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Build the quarterly business review from your own data

Today

The QBR is Thursday. You reuse last quarter's deck, drop in a ticket chart, and spend the meeting narrating what already happened. The three things you needed them to fund get raised in the last five minutes and deferred again.

With Claude

You paste the quarter's ticket themes, the lifecycle notes, and what you want approved, and get back an agenda, risks written as business consequences, a recommendation per risk with the cost of waiting, and the three hardest questions the room will ask you.

The prompt

Paste this into claude.ai and replace anything in brackets.

You are helping me prepare a quarterly business review for a managed services client. My QBR format and two past decks are in the project knowledge.

Client: [name or code, headcount, what the business does, who will be in the room and what each of them cares about]
Contract: [for example per seat managed services, what is included and excluded, renewal date]
Quarter: [dates]
Ticket themes and volumes for the quarter: [paste your export or your own summary]
Asset and lifecycle notes: [paste what you know about machine age, warranty status, and end of support dates for what we cover]
Projects we completed this quarter: [list them]
What I want them to approve next: [list the projects or spend you are recommending]
Budget context: [what they have told you about budget and timing, or write UNKNOWN]

Build it in this order:
1. An agenda that spends the first third on their business and the rest on ours.
2. A one page service recap using only the figures I gave you. Where a figure belongs and I did not supply it, write FIGURE NEEDED.
3. Risks, ranked, each stated as a business consequence first and the technical cause second. Say plainly which risks came out of this quarter's tickets and which are lifecycle or design issues we already knew about.
4. For each risk, the recommendation, the decision I am asking for, the rough shape of the work, and what changes if they defer it one more quarter. Do not price anything.
5. A twelve month roadmap by quarter, built only from the items above.
6. The three hardest questions this room will ask me, and a straight answer to each.

Rules: no invented benchmarks, no industry averages, no percentages, no dollar figures, no vendor statistics. Assume the person holding the budget has sat through plenty of vendor decks and will discount anything that sounds like one.

What to skip in IT services firms and MSPs

  • Credentials and live infrastructure detail. Passwords, API keys, certificates, connection strings, firewall or VPN configs, network diagrams with real addressing, and security assessment or penetration test findings do not belong in a chat window, yours or your client's. On Free, Pro, and Max accounts whether your chats are used to improve Claude is a setting you control in Privacy Settings, and Anthropic does not use Team or Enterprise account data to train its models by default. Either way, a secret that leaves your password manager is a secret you no longer control. Reference credentials by where they live, never by value.
  • Security configuration and compliance attestations. Claude will hand you a confident conditional access policy, firewall rule set, or control mapping that looks right and is wrong in the details that decide whether it holds. It does not know the client's real environment, the current version of the framework, or what your assessor will accept. Use it to draft the explanation and the client facing summary, have a named engineer verify configuration against vendor documentation, and never sign an attestation or a security questionnaire on the strength of a chat.
  • Incident communication that carries legal weight. Once an event looks like unauthorized access, exfiltration, ransomware, or loss of regulated data, the message stops being a service update. Breach notification requirements vary by state and by contract, the clocks are short, and most cyber policies require you to involve the carrier and counsel before you communicate. Draft internally if it helps you think, then route anything client facing through counsel and your carrier before it is sent.

Want all 4 workflows for IT services firms and MSPs in your inbox?

Every prompt on this page plus the rest, so you still have them on Monday. One email, then four short ones on making it stick. Unsubscribe any time.

Or answer four questions and Claude writes three workflows for your specific business rather than the industry generally.

Before you try it

More for IT services firms and MSPs

Full guide for IT services firms and MSPs