<aside> 📋 Frequency: Quarterly | Time: 60 min | Trigger: Third week before quarter end

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Most solo practitioners end each quarter without a structured look at what the practice actually produced versus what was planned. Without formal review prep three weeks before close, you enter the new quarter running on habit — not on an honest assessment of what worked, where profitability eroded, and which clients are worth renewing. The three-week window is deliberate: it gives you enough runway to act on what you find.

Prerequisites

• All three Monthly Financial Reviews for the quarter complete
• Capacity Planning Updates current through the prior week
• Your pipeline tracker with deal outcomes for the quarter — closed, lost, and stalled — with close dates recorded
• Client engagement records with any scope changes, extensions, or exits noted

Procedure

1. Run the Client Profitability Analyzer skill for all engagements active during the quarter, using revenue, logged hours, and scope of work per client as input. Review the profitability ranking and flag any engagement where effective rate dropped below your floor.
2. Run the Quarterly Business Review Prep skill with your quarterly revenue totals, client profitability output, pipeline close rate, and utilization averages as input. Review the structured QBR brief output for accuracy.
3. Review practice mix for the quarter: calculate the split between retainer, project, and advisory revenue. Identify whether any shifts were strategic or the result of taking whatever showed up.
4. Assess client concentration risk. If any single client represented more than 30% of quarterly revenue, flag it as a dependency risk and add a pipeline diversification priority for next quarter.
5. Review pipeline metrics for the quarter: deals entered, closed, lost, average time to close. Compare to prior quarter. If close rate shifted significantly, identify whether the cause is upstream (targeting) or downstream (proposal quality).
6. Identify 2-3 priorities for next quarter based on what the review surfaced. Each priority should name a specific constraint and a specific fix — not a directional aspiration. Document the full QBR in your project system.

Expected Outcome

You'll have a complete QBR document with revenue performance, client profitability rankings, practice mix analysis, pipeline metrics, and 2-3 named priorities for next quarter — ready to act on before the new quarter starts.

<aside> ⚠️ Common mistakes:

— Running the review after the quarter has already ended. The trigger is three weeks before quarter close for a reason. If you wait until Q2 to review Q1, the new quarter is already shaped by unexamined momentum and you've lost the window to act.

— Setting next-quarter priorities as aspirations instead of constraint fixes. "Grow revenue" isn't a priority. "Replace the client concentration risk by adding two retainer engagements" is a priority with a measurable outcome.

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