👋

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