The 90-day plan review builders and tradespeople actually need.

A 90-day review is not a chat about how busy the last quarter felt. It is a short, structured look at the three priorities you set 90 days ago, whether each one actually moved, why, and what that means for the next three. Most building and trades businesses that have a plan at all wrote it once in January and have not opened it since — the review is the step that turns a one-page plan from a document into a habit.

For a builder or tradesperson, the review needs its own shape because the usual version, built for an office business with steady weeks, does not survive contact with weather, subcontractors and jobs that straddle two quarters. Below is what to check, what tends to go wrong, and how to run the 90 minutes without it turning into either a pep talk or a telling-off.

What should a proper 90-day review actually cover?

A review that is worth the 90 minutes covers four things, in this order, for each of the three priorities you set last time:

• What actually happened. The number itself — quote turnaround, call-back rate, average job margin, whatever you chose — against what you said you would move it to. Not a feeling. A figure, pulled from invoices, job sheets or the accounts.
• Why. If it moved, what specifically caused it: a price change, a new process, one supplier swapped out. If it did not, was the target wrong for the quarter you actually had, or did the priority get crowded out once three jobs ran over at once?
• Keep, change or drop. A priority that moved and is now simply how the business runs gets dropped from the list — not because it stopped mattering, but because it is done. One that moved partway gets kept with a sharper target. One that never got touched gets a straight decision: still a priority, or quietly not one after all.
• The next three. Written down before the meeting ends, each with the single number that will prove it moved and the date you will next check it.

That is the whole review. No more than three priorities carried forward at a time — a list of eight intentions is not a plan, it is a wish list, and it fails the same way every quarter: everything gets a little attention and nothing gets finished.

Why is this harder to run in a building or trades business?

Three things make the standard version of this review a poor fit straight out of the box.

First, the calendar does not cooperate. A kitchen fit-out or an extension frequently starts in one quarter and finishes in the next, so "what happened this quarter" has to be read against jobs that are still mid-flight, not treated as a clean 90-day box. Second, the weather and subcontractors move the numbers for reasons that have nothing to do with the plan — three wet weeks or a plasterer who stops answering the phone will hit the figures regardless of how good the priority was. Third, the owner is usually also the estimator, the first call for problems on site and often still swinging a hammer some days, so the review itself has to be booked like a job, with a start time and an end time, or it never happens at all.

None of that means skip the review. It means read the numbers knowing why they moved before deciding what to do about it, and protect the 90 minutes the way you would protect a client meeting, because nobody else is going to protect it for you.

What goes wrong when the review gets skipped?

The plan quietly stops being the plan. Priorities drift without anyone deciding to drift them — by month five the business is chasing whatever job is loudest that week, which feels productive and is not the same as moving the three things that were agreed to matter most. The team, if they ever heard the original priorities, has no idea whether they landed, so good decisions on site do not get reinforced and poor ones do not get corrected. And the owner loses the one piece of evidence that would show whether last quarter's changes actually worked, because nobody wrote down what happened before memory smoothed it over. Three quarters later the business is in the same place it was at New Year, having worked every week of it.

How do you actually run the 90 minutes?

Book the date at the end of the current quarter, not when a gap happens to appear in the diary — a genuinely quiet 90 minutes rarely turns up on its own. Do it off-site, phone away, and keep to the four steps above for each priority before writing the next three. Bring the figures with you rather than trying to recall them in the room: last quarter's invoices for quote turnaround and average job value, the job sheets or a simple spreadsheet for call-backs, and the accounts for margin. If a site manager or lead tradesperson is close to the work, bring them in for the parts that affect the team, and leave anything about an individual's pay or performance for a separate conversation. Finish with the next three priorities on one page, each with a number and a date, pinned up or saved somewhere it will actually be seen before the following review.

That one-page plan is worth building properly before you try to review it — 90-Day Planning covers how to pick the three priorities and turn each into weekly actions. If a full quarter feels too long a gap between check-ins, The Monthly Business Review is the same discipline run every four weeks instead of every twelve. And Now, Where, How is the three-question model worth using inside the review itself: where the business actually is, where it needs to get to, and the moves that close the gap.

This is also the rhythm behind Performance on Purpose and the fortnightly work in Business Coaching — the review done with somebody in the room asking what actually happened, not just what you meant to do.