Becoming a “Numbers Person”: Why you need a Weekly Business Review (WBR)

I deeply respect and admire people who are across their numbers. For me, there is such an impressive quality to a colleague who can come into a discussion prepared with knowledge about the health of not just their team, but the teams they connect to, even more so if they have the full picture of the business at large that they can wield to drive a discussion towards some kind of objective narrative (knowing that one number may not hold the whole picture, but a few together can tell a story worth investigating). ARR, EBITDA, upcoming renewals, contracts at risk, monthly spend, margin, cash runway... Quite often now when I do advisory work I ask People and Operations Leaders alike some basic facts on the business and I am met with “let me get back to you” or “I’d need to ask Finance,” it’s so common that it’s not shocking anymore. Perhaps the frequency is the shock now. <blockquote> If you are a leader, you need to be a numbers person. </blockquote> I say this as someone who has not always been a numbers person, I’m the kind of person who, for a very long time, lived in the anecdotal. In many ways, being able to see trends and interesting quirks in qualitative information is incredibly valuable (and got me much of the way to where I am today), but as I progressed in my career it was clear to me that the more I knew about the facts of the business, the better decisions I could make. <a href="https://jessicamayzwaan.medium.com/becoming-a-numbers-person-why-you-need-a-weekly-business-review-wbr-fc4da1648c10">Website</a>