how a 15-minute meeting 10x's growth across 5 companies

Summary

one 15-minute weekly meeting per company, run the same way every time. across five businesses doing eight figures a year, this is the operating cadence that holds it together.

structure:

1. start on time. always. lateness sets the culture. starting at 9:02 every week becomes 9:08 within a month.

2. minute one: brief small talk. people are humans. one minute of “how was your weekend” matters. then move on.

3. minutes two and three: the three Cs. company calendar (what’s coming this week), conflicts (anything blocking us), constraints (anything we’re short on).

4. KPI report-out. each KPI gets one of four statuses: excellent, good, needs work, try harder. “try harder” triggers a follow-up. no debate in the room.

5. better humanness reporting. what are you reading? how many workouts did you get? one win in your personal life this week. this isn’t fluff. it’s how you build a team of better humans.

6. end on time. always. ending late punishes the people who showed up on time. don’t punish the disciplined ones.

run that meeting weekly for 12 months and the business will look different. that’s the whole thing.

Transcript

introduction and the importance of efficient meetings

If you’re anything like me, you hate meetings, but you know they are necessary. That’s why I’ve spent years refining the perfect 15 minute meeting. If you implement the structure I’m gonna show you, you will have meetings that suck less and your business will grow faster. I own five different businesses.

detailed breakdown of the 15-minute meeting structure

We’ll do over eight figures this year and one of my businesses has hit the Inc. 500 two different times. None of this was on accident. It’s all very intentional about how we have scaled over the years and a lot of that has to do with operations and being very intentional about how our processes work.

So today I’m gonna go over our 15 minute process. I’m gonna jump straight into it. So meetings start on time. That is paramount that you set that culture. People are not late to meetings. So let’s go over the perfect 15 minute meeting structure so your meetings will suck less. We’ll start with minute one.

So in the first minute, you’re really just doing two things. People are showing up to your meeting and then you are also doing small talk. Look, you have to give people a little bit of opportunity to talk about sports, weather, whatever the case is. In the first minute, show up, small talk, but don’t let it go on too far.

discussion on the significance of each section of the meeting

I know some people let this go on five, six minutes at a time. You can’t let that happen. You have to be very intentional if you wanna keep this meeting short and effective. So moving to minute two and three of your meeting, you have the three Cs. You’re gonna go over the company calendar where you’re gonna go over any events that you have going on so everybody is aware of what’s happening.

You’re gonna go over any conflicts there may be. Maybe someone’s out of town, maybe someone’s off work. You weren’t aware of it so you make sure that all conflicts are deconflicted. And then the last thing, are there any constraints? Are there any time constraints, resource constraints? You’re gonna go over these quickly and have each person look at the calendar briefly.

Not everyone needs to sit there and report and give their full detailed approach of what they’re doing that week. You just go over the calendar at a glance, pull it up on your screen. What conflicts do we have? Are there any constraints? Then you’re moving on. Next, we have minute three through six.

So this is where we jump into KPIs. KPIs can sometimes be a long drawn out process. That’s not how we do it. So here’s exactly how we report our KPIs. Every team member is responsible for reporting one to three KPIs. And not having to sit there and give a detailed explanation of the KPI, they’re just responsible for pulling the numbers.

So when we pull them up in the meeting, the numbers are there, they’re ready, they’ve been checked, they’ve been reviewed. So we don’t have this long conversation about each KPI. We can hit on each KPI and move down the line. Now, something that’s really important with KPIs is how we report them. So they’ll report the number, the key performance indicator, and then they will also have attached to it a different status for each one.

And the statuses are very, very important. So the first status is excellent. That means we are currently exceeding our growth goal. So every KPI is gonna have its benchmark, right? Like where it should be. And excellent would be not only are we hitting our growth goal, we are exceeding our current growth goal for the year, the quarter, the month, whatever the case is.

The second status could be good. Good means we are on track. That means we are hitting our growth goal, but it’s not phenomenal, right? It’s just we’re on the right track, this is good. No alarms, no real issues. Ultimately, this KPI is good. Not a huge conversation needed for this KPI. The third status is average.

That means the KPI is okay. Still not to the alarm state, but it’s just kind of on par with keeping the company’s status quo. Maybe we are doing okay. If we were to maintain this pace, it would keep us at a very low to no growth strategy, but we’re not moving backwards. There are no gaping holes. No need for alarm, but ultimately this is average.

We don’t love to see this one. Now we start to get into the more negative side of things. The next status is bad. So what does bad mean? Well, it means bad. It means we are below our growth goal targets, and we’re below our status quo targets. And what this means for us is if something is bad, that means a meeting is required.

It doesn’t mean that we’re gonna meet right now about it, but if we have a team member report something bad, a very bad metric that needs to be fixed, then we are going to set up a separate meeting. This next meeting could be an hour, could be two hours. It all depends. This could be between the business partners.

insights into how this structure supports business growth

This could be with department heads. This could be with key employees, but ultimately if we have a bad KPI, we are going to set a meeting for that KPI. That way we can brainstorm how do we fix it? How do we get back on track as fast as possible? One of the biggest problems I see with people in meetings reporting KPIs, even if they are reporting KPIs, is there is no if this, then that.

If you have a bad KPI, what do you do? You shouldn’t sit there and be like, oh, well, that sucks, that’s a bad KPI. You need to start putting a plan in place to reverse that course. And then the last status we have is try harder. Ultimately, this is full stop. We need to try harder. Everybody in the company is getting involved.

We need to find out why this KPI is doing what it’s doing, and we all need to put in more effort. So we might even pull people from departments whose job is not this KPI to help with this KPI till we can at least get it moved back up to bad, average, good, and excellent. All right, minutes six through eight is pretty simple.

Quick check-in with the team. Who needs what? So right now in the meeting, we have the entire team together, even though it’s for a brief time period. Does a sales rep need to talk to someone in marketing? Does a customer success need to talk to leadership? Something like that. Who needs what? You can set up additional meetings if required, or you can just quickly get the information you need, which is our preference.

Hey, I have a question about this. Can you approve this? So on and so forth. And these things are quick, they’re bulleted, and they just go really fast. So who needs what? We have everyone together. We don’t need a bunch of huddles. We don’t need a bunch of people getting together in additional meetings unless it’s absolutely necessary.

So if you need something, now is the time. We don’t need a Slack message later. Who needs what? Get it out there right now. Now, minutes eight through 15, very specific to the companies that I run, is our better humanness reporting. So we run better human businesses. That means these are businesses that improve the health and well-being of other humans.

And being as such, we put a huge emphasis in our company and our culture on working out, bettering yourself, reading, listening to books, reading books, listening to podcasts, those kind of things, and then also keeping a positive mindset because sometimes business can just be tough. So how do we do this?

This is where we actually go team member by team member, and they report on three different things. First thing is, what book are you currently reading? It could be any book. It could be fiction, nonfiction. We’ll typically challenge employees to read a certain book, or maybe they’ll pick up a book based off of some of our recommendations.

But everyone in the company is going to be expected to answer, what are you reading right now? And the answer should not be, I’m not reading right now. After that, we dive into workouts. How many times did you work out over the past week? Obviously, we don’t have any kind of standard. We don’t say you have to work out five times.

You have to work out three times. But we want to report on this within the company to make sure everybody is holding everyone else accountable. Did you get three workouts in, two workouts in? If you keep saying you get zero workouts in, I might want to check in and say, hey, is the workload too much?

closing thoughts and how to implement these strategies in your own business

Is there a bandwidth issue? What’s going on here? So ultimately, how many workouts did you do this week is something that we report on. And last thing is a positive focus. We have one both personally and professionally. So over the past week, what is something positive that happened in your personal life that you’re comfortable sharing with the team?

And then also, positive focus, either looking back from the previous week or looking forward professionally. What’s going on in work right now that has you excited that you are really jazzed up about? And this is our Better Humanness reporting, something very unique to us and really has helped build our company culture.

Now, that’s everything you need to run the perfect 15-minute meeting. But I know this won’t be easy. The first time you do it, it’s gonna be a 30, 40-minute meeting. It took us years of refining this process. But ultimately, once we had this structure implemented, we were able to get it faster and faster and faster.

Once you set the standards with your team, they know what you’re gonna be reporting, they know what they need to be prepared for, you can actually go through all of this very fast. We typically can do this in 15 minutes. Sometimes if there’s a who needs what is a little bit longer, maybe it stretches to 20 minutes.

We typically never spend 30 minutes in a meeting and we have a fairly large team. So I know that you can implement this and see a lot of progress in your business. This will get you focused on turning KPIs around, building a company culture that’s worth being a part of, and ultimately, you as a business owner keeping you focused on what matters most.

So if you want your meetings to suck less and you wanna grow your business, implement this 15-minute meeting structure and get it done. Try harder.