The best companies in the world are constantly looking for ways to improve — and if you are serious about growth and agility, then asking the following seven questions during your quarterly review can help you build a better future.

1. What Challenges Do You Expect to Face in Upcoming Months? No matter how well things may be going for your company, there are bound to be a few challenges waiting for you. Even if those challenges are related to scaling for your growth! Considering the problems that may await you is one of the best ways to prepare for the future, especially if you use your position of leadership to glean a diverse array of potential solutions to these issues.

2. What Are Your Profit and Loss Projections for the Future? Any financial report includes these statistics — and so should your overall review of the company. Understanding how your finances are shaping up will give you context through which you can analyze virtually every other question on this list.

3. Do You Envision Any Potential New Strategies to Help Your Company Expand? If the answer to this question is “no,” you may wish to begin searching for new ways to find what challenges you should focus on, gather ideas and build a vision for how your future will shape up. The opportunities are always there — the only real question is which leaders will think of them first and build the infrastructure needed to turn those ideas into reality.

4. How Would You Analyze The Existing Leadership Team? Understanding the pros and cons of every leadership style in your organization is another important job for anyone hoping to build a company that scales in a natural fashion.

5. How Can the Company’s Core Message Be Redefined? The most successful companies in the world only redefine their core message once in a blue moon — but you should not interpret this reality to mean that they are not always thinking about how their message relates to their audience. If you are really looking to succeed with your target customers, you should be thinking critically about what they want to hear, how they want to hear it, and how that relates to your offerings. Operationalizing Design Thinking is one way you can closely collaborate with your customers to better understand their needs and act on them.

6. What’s Going Well, and What’s Not? Again, this is a question that any company, successful or not, will have a myriad of answers to. Gathering this data, analyzing it in a productive way, and coming up with concise and actionable answers is not easy — but it is an exercise that can be tremendously productive.

7. How Will You Plan for Continuous Improvement? If you are unsure of how to answer this question, Planbox may be the perfect answer. Our software suite is oriented toward agile organizations that take a proactive approach to improving every aspect of what they do, even if that means listening to hard answers to difficult questions during a review. Visit us online for more information on what we do and why we do it!