The second requirement for the preparation phase is feedback. It is a key to growth. Make sure you start getting feedback at least three weeks before the planned business review. People might be busy, traveling or attending events, and may not get back to you immediately.

Who should be giving feedback? In-country reviewers, end-users, project mangers, vendor managers and also the quality assurance team, finance team or any other stakeholders that are involved in the process and can share valuable inputs. Feedback should be gathered on the buyer and seller sides alike. Business reviews are meant to be discussions between partners, and to make this truly a reality, 360-degree feedback is needed.

What should the feedback cover? Definitely the quality of cooperation, deliveries, communications, responsiveness, instructions — consider if they are clear and to the point, as well as if they are being followed. Feedback can be also shared on great achievements, and who or what was helpful for the stakeholder.

Presence during the meeting is all about leading the meeting in a way that benefits all attendees. Easier said than done, of course.

The business review is a meeting like any other, so basic rules should apply to it. There should be an agenda sent to participants at least 24 hours before the meeting, with presentations to follow and agreement on who is presenting which parts. Both the customer and the supplier can present, or it can be only the supplier. There should be no distractions; the best reviews are done with phones down and laptops shut. Without distractions, reviews finish quicker and get better results in terms of completed follow-up items.

Stakeholders are one of the keys to success. Make sure you gather the right stakeholders in the room. For feedback, be as generous as you can get, and involve everyone. For the meeting, limit it to the people who are crucial in the process. Make sure what and how you present in the review keeps people involved. If you find yourself in a room full of people who were told to come to the business review, but who are only interested in five minutes of the whole review, the review will not be successful. To remain present, you need people who bring value to the table. Focus on main points of contact. If they are your everyday contacts, they will use the opportunity to show their successes in front of their bosses and will make sure the needed executives join the meeting on the customer side. On the supplier side, it works the same way.

You also need your presentation to be involving and interesting. This is basic, but we tend to forget about it when we prepare business reviews. When you are preparing to speak at a conference, you will have lean slides, practice before the actual speech and pay attention to the time. The same applies to reviews. Do a dry run with your team before the actual meeting. Discuss with the team which questions might come up. If you have 100% on-time deliveries in all months of a year apart from October, it is guaranteed that a question will pop up about why this month has only 80% on-time deliveries. Knowing this, you can add this explanation to your presentation. Make sure your presentation is not overloaded with information. Simple presentations usually work well. Try involving the audience so that they stay focused.

In Figure 2, you can find an example of a quarterly business review timing split. It can be totally different for yours. The amount of time spent on each of the items, the number of items and so on are all subject to change. I would, however, set aside 5% of the time for creativity. Include a fun exercise where everyone introduces someone else from the team (for new teams) or you share one new fact about yourself that occurred since the last time you have all met. Once, I had a customer bringing in a colleague from a different team to talk about a super interesting new development they were working on — valuable and fun.

Last but definitely not the least are rotten apples: topics that are not comfortable or desired by all stakeholders or by one of the partners. If there were escalations, issues or bumps, we need to mention them. These meetings are more strategic then tactical, but strategy cannot improve without learning from the past. Failure is not as important as the way it is handled. Be it customer or the supplier, resolving the issue is key. It is important to mention the issues, but do not dive too deep. They should have been addressed at the time of their occurrence in detail, so this is the time to go over it carefully. It is important to take responsibility — ownership of issues helps in growth and also ensures that both sides are handling their issues professionally. When talking about rotten apples, it is very important to finish off by listing fixes and actions to prevent recurrence.

Follow up is crucial for both sides and it’s not as simple as sending a thank you note. As you have seen in Figure 2, around 30% of the meeting should be spent on planning. Focus on the future more than the past. For the ideas, solutions and innovations that were discussed during the business review, defined action items are a must. Follow up is a natural way to set these up. Add action items for all stakeholders. Define deadlines for them. Add risks and their mitigations. Items from this exercise will be your roadmap for the next review, and will provide continuity for the two.

In your follow up, set the date for the next quarterly business review. This is not as needed for the annual business reviews, but for more frequent meetings it is good to plan well ahead. You might hit the holiday season, conference season and so on. Define your key stakeholders, as it might happen that you will not be able to gather everyone on a given date. However, where there is a will, there is a way, as they say. During one of my quarterly business reviews, I was presenting my slides from a yacht, anchored in one of the marinas in a beautiful Polish lake.

One extra point to be covered are the numbers. How many meetings, and how often? Usually experts recommend a maximum of 40 business reviews per year. With 40 meetings per year, you would probably already shorten the time during actual meetings and not need a full preparation phase. The reality, however, is that you can’t do too many business reviews. Especially as an LSP, you will be having reviews both with customers and suppliers. You will need to decide which partners have the most impact on your business and meet with them.

Business reviews are an amazing way to meet all stakeholders outside of the everyday haze of tasks. This is a time to discuss and present success stories; to talk about the future and how both parties benefit from this relationship.