The Quarterly Owner Time Review SOP

Purpose

To decide, once a quarter and on evidence rather than feel, what comes off the owner's plate and what goes on it. The weekly owner review handles the coming week and cannot make structural changes, because structural changes take longer than a week to show a result. This review is the one that moves work between people permanently, and it exists so that decision happens on a schedule instead of after a bad month.

The output is one page: three targets with numbers on them, and every handoff that came out of the review with a named owner and a date.

Scope

In scope: the owner's own hours over the completed quarter, the standing measures below, disposition decisions on recurring work that consumes owner time, and the handoffs those decisions produce.

Out of scope: company financial performance, personal and family planning, staffing decisions that are not handoffs, and anything about the coming week. Each of those has its own review, and pulling them in here reliably converts a 90-minute decision meeting into a three-hour discussion that ends with no handoff written. If a financial or personal item surfaces, write it on a parking list and move on.

Cadence: once per quarter, in the final two weeks of the quarter, 90 minutes, off the shop premises. Off-site is not ceremony - it is the only reliable way to get 90 uninterrupted minutes, and this review is worthless if it is run in 15-minute fragments.

Roles and responsibilities

The field lead's 20 minutes matter. A handoff to the field that was never checked against crew load comes back within a month, and it comes back as a quality problem rather than a capacity problem, which is much harder to trace.

Inputs required (assembled two weeks ahead)

1. The prior quarter's one-page output, with its three targets.
2. Owner hours by category for the quarter, from whatever log you keep. Two representative weeks is acceptable if you do not log continuously; three months of guesswork is not.
3. Interruption counts per working day, or the best sample you have.
4. The check-back queue: every piece of delegated work still awaiting a decision from the owner.
5. The list of commitments made in the quarter that are still open.
6. The recurring calendar: every standing meeting and standing obligation with the owner's name on it.

If input 2 does not exist, run the review anyway using inputs 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6, and make "start the log" the first of the three targets. A review deferred until the data is perfect is a review that never happens.

Procedure

1. Reconcile last quarter's three targets, before reading anything else. For each: hit, missed, or abandoned. Abandoned is a legitimate answer and must be recorded as such rather than quietly reclassified as missed - the two have different causes. A target abandoned because circumstances changed is information about your planning horizon. A target missed is information about the plan.

2. Read the four standing measures against the prior quarter's values. Direction matters more than level, since the level differs by shop and by season.

3. Name the single largest recurring consumer of owner hours in the quarter. One. Not a list. The list is how this review produces nothing.

4. Decide its disposition, choosing from exactly four options. Keep, delegate, systematize, or kill.

• Keep is correct when the work genuinely requires the owner and no version of it can be reduced. Say so explicitly and stop revisiting it every quarter.
• Delegate requires a named person with the capacity, and it produces a handoff document with a decision ceiling written as a number.
• Systematize means the work stays with you but gets smaller: a template, a standing rule, a price book entry that removes the judgment call. Pick this over delegate when the work is fast but frequent, because delegating a frequent small task creates more check-back traffic than it removes.
• Kill means stop doing it and accept the consequence. This is the least-used option and it is correct more often than it is chosen.

5. Set exactly three targets for the coming quarter, each with a number, a unit and a step size. Three because a quarter absorbs about three structural changes and no more. Each target names the measure, the current value, the target value, and the unit of analysis.

Apply the step-size rule: no single measure gets a target more aggressive than a one-third change from its current value in one quarter. A larger cut is not held, it is bounced, and a bounced target costs the credibility of the next one. If a measure needs to halve, that is two quarters by design.

6. Write every handoff with an owner, a ceiling and a date, before leaving the room. Handoffs written afterwards are written vaguer, and vague handoffs come back.

7. Publish the one page to the office lead and field lead within 48 hours. Not for approval. So they can hold you to the three targets, which is the only enforcement mechanism this review has.

8. Book the next review before you leave. Same slot next quarter.

A worked review

An owner who still runs calls two to three days a week reaches the end of a quarter. Last quarter's three targets were: cut owner-answered dispatch questions from 14 a day to 7 a day; raise the median longest unbroken block from 35 minutes to 60 minutes; hand off permit and approval chasing entirely.

Step 1, reconcile. Dispatch questions came in at 9 a day, down from 14. That is a drop of 5 a day, about a 36% reduction from 14, and the target was 7, so it is missed by 2 a day despite real movement. The median unbroken block came in at 41 minutes, up from 35, against a target of 60 - a gain of 6 minutes where 25 minutes were needed, so about a quarter of the intended gain, and missed. Permit chasing was handed off in week 3 and has not returned, so hit.

Note what the step-size rule would have said about those targets at the time they were set. Cutting 14 a day to 7 is a 50% cut, past the one-third ceiling, which would have set the target at about 9 a day - exactly where it landed. The block target of 35 minutes to 60 minutes is a 71% increase, well past the ceiling; the rule would have set roughly 47 minutes, and 41 would still have missed it, but by 6 minutes rather than by 19. One of the two misses was a planning error, not an execution failure, and reading it as an execution failure is how an owner concludes they are undisciplined when they were over-ambitious.

Step 2, the four measures. Committed-hours share averaged 84% across the quarter's weeks, up from 79%. Interruptions per working day, median 9, down from 14. Median longest unbroken block 41 minutes, up from 35. Check-back queue depth on review day: 11 items.

Two of the four are over their lines. Committed-hours share at 84% leaves nothing to absorb a bad week, and the check-back queue at 11 items says delegated work is stalling on him. Those two are related and the relation runs one way: a queue of 11 items generates its own interruption load, which consumes the hours, not the reverse.

Step 3, the largest consumer. Quoting, at about 5.5 hours a week across the quarter.

Step 4, disposition. Delegate or systematize. The field lead can quote straightforward residential work, so delegation is available. But quoting here is frequent and mostly fast, with the time going into the judgment calls on non-standard items, and delegating a frequent task with judgment in it moves the judgment calls into the check-back queue - which is already at 11 and is the measure most clearly out of line. So: systematize first, by getting the twenty most-quoted items into a price book with fixed numbers, and revisit delegation next quarter once the judgment content has been reduced.

Step 5, three targets. Check-back queue depth from 11 items to 8 items, measured on review day (a 27% cut, inside the one-third ceiling). Owner quoting hours from 5.5 a week to 4.0 a week, averaged over the quarter's weeks (a 27% cut, inside the ceiling). Median longest unbroken block from 41 minutes to 54 minutes (a 32% increase, just inside the ceiling).

Step 6, handoffs. Two: the office lead owns clearing any check-back item that has sat more than 3 working days by escalating it in the daily huddle rather than waiting; the field lead owns building the price book draft for the twenty items, due in 5 weeks.

What this review is prone to getting wrong

It becomes a self-assessment. The moment the reconcile step turns into a judgment about whether the owner is disciplined, the disposition decisions go soft, because every option except Keep now reads as an admission. Read the numbers, record hit or missed, and move to Step 2 without discussion. The worked case above shows why: one of the two misses was a bad target, and that is only visible if you are grading the plan rather than the person.

Handoffs decided here are never checked again. The permit handoff in the worked case held, which is the good outcome and also the reason it disappears from view. Add one line to the prior-quarter reconcile: for each handoff made in the last review, is it still with the person it went to. A handoff that quietly returned and was never noticed is the single most common way an owner's committed-hours share climbs while every quarterly review looks productive.

The parking list is never read. Items pushed out of scope during the review accumulate and eventually justify skipping the review altogether because "it does not cover the real problems." Read the parking list at the start of the next review, route each item to the meeting that owns it, and clear the list.

References

• U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), small business planning and management review practices
• Trade-standard practice, quarterly operating review in small field-service shops
• See related: How to Run a Weekly Owner Review, The Quarterly Personal Reset, How to Measure Whether You Are Actually Less Busy, The Check-Back Cadence for Delegated Work, How to Hand Off a Recurring Task Permanently