As your team grows you’ll need to meet with them regularly to keep things moving forward smoothly.
Hate meetings?
Believe me, I get it.
I’ve gone from having too many meetings with my team to canceling them all and back again.
I’ve tried all the formats and it took us a while to figure out what worked for us.
Now it’s something we train our high-level coaching clients in our Leverage program.
Just the other day my friend asked me about the format of our meetings so I thought I’d share that with you today.
If you haven’t been meeting with your team or the meetings you’ve been having haven’t felt useful, give today’s episode a watch.
Transcript / MP3
What’s good, everybody.In this episode, I want to break down how we run our weekly team meeting. … Let’s get it going.For three years. My agency built funnels and automation systems for the biggest names in marketing today since then have transformed that agency into a hyper profitable training and consulting business. While everyone is out there and talking about scale, like at some sort of destination, we’ll be asking the real question, how do you transform your business into a more scalable model using the knowledge, skills, and expertise that you already have? This podcast is here to give you the answer. Join me and follow along as I learn, apply and share the strategies I’m using to build my multimillion-dollar business. My name is Greg Hickman and welcome to Scalable.Recently one client asked about what are the different meetings that we have as a team each and every week and month. And then one of my other friends, Dylan asked about, um, really how we run our meeting and the agenda of our meetings. And he I know has recently adopted that meeting cadence and specifically the weekly team meeting. Then I’m going to be sharing with you today and just the other day he was sharing how much more clarity he has and what’s going on in his business and how much more his team feels aligned with kind of moving towards their goals because of this meeting. So in this, in this episode, I want to talk about kind of how we run our weekly team meetings. Um, I’m not going to cover all of the different types of meetings we have. I’ll do that in another episode. Um, but I really want to cover just what we talk about every single week on our weekly team meeting.Now we meet on Mondays and our meeting is about 30 minutes long. I will tell you this when I first started my business and I only had one other team member, it felt really awkward to have a weekly team meeting and really not useful. And we would do it anyways and it would start as an hour. And we felt like, all right, well like this isn’t going anywhere. This isn’t really helpful. And it’s really because we didn’t have a specific agenda guiding us. And what’s funny is when we were, uh, kind of more of a full-service agency working with our clients, they asked us to be in a lot of their team meetings. So the agenda that we now use is sort of a kind of like the result of the things that we liked and found useful from all of the different meetings that we had been on from our clients who have really successful businesses as well as uh, things that we’ve learned in books like, uh, scaling up, which is on one of these shelves.So if you have only one, one other person on your team or if you have contractors, I would invite you to still have these people come to this call. When we were working with our clients, I mean we were a hired agency and we hopped on their team meeting to be in the know because we felt that we were a part of certain things that we needed feedback from other members of the team. And the bit our clients also found value in us being there as well. Now I’m not going to go how useful or not useful that was. That could be a whole nother episode in and of itself, but the reality is many of you might have tried this like we did and felt like it wasn’t useful and then stopped. Uh, many of you might feel like you have a small team, thus again, it not being useful or worth your time.I will tell you if you have an agenda and you use this meeting wisely and there is a specific outcome and the purpose of this meeting, it will be very useful to you. No matter if your team is fully remote like our team is right now. Um, or if you meet in an office once a week, right? Or every single day and you have this meeting in your office once a week, you will find value in this once you go through the repetitions and motions of customizing this to you and your business. Right? So if you’re looking for that agenda or how to conduct this meeting and you’ve been unsure, I would say the first step is to listen to how we do it. Possibly give our agenda a try and then model it based on how that goes for you. Once you’ve applied it to your business, get feedback from the people coming to that meeting and then evolve it and make it your own.All right, so let’s jump into what we cover in this meeting. Again, our meeting is 30 minutes. It originally started as 60, and we felt like that was way too much time and in some cases, we actually finished this meeting in 15 minutes depending upon the number of items that need to be covered, which you’ll understand in a second. So, um, the agenda, the meeting always starts off with kind of sharing the purpose of our business. Like why are we here, right? This kind of client-centric mission, right? Who are we serving? Why are we here to serve them? You know, what is the reason for being so to speak? It’s one sentence. Your sentence will be different from anybody else that lives in this episode, but this is for you. This is to just realign you and your team about why you’re here each and every week.All right, so just, hey, remember here’s what System.ly is about. Here’s what insert your company name is about. Share what your company’s about. Then we jumped into good news and wins. So round Robin really quickly. Each member of the team shares the good news in their at-home life, personal life or something that is non-business-related and then a win from the previous week in business, right? So again, we are fully remote. So hearing about wins personally or something that happened maybe in their family life or with one of their children. Like it’s nice to hear about how you know, what people are doing with their time outside of work and that they’re obviously living life to the fullest and enjoying themselves and having a good time, right? Like that’s why we’re in business. We want to make sure our team and our clients have more time to work on the things that they love.That’s why we love systems, right? Structure and process and automation. So to hear what they’re doing with that time is is really insightful and valuable. And it also helps build better kind of connection and community bond with, you know, the rest of the team. So very quickly, here’s something that happened personally. You know, for example, when I was training for my half marathon, um, I and after I completed it, you know, that next team meeting I shared my results. I’m like, Hey, this is a big win for me. Like I’ve been training for 12 weeks and I hit my target time. Right? So like that would be a personal win. Then each of us shares a business win. So, hey, based on the last, since the last meeting, what’s one thing that is a win in your eyes from the business? And this is great because each and every person has different roles and responsibilities within the business.So I get to here as the owner kind of how they’re seeing us winning across the different functions of our business. So really insightful for me. And then everybody else gets to hear the winds that are happening. So again, that section is usually about five minutes. We have, uh, four people that are on this meeting at the moment. Um, we’ve been anywhere up to seven or eight and we’ve as I said, we started with one other person, so this section could be a little bit longer. You know, if you have 40 people and I would gather and we haven’t had 40 people, so I’m just making an assumption here that this type of share would have to be really rapid-fire to keep the meeting to a certain time length, right? If you have 50 employees and everyone takes a minute a minute, that whole thing is just going to be about an hour, right?So, um, as you start breaking off in department meetings, some of that information might be shared there as well. So we do the good news and the wins next. We jump into kind of a quick, less than five minutes, let’s review the sales data. We look at the pipeline, we look at, um, new clients that we’ve enrolled in the last seven days. New deposits and expected start dates for some of our clients that are coming in. Um, what does the pipeline look like for this week and the next really, the next 14 days we look at. Um, and that’s really what we’re, we’re looking at from a, from a sales metric perspective, we’ll look at no new leads in qualified applications, um, you know, strategy sessions on the calendar, how many of those are qualified and then revenue, right? So that’s very quick, kind of high level of what’s happening in the business.Moneywise then we jump into our kind of company metrics and projects. So in another episode, I talked about, um, how we operate on 90-day sprints. And so each 90-day sprint we have three to five projects that we’re typically working on that have three to five very specific outcomes. So each project has a very specific outcome that we’re working towards. So when we jump into the company metrics and projects section, we do look at um, kind of our progress towards the overarching goal of that 90-day sprint kind of percent completion, what things have gotten done, what’s, what’s coming up, et cetera. Um, and we kind of judge on like, are we on track, are we off track? Those sorts of things. We also look at some higher-level numbers that aren’t necessarily sales like sales data, but just overall cash collected expenses, some high level, high-level numbers so that the whole com, the whole company is in the know of like where things are at moving towards these goals that we have.Um, that section is usually about, uh, that portion of the meeting is usually about like 10 or 15 minutes. Within the projects, portion is when we kind of determine what are each of each members weekly commitments are. So we have 90-day targets, 30-day outcomes, and weekly commitments. So each and every week I, I show up and I’m going to say, hey, hey teen. Like, these are the three to five things that I’m working on this week that are going to help us hit our 30-day outcome, which should help us hit our 90-day target. And each of the team members goes around and we share the three to five things that we’re committing to get done between this team meeting and the next team meeting. And this is kind of the quick opportunity for the team to say like, Hey, is that really important this week or is, you know, can you bump something next week and or hey I didn’t hear you mention x, y, Z. I think we should bump, make sure that’s in there and we should move this to the next week because it’s not as important.So it’s really helpful to kind of quickly see are the activities and the things that each of us are doing on the team each and every week. Actually moving us towards the 30-day outcome and the 90-day targets that we’ve set. So it’s again, it’s a quick round-robin, usually about 10 or 15 minutes. Every once in awhile there might be a clarifying question on one of the commitments that someone’s making, which will usually be tackled offline. Um, if it requires more than like a one or two words, you know, clarification. So from there, um, we jump into client wins. So, uh, each and every week where, you know, again, each of us, each team member kind of has a different view and role and responsibility within the business. And many of us hear about client success and client wins in different capacities. So sometimes I have clients reaching out to me that just shared a win that I will then want to share with the team.Sometimes one of our, you know, one of our other coaches or our community manager sees something in the community and wants to make sure that everyone saw it. So we quickly talk about, hey, like, you know, Mike got it. X New dollars in clients and you know, um, you know, Holly just built her funnel. Her funnel is finally live. I know she’s been working on getting that, you know, getting that built. Um, you know, Chris just sold his first five clients into his new hybrid offer, right? All of these sorts of things like the team goes around a circle and quickly shares any sort of client wins that they’ve seen or heard of just so that the team is on point with what’s happening from a client perspective. Now, the last session or last part of the meeting, um, is called ids and it stands for identifying, discuss, solve.I will say that sometimes this comes right before we talk about what our weekly commitments are. Um, it kinda depends on how many items are on this list. Um, but basically as the week goes on, there might be something that happens that I want to make sure that we talk about as a team and it doesn’t make sense for me to bring it up in that moment. So say it’s Wednesday and I, something happened. I’m like, I need to be sure that I talked to the team about this thing that happened, but I know if I bring it up or I put it in slack that they’re going to be derailed. So I go into the Google document, we share a document that has this agenda on it that we all look at. And so I’ll add a bullet point in the ids section, identify, discuss, solve with my initial.So I’ll put g h and then the topic that I would like to discuss. And so when it comes to this portion of the meeting, this is usually the portion of the meeting that can take a lot of time, that kind of flexible piece of the meeting as well, where it’s like, hey look, we have five items to discuss. Like we got, you know, 20 minutes left or eight minutes left. Like, let’s see how many of these we can knock off. And are any of, if you submitted one, is it important that this gets answered today or is this like, can this wait until next week? So we quickly prioritize which of the bullet points we need to discuss. Honestly, sometimes there aren’t really any. Um, we have had that usually there was like one or two. And so we’ll quickly mention something that we want to talk about.We have clients coming into town. Um, as I, as of the recording of this video, the clients will have come by the time you guys are watching this, but we have our clients come into town for one of our quarterly intensives. And so I had a question about something that was going to happen from the audiovisual perspective of the meeting. Hey, how are we recording this? You know, have you talked to Chris, our video guy about this thing? Like where is that all that? I just want to make sure that that’s dialed in. So like that was a bullet point in the ids section and we identified, Hey, this is what we’re wondering about, let’s discuss it and then, hey, what’s the solve? Sometimes you can solve the things on that meeting. Sometimes the solve is, hey, now you have a task that you need to add to your list for this week and report back next week.Um, with the resolution, right? So Ids, identify, discuss, solve. And that’s pretty much how we end the meeting, right? So, like I said, we kind of move ids and our weekly commitments around, depending upon how many bullet points are in the ids section, if there’s like one or two, we usually address that and we usually end the meeting with our weekly commitments because again, for me as the owner, it’s really important that I know what everybody’s working on. And again, we have this Google doc so I can kind of quickly look at the Google doc and see if something is super important that we want to raise. So we always seem to get through the important items within the ids section, but depending upon how you operate, those two sections can be interchangeable for you. So that’s how we run our weekly team meeting. Like I said, it started off as an hour, we reduced, reduced it to 45 minutes and now it’s down to 30 minutes.And for me as the owner, it’s really helpful to get everybody aligned to make sure that what everyone’s working on and committed to that week is moving us towards our goals and our outcomes and that I’m able to answer any questions. In a way where I’m not interrupting someone because it’s uh, a non-urgent task that I just drop in slack and it derails everybody. So it’s kind of a, a storage place for topics that are not urgent, that just need to be discussed and or questions that need to be answered. That can be answered very quickly in this call. That’s how we run our meeting. I’d love to hear how you run your meetings. Um, if you’re watching on youtube, be sure to leave a comment below. I’d love to hear how you operate cause hey, maybe there’s something we can add. Um, but if you don’t currently run a weekly team meeting, let me know why not. And if this is an agenda that you will start to add and uh, hope you guys enjoy the rest of your day.If I gave you five to 10 new clients, would you or your agency break? If so, your current agency model is broken? I struggle with this too, until I found a better way by adding online programs, training, and coaching to our agency, we’ve doubled profits without adding more hours. If you want to work directly with me and my team to transform your agency, visit myscalablebusiness.com to learn more.
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