As a founder, it’s easy to live in reactive mode. Planning, launching, and establishing a new company has many moving pieces, and it’s easy to fall behind as a lean startup team or a solopreneur that works overtime to fill all the gaps.

When that happens, it’s easy to start focusing on putting out fires to the point where you lose track of where your business is going. Smaller problems can snowball into bigger issues. And what’s the old adage? You only need to be one degree off to eventually miss your target by a mile.

Rather than allow your startup to dictate how you react, entrepreneurs should try to set up structure and guardrails that keep them in the driver’s seat. One of the most effective tools is setting aside 60 minutes each week to review priorities and reset focus. This single habit has the potential to turn a chaotic startup into a focused, thriving business.

The Weekly CEO Meeting

Startup teams are well known for being lean. Particularly in an age where AI is allowing owners to streamline operations without outsourcing, most founding teams don’t need to hire employees until they’re further into a launch. That’s why more than four out of five small businesses in the U.S. don’t have employees (via Gusto).

The prevalence of solopreneurs makes it easy for a founder to feel like they’re just as much an employee as an executive. But the truth is, even if a founder is doing all of the work, they can’t sit exclusively in the “worker” seat. They need to shift into the “boss” mindset at least once in a while.

That’s where the Weekly CEO Meeting can help. In larger companies, C-suite executives often have standing appointments where they circle up and take a big-picture look at the state of a company. Small businesses may not have the complexities that a larger C-suite weekly roundup might need to address, but they can benefit from this practice, all the same.

This starts by blocking out a 60-minute meeting once a week. This can be for an owner and even a small leadership team, if it exists. The goal is to step out of day-to-day tasks and disconnect from the “putting out fires” mindset.

Instead, the Weekly CEO Meeting is an opportunity to review goals, key metrics, and cold, hard cash. Are you accomplishing things on your established timelines? Do you have KPIs, and if so, how are you measuring against them? Is cash flow a concern? Will it be?

The Weekly CEO Meeting is an important opportunity to see your business through the lens of a CEO, not an employee. It gives you a chance to direct a short burst of mental energy toward a goal-focused, long-term perspective of your company, not just once but over and over again.

The Catch to the Weekly CEO Meeting: Your Business Plan

A Weekly CEO Meeting needs more than the right people in the right mindset. It only works if you have the documentation, structure, and guidance to gauge how well you’re doing as a company. When a company is young, though, you don’t have as much documentation in place to guide decisions.

This is where your business plan becomes an invaluable asset. A business plan is often seen as a formality, a one-and-done document that helps you gain an initial picture of what you want to make …and then sits in a folder gathering digital dust.

And the truth is, a half-assed business plan doesn’t have much to offer. If you write a plan that is really just an executive summary or a cherry-picked attempt to address the things you’re interested in, it can leave blind spots.

A real business plan is a thoughtful, well-researched, pressure-tested document. The Small Business Administration goes so far as to call your business plan “the foundation of your business.” When you take the time to build a strong business plan before launch, you move from a one-shot picture of what you want to build to a foundational living document you can trust to help you take action throughout the launch.

If you have one takeaway from reading this, let it be this: take the time to build a robust business plan. Do your research. Understand the details. Build a resource that you can return to each week as a guiding light, a roadmap, a North Star for your Weekly CEO Meetings.

The AI Trap for Business Planning

One of the biggest weak points for modern business plans is how often founders use AI tools to streamline the business planning process. These are more thorough in the sense that they might have all of the necessary sections. But the information too often leans on basic templates, spreadsheets, and industry-unspecific advice.

If you want to build a business plan with the help of artificial intelligence, it’s understandable. Founders are naturally busy people, and often they don’t have the time to conduct things like market research or financial projections.

If you want to use AI to fill this gap, though, look for an AI platform. Specifically, you’ll want to find one that’s designed for business planning and financial forecasting. LivePlan, for instance, combines AI-powered tools that use real market data and verified industry benchmarks to genuinely stress test business ideas before writing a plan. It also uses fully interconnected financial models for more accurate profit and loss and cash flow projections. It has trained AI backed by decades of business planning expertise to make sure your plan is accurate and useful.

If you want a Weekly CEO Meeting to work early in a company’s life, you need to build it around a business plan you can trust. That starts by bridging the gap from half-baked plans to thorough, well-researched foundational documentation. Having this in place makes it far easier to ground executive assumptions in real data, not just guesses and gut instinct.

Learning to Create Action From Your Plan

Once you have a strong business plan in place, you’ve set the stage for a Weekly CEO Meeting. But for it to truly be effective, you need to learn to create actionable insights from your weekly analysis.

A good business plan is still just a plan. You want to use a planning platform like LivePlan alongside a scheduling tool like Trello, Notion, ClickUp, or Asana. These can make your weekly CEO meeting both strategic and actionable.

Video meeting software Zoom points out that task and workflow management platforms like these help improve organization through better collaboration and more efficient meeting takeaways. They can serve as a central source of truth where all of your actionable takeaways can live coming out of each meeting. You can assign tasks, detail expectations, and provide timelines — all of which keep things moving. You can also return to your workflow tool to review and update things during each Weekly CEO Meeting.

Finding Success Through the Weekly CEO Meeting

Entrepreneurs often spend too much time with their heads down in the employee role. It’s important to break away at regular intervals to review things from a C-suite perspective. The Weekly CEO Meeting gives you a standing appointment to slow down. This allows you to take stock and assess where you need to focus.

To get started, set up a recurring time on your calendar — start with 60 minutes. If you need more, bump it to 90 minutes.

At your first meeting, review your top three priorities. Consider where you need to set up time blocks for the upcoming week. Review key numbers, like revenue, pipeline, cash flow, and any other important KPIs. Look for bottlenecks and consider ways you can experiment with boosting productivity and similar initiatives in the coming week.

By creating the Weekly CEO Meeting, you create a business ritual you can leverage on a regular basis. A single hour every week can help you stay focused and incisive for the other 39 hours (or as a founder, likely the other 59 hours) you’re working. Use that one hour to save you dozens of others in the week ahead. You’ll thank yourself once you start to see the benefits play out in your business, your productivity, and your personal sanity.