A Weekly Operating Cadence for a Five-Person Company (The 30-Minute Version)

Most of the owners and founders I work with run companies of two to twenty people. They do not need an operating system designed for a 500-person company. They need a cadence that fits in the gaps between actually doing the work. This is the one we use inside the Rich Ventures GTM & Operations Plan, built around a single 30-minute weekly session. It is deliberately small.

Why 30 minutes

I have run two-hour weekly business reviews and I have run 30-minute ones. The two-hour version produced better slides and worse decisions. Thirty minutes forces three things: a short list of numbers, a short list of decisions, and a short list of commitments. If a topic does not fit, it becomes a separate working session or it was not that important.

The five numbers

Every business I advise tracks a weekly scorecard of exactly five numbers. Not fifteen. The five change by business, but they almost always follow this pattern:

1. Cash: balance today and weeks of runway at the current burn. Non-negotiable for any company, including profitable ones.
2. Leading demand indicator: new conversations, qualified leads, bookings requests, foot traffic. Whatever happens before revenue.
3. Revenue: the week's sales, or new ARR, against the same week last month.
4. Retention or repeat: renewals, repeat orders, returning customers. The number everyone forgets.
5. The constraint: whatever is currently the bottleneck. Hiring pipeline, delivery backlog, inventory, support queue. This number rotates as the constraint moves.

The owner fills these in before the call. If filling them in takes more than ten minutes, the systems are wrong, and fixing that becomes the first project.

The 30-minute agenda

• Minutes 0 to 5, scorecard. Read the five numbers. No discussion unless one is off trend.
• Minutes 5 to 10, last week's commitments. Each commitment is done, not done, or dropped on purpose. No story required for done.
• Minutes 10 to 25, one decision. The single most important open decision in the business. Pricing, a hire, a channel to cut, a customer to fire. We decide it or we define exactly what information would let us decide next week.
• Minutes 25 to 30, next week's commitments. Three at most. Written down by me and sent after the call.

What happens between sessions

The cadence only compounds if the week in between is used. Two rules make that true. First, commitments are small enough to finish in a week with the business still running; "rebuild the website" is not a commitment, "get three quotes for the website" is. Second, anything urgent goes to email, and I answer it. The weekly call is for the important, not the urgent.

Monthly and quarterly layers

Once a month, one of the 30-minute sessions is replaced by a 60-minute review of the month: the five numbers as a trend, what the decisions added up to, and whether the constraint has moved. Once a quarter, we spend 90 minutes on the plan itself, which usually means removing things from it.

That is the entire operating cadence. Fifty-two short sessions, twelve medium ones, four long ones. No offsite required.

Why it works for small companies in particular

Large companies have cadence imposed on them by boards and budgets. A five-person company has no external forcing function at all, which is why strategy quietly decays into reaction. One of our clients, who runs a restaurant group, describes the effect as meeting with us about once a week, if that, and the marketing simply getting done while the business grows. The value is not the advice in the session. It is that the session exists and someone is going to ask.

Start this week

You do not need us to begin. Pick your five numbers, put a 30-minute block on the calendar at the same time every week, and write down three commitments at the end of it. If you want an operator on the other side of that call, that is what the GTM & Operations Plan is: $999 a month, one year up front, and a standing reason to make the decision instead of carrying it another week.