092: Rob Simons - Have You Ever Had a ‘Good’ Meeting?

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Ugh. Meetings. I think most of us think like that, taking the time to do. We don't need more meetings, right? And yet well run good meetings, a system, a cadence of good meetings can make all the difference, can actually give you back time. Today's the show is all about well run meetings and what it takes to make them so. I have on a special guest today an experienced senior coach and he and I will share back both our own experience and experience with clients on what it takes to have the right sequence of well run meetings that can make all the difference, give you and your team time back. So if you are engaged in engineering your team's meetings now or if you avoid the subject, this show is great for you. It'll really free you up, give you some ideas to tweak your business, make your life easier. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host and Gazelle's business growth coach Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today on a really great topic is Rob Simons. We're going to talk all about meeting rhythms, meeting communication rhythms and the do's and don'ts and all that. So Rob's longtime EO Y E O guy, which is how we first met and connected and he he'll tell his story but he came to learn and apply the rock habits. He's a coach in the Central Texas area primarily with Petra Coach organization. We'll tell you more about them later and there but they're also in our world of Gazelle's coaches and really an outstanding leading organization. I love working with them. Rob and I also in addition to bumping each other at EO functions and things around the world have both been involved in training this work with the accelerator training program. So I don't know there's more I Could say I'm going to let Rob tell his story. Welcome to the show, Rob.

Hey, Bill. It's really good to be here. I'm excited about this. Like you said, you and I seem to have been running into each other for years now, and you're doing a lot of great things with this podcast, so I'm glad I can contribute.

Awesome. And you're in Vegas today working, right?

I'm in Vegas. There's a conference going on. One of my clients puts on an annual conference, and I've got three or four clients here. And so I know when you say you're in Vegas, I promise it's work. I'm not hanging out at the slot machines or anything like that.

Today we get some if you want. You know, people are. When I post photos from places like Vegas or Tahoe or retreat things that I'm working, people are just like, oh, dude, you, you. You're not working, or you shouldn't be working. But it is where, like, we try to get all. I think all of us pretty much try to get our clients to step off site. It doesn't have to be for a gambling location, but to get out of the office, get out of the mainstream and get away to. For somewhere to do their meetings. Right? To get out of the. Don't just do it in the conference room, even if you have a groovy conference room.

Yeah, no, we're big believers. That, and this is a good segue into meetings is that meetings can be very. Especially if you're doing strategic thinking for the annual planning or the quarter planning. It's so easy to get distracted when you're in your office, right? You take a break and everybody gets up and they head to their office and they start checking emails and voice messages and Facebook and Twitter and who knows what else. And next thing you know, you can't get them back and focused on the important subject of the day. So we recommend all our clients to do their quarterly plannings and annual planning somewhere off site. It really makes a difference.

Some people are surprised that I were, like, right into it. We're going to step back in a second and give people a little background on you. But that I often say we should even consider, like an Airbnb get a big living room, and we can use a house where it doesn't have to be a meeting facility. I've also done them in a favorite new thing, our museum meeting rooms. Most museums have some kind of a boardroom meeting room that they use for private functions and for board meetings. And they're often kind of cool spaces and they're way less expensive than a hotel. Actually, my worst thing is like an interior meeting room in a Marriott, right?

That's like, absolutely. My. If I don't see daylight for eight hours, it's really tough. And it's the same thing for everyone else. You know, it's interesting, the Airbnb, we've done a lot of that as well. In fact, we find that if you can kind of spread out in a living room kind of environment, everybody's kind of in couches and lazy boys and chairs, it can actually really encourage a great meeting and everybody just feels more comfortable and they get relaxed. And we just did that for what we call Petra University. We get together once a year and we rented like a. It was a. A big Airbnb had two sides to it, six bedrooms, and it was perfect. It was awesome.

That's fantastic. All right, so before we get too much further, we're going to talk all about good meetings and bad meetings, how great meetings really help everything and don't take away time, but actually free up time because of what they provide. But so we're going to go into a lot of things here, but before we do that, tell us a little bit of your story. Share with us your kind of entrepreneurial journey, how you applied it, your past businesses, and what leads you to coaching.

Yeah, you know, for me, probably one of the most important milestones for me or important things that happened to me is I grew up at the beginning of the personal computer revolution. You know, I had a Vic 20 when I was very young. I had a Commodore 64, I had Apple II. I remember going to an Apple II Plus. And so I was very much one of the very early computer guys. And of course now we think it's kind of silly, but my middle school had one computer for the entire school and you had to be in the gifted program, even have access to it. And of course, nowadays we just think that's crazy, especially with the iPhones that we carry around. But the long story short, my first part time job, my first substantial part time job was working for a print shop. And it was a little mom and pop print shop. And the guy who owned it was really my first mentor and he was just a classic entrepreneur. Started with a franchise, realized the franchise model didn't make sense, started another print shop and I started just doing deliveries and bindery work and eventually was able to do some work in the press room. But my knowledge of the Apple computer just happened to be Perfectly timed with the desktop publishing revolution. And so that's about the time that I was working for him. And really even before I got to college, I started kind of making a name for myself as the kid who knew computers and knew printing. And so that really kind of pushed me into this fast path. Went to college at Auburn University, spent most of my time at Auburn actually doing consulting jobs while I was going through school and came right out of college. And I was immediately working for publishers and printers, showing them how to use a computer and how to integrate that into their publishing world. And so that was really my start.

We could probably geek out and do a whole show. We'd lose a lot, 3/4 of our audience. But talking about 300 baud modems and old CPM systems and early Apple and early IPM and Macintosh, arrival at all of those things.

But that's what got me into it. And that's how I started my first publishing firm. I was 23 and just started my first publishing firm, sold that, started my first branding firm at 25, had that for 19 years, sold that a couple of years ago. But that's really what got me into this. And I know you're going to ask this, but a defining moment in my life was in 2003 I had somebody invite me. They said, hey, you ought to check out this entrepreneurs organization. And I had gotten the invite in 1999 when they started the San Antonio chapter. And I noticed that one of my competitors was also one of the founding. They were invited to go to the initial kickoff meeting. And I had an ego, to be honest. And I just why would I want to go to a meeting with my competitor? And four years later, my competitor was probably twice my size. And I said, what the heck did they do that I didn't do? And so in 2003 somebody invited me to go hear this guy named Vern Hardish. And that was kind of the beginning of me realizing how much I didn't know about running a business. And Vern Harnish spoke for it was in an all day workshop. And at the end of the day I was just like, I've got to make some changes. Because at the time I was working 60, 70 hours a week and it just didn't make sense. So that's how I got into Rockefeller habits and scaling up. And around 2008, 2009, got really involved with strategy summits at EO and the accelerator program that you mentioned. And in 2011 started coaching clients on a more full time basis.

You know, I was Asking a business partner and one of my clients actually, over lunch yesterday. So if we're successful in selling this business, what will you do next? If money, if your primary security and your time is not automatically filled, what actually matters to you? What do you want to do? And he didn't have a ready answer for it in the moment, but, you know, at first he thought of some leisure things, and that usually lasts for a little while. People pick up their golf game and they do things like that. But then after a while they're like, okay, I'm not done yet. I've got more to give. Well, and I think something like that is what leads us right, to a life of coaching.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

So you started to coach even before you'd left, before you exited your last business. Yeah.

So in 2003, Vernon really just kind of woke me up to this idea that I have to work on my business. By 2011, 2010, I was spending 150 days a year for EO and for other organizations other than my business. My business was pretty much running itself. I mean, we had some regular rhythms and I had some roles and responsibilities, but that to me was a big success factor, is getting out of my business and being able to do other things. And then when I met andy Bailey in 2013, he was the one, the founder of Petra Coach. He was the one that was like, well, why don't you just redirect that energy that you're using for nonprofits and let's start throwing some paid clients in there. And that was a big change for me.

That's awesome. So just to bring our folks to newer listeners in, Vern Harnish, of course, is our sort of thought leader, our originator of the Rockefeller Habits and Scaling up and. And a co founder of the Young entrepreneurs organization, then Yeo back in 87 and. And he launched a program at MIT called the birthing of Giants, which was a program that led to. And where the Rockefeller habits got really honed and developed and then got published in the book. And then the latest book is the Scaling Up Framework, which has expanded and evolved from the original Rockefeller Habits. And that's the work that we do. And of course, we all learn along the way, right. To work on our business, not just in the business. And we. My business partner went through that Birthing a Giants program and brought back the binder of things to me, some of which I applied and many of which I did not and resisted and pooh, poohed in a variety of ways, as some of my clients do. Today. And I learned many expensive lessons along the way from the things that I didn't do and didn't apply, some of which we're going to talk about today and both of absolutely our things. But I, you know, I am not a coach on the basis of having gotten it all perfect, and I get better and better with each client in each thing that we, that we do. But it's. It's as much the things that I did poorly that I share and contribute so that others don't need to make the same mistakes that I made, right?

Absolutely. Absolutely.

And the things that we did do obviously had some effect because they got us to this place, right?

Yeah. And it's. Certainly you and I are biased now, but, you know, one of the biggest mistakes I made is I didn't get an outside coach. You know, I had that classic entrepreneur attitude that I can do it myself. I can figure this out. I'm a smart guy. And, and, you know, it's just I tell people all the time I'm a big golfer. And Jordan Spieth, maybe one of the best golfers in the world, still has a coach. Right. He still has somebody who has experience with making swing changes, can see things that Jordan can't see, and just has a way of being able to speed up the implementation of the whole process. So I share your pain. I did the same thing.

Let me say a little something about the coach selection while we're on it, and you can feel free to chime in, but I heard another coach call me once out of the blue, and he saw some online posting or whatever, and he sort of chastised me for reaching as a coach. He's like, you can't coach that. You didn't do a business like that at that size and that stage. I'm like, my coaching capacity, ability and skills have not a lot to do with my actual business background. It certainly informs, it contributes to it, but it's in no way limited by it. And when you think about who coaches Michael Jordan, who coaches pick any coach, right? Who. Who coaches the top performer in any field, they're not necessarily somebody who did more better in that arena than the other person. They're expert at coaching and a particular set of skills and drills and disciplines that are necessary to be applied. Applied. But I coach people all the time in industries that I have no background in, and I'm effective with them. It's got nothing to do with it. I'm. I'm bringing the rock habits, both the, the wins and the. And the mistakes in that arena to a client and a breadth of experience in that. And, and I, when I tell people how to pick the coach, I'm like, I don't know if I'm the coach for you or not and I can help you find if not. But as somebody else. But I'm interested. One is are you coachable and do you have any growth goals? If you're just like, I just, you know, I kind of want to keep getting better. That's insufficient for a coaching relationship. So do you have some real growth goals and are you actually coachable? Will you make any changes to yourself and to your business? And then finally, do we have a personality fit? There's all different style coaches. There are coaches who are very drill sergeant. There are coaches who are very number driven. There are coaches who are accountability oriented. There are coaches who are sort of deep counselor thinkers who focus on the motivation and the, the why of the that's me more than, than anything else. So there's all sorts of different styles and you want to find somebody who's whose voice, who's, who's coaching you're willing to embrace. And so a huge amount of is that, is that fit to the personality type, right?

Absolutely. I, you know, I say the same thing. I mean Jordan Spieth's coach is not a better golfer than Jordan. Absolutely true. You know me personally, I came up, I came from a background. My grandfather and my father were both ministers. My dad's still a minister and so I came from this long line of ministers and I obviously chose not to go down that path. But I realized a couple years ago that what I do today is actually very similar. I'm a storyteller. I come up with ways of being able to convince people to make changes based on using stories. And that's just me personally. I like to come up with unique ways to be able to teach concepts in ways that people can adopt it pretty quickly. And you're right, I'm not a drill sergeant type. I'm not that heavy handed in your face. You got to get this done. I'm not a big rah rah sales guy. I'm a guy that likes to come in and connect with people and be able to build that relationship and figure out what motivates them and how can I set them up for success, usually through telling a story.

I, on the other hand, I'm a lot more of that sort of passionate persuader. Right. I'm a salesy kind of a guy. And, and it just is natural. And how I am. And we know coaches who are numbers driven or who are hold your feet to the fire, all of that kind of thing. When you find somebody who needs that, then we can point you to somebody like that. Let's talk about segue a little bit into our topic for the day. The meeting habits, the meeting rhythms. I know I've done some things well in that in my business past and today and with clients, and I've also struggled with some aspects. Why don't you tell us about your thoughts and background in that, how that's evolved for you and take us into that.

So I think I had the same. My initial attitude towards meetings when I owned my businesses was I hated them. Right. I think most classic entrepreneurs, they're so add. They've got so many things going on, their attention span is short. The last thing they want to be is sitting in a room for an hour. And makes it even worse if they've got to have 10 meetings a week. And that attitude was actually completely opposite of what meetings are really for. Right? Meetings. Good, effective, and that's the key word here. Effective meetings on a regular basis set you free by knowing the rhythms that you have to have in your organization, allows you to have the freedom to be able to go do the entrepreneurial things that you want to do as long as you go to the meetings and have effective meetings that you need to have. And so part of this, you know, as I continue to build my coaching skills like you, I read everything Burn Put out, and I went through the. When I got the latest version of scaling up, the first version of scaling up, I went through it. And one thing I noticed that was lacking is there's not just like one section and scaling up that says, here's all your meeting rhythms. It's kind of dispersed throughout the book. He talks about it in different areas. And so one of the things I did is I went back and I actually went through the book again, just pulled out what are the meeting rhythms that we should be doing as an organization? And I just kind of put it into a single document. So it made it easier for me to sit down with my clients and say, okay, let's talk about what is the right level of meetings for your organization? And then we tailor it a little bit for every company. But that to me was like a big step in the coaching process, was being able to sit down and say, okay, let's build out your matrix of meetings and let's make sure that they're all really effective so you're not wasting Your time in bad meetings.

Yeah, I think that's a key that gets in the way for a lot of folks is they're like people's meetings are so mediocre on the whole and they're just, you know, the idea of doing more of that seems pretty horrible. But if you actually had effective meetings, useful, helpful meetings, you can see, save a lot of time, not add time. Right?

Yeah. And I'm curious, Bill, if you've seen this with your clients, but you know, the, the communication mediums that we have today, especially email, make it easy for people to take subjects, take topics and just throw them out into the world via email. Right. We've all seen this. There'll be this long three page email that's sent to 15 people.

I'm rolling my eyes right now. Yeah.

And everybody interprets it differently because it's a terrible channel. And then one person will hit reply all and they'll put in their two cents and then somebody else hits reply all and the next thing you know, you've got this long trail of emails about one subject that are just very disjointed and it's not effective.

By the time I've read it, I'm like, what the hell is this all about?

And so, you know, I tell people everybody complains about email. They're like, oh, we got too much email. I got so much stuff in my inbox I can't get to and what we find. And I've actually, I had one client tell me that they thought they reduced their email by 60% inside the organization just by having good meetings, good effective meetings on a regular basis. Because if I know that if, Bill, if you and I work together and I know that we've got our daily huddle tomorrow, instead of just sending you a quick email, I'll probably just hold it, I'll put it in my daily huddle update tomorrow. There's no reason for us to have to send an email if we know we're going to meet tomorrow if it's not urgent. And by the way, a lot of people say, well, what if it's something urgent? And I'm like, well then do what we used to do old style, like get up, pick up the phone and call them. If it's really urgent, call them or go see them in person. Because so much gets lost in translation and email and text these days. I mean, I'm assuming you see the same thing with your clients.

Both text and email are so. And it was a great illustration. You can do this yourself. If you're listening. Go write on the wall, the whiteboard or flip chart in your meeting room. I didn't say you were smart. And then have your whole group read it out loud, emphasizing each word in turn. So I didn't say you were smart, and then I didn't say you were smart, and then I didn't say and so emphasize these words, read them all aloud together, and notice the different meaning of each of them. And then consider how easy it is for our email and our text exchanges to be miscommunicated. Now, I think they're really powerful. I use email and text all day long for things, hey, I'm running 10 minutes late. Please, you know, be advised, then that person isn't irritated or whatever. But what do you think about X, Y and Z? And, you know, dealing with things that, where I need to hear how your reaction and how things are landing makes a real difference. And we're not really going to make hard decisions about things. I can't see the face my wife makes if I suggest a restaurant by text that she doesn't like or a movie, but if I tell it to her face, I can see in a second what she thinks about it. Right?

Yeah. And we, we strongly recommend. I mean, we do a lot of video conferencing with our clients and we recommend video conferencing. This is a world where there's a lot of remote workers and there's a big difference when you can actually see someone. I mean, the phone's good, don't get me wrong, phone's good, but the video is better. And you can, what is it, 60, 70% of language is non verbal. And so you've got to be able to see that.

So I. So the meeting I did really well was the Daily Huddle. That transformed my business. A lot of clients struggle with this one, but the Daily Huddle got us on the same page. It was also a key place where we built our culture rooted in purpose and values and bhag. So we had a manifesto, which I often work with clients, which is a few key elements of the, of the strategy pulled out. So things like purpose, values, brand promises, and BHAG rolled into one. And we read that every day. We just read it. It takes like 30 seconds. And then we thought about it and how it related to the matters of the day and the day before. It's common practice with many of our, not everyone, but many of our clients in our collective world that had a huge difference. I was pretty weak with the weekly and the quarterlies. I would do annual mid year kinds of planning sessions. But I, but I was weak on the others. And if I'm honest, there are two aspects. One is I wasn't proactive. Right. I didn't schedule it on a regular, consistent basis. I looked to put it in where we could do it rather than saying it's going to be every Monday at 9am or whatever. The right cadence for it would be the rhythm. And so I was always reactive and there was insufficient preparation. So I didn't, and I didn't make my people prepare thoroughly before walking into a meeting. Yeah, that's too much winging it, right?

Yeah, you got some, you have some really good points in there. You know that daily meeting, if it's prepared properly and done properly, is the most impactful thing that we do at Petra Coach. We go back every year and do an impact survey and we talk to our clients on a regular basis about what has really made a big difference in your organization. And the Daily Huddle comes back consistently, is probably the top rated item. It gives you that daily rhythm. And like you said, it becomes the basis of your culture. And I talk a lot with clients as well about the millennial generation. We all know this. I mean, they're a huge, just the numbers, the demographic numbers of the millennials is huge. And they're a generation that likes feedback and reinforcement. They like purpose. I love that idea of reading the manifesto every day. And so that gives them the reinforcement. And the analogy I use with a lot of my clients is most people have some sort of daily news source, right? They're driving to work, they listen to NPR or they're driving, they're getting ready for work in the morning and they're listening to ESPN or maybe they're listening to CNN or Fox or whatever.

Your news choice is a fantastic business podcast, right?

Or a fantastic business podcast. But they also, they might go to a website every day, New York Times, the ap, whatever. But the point is, every day they're looking for, they want just the headlines, what's going on in the world today so I can be connected. So when I see you at the water cooler, I can say, hey, man, can you believe what's going on over there in Syria? Yeah, that's horrible, isn't it?

Right, right.

And you need those headlines to be able to connect is what part of what gives us society, community. And so in an organization, you have to be diligent about making that. And by forcing everyone to come to the Daily Huddle with their headlines from yesterday and their headlines for today, it just creates that community, and I find it just incredibly valuable.

So the daily Huddle is one that some of our teams really struggle with. The ones everybody who successfully implements it just raves about it and they talk about the power of overcoming the hurdle. But in the beginning, there is often a struggle. I can remember one team really distinctly $25 million business. They'd done a number of acquisitions. So we had distributed teams that had been. That have been acquired in. Right. And their number one complaint is we're siloed. Right. I don't know what the other guys are doing, and we're. We're disconnected. Right. And. And in the same breath, they were also didn't hated the daily huddles. Stupid. Why do I need to bother with that? Like, so the thing for you guys to confront is the fact that while you don't like to be solid, you want everybody else to be. You want to know what people are. You don't actually care to take the time, 20 minutes out of your day, the interruption to go learn what everybody's up to and share what you're up to.

Yeah, yeah, I, I have the same story. I had a client I worked with, and they fly fought it tooth and nail. They just constantly battled with me about doing the daily Huddle. But the same thing, they said communications was their biggest issue when I started working with them. And I remember we were doing a quarterly planning about six, nine months in, and they go, man, our communications is great. Now I feel like I know everything that's going on and we're aligned. I feel informed. But I still hate that daily huddle. And I was just like, you get the. That that doesn't work. You got to have one, you have to have both that they work together.

Well, there's something also to just embracing the practices of things. Right. You can you. Everybody. So to use a Super Bowl, I mean, football is a great analogy. And anybody who's been in and around or played football at some point in their life will. May have had a Super bowl fantasy and they could imagine or some level of championship. And, And. But if you were to talk to them, they'd want to practice the end zone dance, right? Nobody wants to go running through the tires.

That's a good analogy.

Everybody wants to practice that. Nobody wants to go do the, the. The grunt work. Nobody wants to get up early and run through the tires. And, and. But your coach is somebody who says like, okay, what you need to do now is go run through the tires over there. And we all groan about that. And they're like, no, you don't understand my path. Like, really, I'm being true to myself and I know what's right for me. No, you don't. Run through the damn tires. And this makes a difference. It's not like you and I sat around and invented huddles or anything else. This is the collective work across thousands of companies and rooted in the practice of a guy who in today's dollars would be four times richer than the richest man today. So let's take them each in turn, right? Then the next one is the weekly meeting. So what's the point of the weekly meeting?

Yeah, so this is. You were talking about the meeting that you said you excelled at. The Daily Huddle, my last organization, I excelled in the weekly. And I really got the inspiration from Greg Crabtree, of all places. Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits author. Of course, you know Greg, and it was from a financial standpoint. He said, you know, the weekly meeting, the weekly cadence in the financial world, we should really be closing our books on a weekly basis. And I said, what? I mean, the first time he told me this, I'm like, you're crazy, right? I have a hard enough time closing my books on a monthly basis. And he goes, well, the problem is, he said, the month is a terrible time frame. Sometimes you have four weeks, sometimes you have five weeks, sometimes you have 20 business days, sometimes you have 21 business days, right? You don't have the same number of weekends. It's just a terrible time increment. And people don't. It's hard for people to remember what they did three weeks ago. He said, but if we can just get in a habit where every week we're saying, okay, let's close out what happened last week? Are we done? Is it over? What did we learn? Let's move forward and now let's plan. What are we going to go do this week? It's kind of like running a race. And human beings think in a week. Like, if I was to ask you right now, Bill, what are you going to be doing this weekend? You probably know if I was going to ask you, what are you going to be doing in three weeks? It's probably a little bit fuzzier. What we always did at my company is on Monday mornings, we came in, we closed the books, we went through everything that we did the week before. It was a very specific. Let's just make sure we're closing out. We would look at the targets, we'd look at the numbers, the billings, even the credit card receipts, did we get all the credit card receipts that were outstanding from last week? That's probably a little bit detailed, but that was really important for us. And we were a time based shop. Everything was billing by the hour. And so if somebody didn't do their timesheets, you can pretty much remember what you did a week ago. But what we found is if we only close the books on the month, at the end of the month, I'd say, hey, Paul, what did you do three weeks ago on Tuesday? I don't have time sheets for it. He has no idea.

Totally.

That to me was the important thing in that weekly meeting. The Rockefeller habits. That's our chance to check in on the company priorities. What are the most important priorities that we started at the end of the, at the beginning of the quarter? Let's just double check on them, let's make sure that we're moving forward. Because the other thing, you know is if you set a quarterly priority and you go more than a week without any progress, you're probably going to be falling behind.

Yeah.

And so, you know, we always reviewed the quarterly priorities. How are we doing? We usually do some shout outs. Anything we heard from the customers. That's the other thing I see in a lot of organizations, they don't celebrate the wins from their customers. You know, the sales guy or the account manager will hear something really good from the client, but they never share it with the team. So we had an agenda item every week, let's talk about the wins from the previous week with customers. And this goes into one of my secrets for any meeting Rhythm is make sure you have an agenda and you follow it. And I know that sounds simple, but what I always do is I say if you don't have an agenda and you're just winging it, it's never going to work. You have to have a printed agenda. And here's the other thing. Somebody has to manage the agenda because you might find over time that, hey, you know what? We need to talk about our vendors as well. Let's do a quick vendor review every week. Well, if you put it on the agenda, it gets done. If you just say it, it just gets lost. And so at my company we had a rule for all meetings. No agenda, no attenda. Right. You didn't have to go to a meeting that didn't have an agenda. So that's one of my first big.

So getting proactive, having a regular cadence, a rhythm to the meetings, knowing on a consistent basis when the meeting is and then having an agenda. The daily huddle is recapping, is a stand up meeting. It's a quick pulse check. We touch things in a very brief like 10 to 20 minutes max. The weekly meeting is a full recap. And for me, this weekly meeting, one of the key things that no matter how your agenda is designed, that it provides is, you know, I, as an outside facilitator or even if you don't have a coach running a quarterly or half yearly or yearly planning session, you can probably produce a really great session. Lots of companies have great off sites. Everything seems clear, we lay out clear plans and then we just get lost in the weeks in between the weekly meeting, in my view. And you can even do a weekly on an every other week basis depending on kind of the operational realities of your business. But in, in my view, the weekly meeting is where we connect the dots and we say, oh, that priority that we established for this quarter is like been completely displaced by all these urgent things and whatever. But if we put our heads together, we can figure out a way to stir that a little bit, a way to attend to that a tiny bit and keep it moving forward, even though we're really overwhelmed with some things that we couldn't foresee.

Yeah, that's a good way to say it.

So that's the weekly meeting. Right. And our big call outs right now are have get proactive about it, design it in the meeting rhythm and have agendas. All right, so then the monthly for me is kind of just an extended weekly where we add maybe a little learning to it. How about you?

Yeah, I would say absolutely. The education is a part of it. Make sure that we're doing some sort of key learning. It could be somebody that's just presenting a on a book they read, it could be watching a TED video. There's a lot of things that you can do there. We use it for a little bit more of a deep dive. If on a weekly basis we're looking at the company priorities. On a monthly meeting we would do a quick review of the individual priorities and we use, I'm sure you do as well, we use the red, yellow, green. If your priorities in the green, you don't have to say anything, just a quick, hey, I'm in the green on this priority. Move on. There's no update, there's no discussion. If you're in the yellow, in other words, you're a little bit behind, but you can still catch up. It's up to you. If you need help, if you're behind, you can ask for help. But if you're in the red, you're going to have some. You need to be accountable. And we need to stop and talk about it and find out why it's in the red, what do we need to do to get it to move forward? So that's one of the things that we do a little bit different than the weekly. The other thing that we usually do is some sort of departmental view. Right. And that's usually where we're getting into the targets. The thing that I recommend the most is to look at your face, your function accountability chart and look at your process accountability chart and you've got some really great leading and lagging indicators on there. And you've got the owners, can they do a quick two minute update on how we're doing with our key processes, how's our key roles in the organization, how's marketing doing, how's HR doing? And it's just a quick health check. Shouldn't take more than 10 to 20 minutes at most. And then of course, the final thing that we recommend for monthly meetings is pick one or two topics that are just important, urgent topics that we need to do some discussion about, we need to do some brainstorming and we need to make some decisions. And so I also. Another key thing to effective meetings is make sure that you use parking lots. Do you have a place where people can say, oh, here's a subject that I'd like to talk next time we get together in a monthly meeting. It could be a whiteboard in the break room, it could be an electronic document. It can be something that each person keeps independently. But you need to come to the meeting with, hey, we're going to set aside 45, 60 minutes, tackle one or two topics, make sure you come prepared with what you'd like to talk about.

You know, a parking lot is funny. It's such a basic, fundamental thing. And I recently screwed this one up. I was leading a session with a group of final 35 people. So it's a little bit bigger room and there was an area we didn't want to go. We opened the session this, the particular section saying, okay, we're not going here. And we'd planned for it. We anticipated that people wanted to go one place and we didn't want to go there. And then boom, if I didn't, it didn't come up in the middle of the meeting. And then I didn't go to the parking lot. Instead I tackled it, which is exactly what. But you know, in the moment we like, we do Stuff I got triggered, I started to do it and I didn't use my parking lot. But a parking lot is a really great way to keep the meeting on track. And if you simply put one in a room and start to regularly use it, people can start to use it to keep your meetings focused. Because there are lots of good subjects that come up that are totally appropriate, need addressing at some point in time, but often not in that moment. Right. So parking lot is a great place to sort of put them to acknowledge it and say, yep, that's not now. And we'll look at that at the end of the meeting or between now and the next meeting or whatever is appropriate in your part. I want to loop back to one other thing and underscore something and that's the opportunity to sort of add learning. So in our world, we know plenty of people who are VISTAGE members, who are ypo, who are eo, who are in all sorts of things like this, where they're working on and developing themselves in some way. We're surrounded by people who are learners in some capacity. My question for our listeners is have you actually built that into your culture aside from yourself, have you implemented a practice as part of your regular traditions in your culture where you got everyone learning and expanding? Too often we have people who come to one of our workshops or do something to better themselves and then. And. But their team is just adrift, like dealing with the operational day to day things. And they're not all learning and when they are, they're not learning together. And then sometimes an owner CEO will come back to the team and say, oh, I just, I heard this at my VISTAGE YPO forum, EO forum and or chapter learning event or whatever. And here we go, we're going to do this now. And in the phenomenon, I think that goes on again and again, whether we're aware of it or not. We call Bohica and that's bend over. Here it comes again. So the head of the company comes back with some new idea initiative and they're all gung ho for it. They implement it imperfectly, they explain it poorly because they've just heard about it the first time and it made sense to them that night, but not so much the next day when they bring it to their team. And then the team sort of pays lip service to it, goes through the motions, nod consciousness or unconsciously and hopes that it'll go away soon and that you'll forget it and they can go back to doing, getting things done as they see it. But if you'll bring a little bit of regular learning, just a little bit on a regular basis together as a team, it'll become so much more powerful and you'll learn and see and innovate and improve your business in all sorts of unforeseeable ways.

Yeah, I have quite a few clients that pay their team members to read. Right. And so whether it's some, the more flexible plans are, it's just about any book. But most of my clients will actually work together. We'll build out. Here's a list of the 20 top books that we believe would help team members to be able to grow their skills. And hey, if you read a book, you get 100 bucks this quarter or whatever, whatever the incentive is. And it really is important. And in this day and age with audiobooks, you know, being able to. I personally, I read on an iPad while I'm on an elliptical at the gym. So I feel like I'm killing two birds with one stone. I'm getting my exercise in and I'm reading a couple chapters at the same time.

I do a lot of audiobooks, quote unquote reading. Right. But it's one of the ways that I get through a lot of business books. I'll do it while running, biking, on an airplane, driving if I've got a long drive to a session. All of those present sort of places where the brain isn't over occupied. But let's being mindful of the time, let's segue quickly and then begin to recap. So that leaves us then with the question quarterly planning thing where we look at the quarterly planning off site. For me it's a day. Some teams, it goes as much as two days where we stop, we look at our progress on the year, we plan the next quarter in detail. We lay out essentially a 13 week plan for the next quarter. I like to have them off site. I like to get people away from the distractions and go through things. And then the annual is just kind of an extended version of, of that where we're looking annual and then we're looking at three year and ten year type things, right?

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, we follow pretty much that same plan. We feel like the quarterly planning session, when done right, is a full eight hours. For teams that are a little bit more mature with the process. We can do an annual planning in four hours, maybe five hours, especially if they do some pre work. But those are really important meetings. The other thing I have some clients do is we'll then mix in some additional exercises. Maybe we'll do some five dysfunctions. Maybe we'll add something in just to kind of break it up. But yeah, the quarterly planning is the key. Meeting rhythm, at least in my coaching process, to be able to get a company to be able to consistently say this is where we want to go in the next 13 weeks, this is how we're going to get there and then go execute. It's just an awesome feeling when you see that, when you come back and they've completed 30, 40 priorities, individual priorities throughout the quarter for a team of 10, 15 people, it's a great feeling.

So whether it's the quarterly, the annual, I think we do some similar things. We start with a review. Right. A retrospective or a review of the last period. How did we do? Where did we win? What did we not win? Where do we come up short? What can we learn from everything? How do we want to improve? There's a variety of assessments that we do to reflect and look back at the period and not just the last week or whatever. And then there's the look forward, the planning for the next period, which goes against the longer term targets. Whether it's a three hag, a three year goal, a BHAG or the combination of all of those. We're then looking against those things and figuring out what the next quarter, the next year need to look like. And in between those things, we're advancing some of the common tools that we would do in the scaling up framework. Maybe we're improving the team health or we're improving cash management or we're going a little deeper in strategy or freshening up something. We're doing some of the work in the other areas.

Absolutely. And I want to make sure there's one other meeting that usually gets lost.

Yeah, please.

It's actually maybe the most important meeting of any organization. That's the one on ones.

The one on ones. Okay.

Every manager should have a one on one with their direct reports. We say on a bi weekly basis. We feel like every other week is just about the right rhythm. We have some organizations that do it weekly. I think there is nothing more important than the concept of a manager's job. A leader's job is to make those around them the best version of themselves. Right?

Right.

You and I grew up in an age when we had the annual performance review, which is the most, it's the most worthless thing ever invented.

Am I going to get a review? Am I going to get a, a raise? Is the core question in that one? And is there a disconnect between how my boss thinks about me.

Right, yeah. And telling somebody in December and trying to coach them about something they did in February is pointless. It's terrible. And so I'm a big believer in maybe the most impactful thing you could do as a manager is have really quality one on ones every other week with your direct reports. It's usually about 50 to 60 minutes. Some people can get them down to 30, but I think 60 is about right. And it really is all about them. What's going on in their world, what's going on with their role, what are the things that they need help with from management, how are they doing on their priorities, how are they doing on their tasks. And this isn't tactical, this isn't like, I mean it's a little bit of tactile, but it's also coaching, you know, the managers need to be coaching their direct reports. And so I just want to make sure I get that in because I think that's one of the most important meetings out of everything we've discussed today.

I totally. So it's not a whole team meeting, it's the one on one. And, and I always tell people once a week is often ambitious for most teams to do a one on one with everyone. And once a month is probably a little too often. And about every two weeks is about the right cadence. And some people will schedule them every week and then know that they're not going to make some of them, but some, somewhere in there I think is the right thing. And I think you're dead on that. That's the chance to review and give feedback and then, then we're very clear. Now you can combine that with like a scorecard or some other process. But if you're looking at the priorities, you're talking about what the person's dealing with, you're both, both clear what, what the person's up to. It gets a lot easier to have a quick, powerful, effective, useful meeting in that and the employee just goes away feeling taken care of. They're clear about how they're doing and they're related and connected.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

So I don't know, I think this, the title of the show has got to be something like well run meetings actually give you back more time. They make you so much more productive. And the keys are that they're well designed, that they're scheduled proactively in advance on a consistent, predictable basis. If you got proactive now, and you said my weekly meeting is going to be on a Monday or Tuesday or it's going to be in the morning or it's going to be here's the standard time. You'd start to organize your clients, your business around that instead of the other way around. And then you have a great agenda. You use a parking lot. There's preparation that goes into it. These kinds of meeting practices will actually give you back time, will free you up, not take more time.

Absolutely. No, I think you summarized it very well and every entrepreneur out there listening to this podcast is going to be cringing with the idea of having all these meetings on their calendar. But it will set you free to be able to do the things that you really want to do, to be creative and innovative.

Well, I want to thank you for being on the show and talking through this subject today. You've got so much to add and it's great to hear another perspective and help through that. I hope it's been valuable for our listeners. If folks want to read more, connect with Rob. You'll find him@petracoach.com and you blog regularly there and write on all kinds of subjects and have a lot to share. And then of course, you'll find us every week here with a new podcast with another thought leader, client, coach, etc. But everything around scaling up, you'll find us@scalingupbusiness.com if you subscribe there. We'll send you a regular update and summary of these things. We've also got daily tips and a download of two tools and some outlines and things so you can get started scaling up and applying the the framework in your own business on your own. Well, special thanks again to Rob Simons for coming on the show and sharing his experience and his wisdom with us as a coach. So appreciate having him on the show. I also want to give special thanks to our original growth guru Vern Harnish and to our show producer Niobaid. Audio production for the show is done for by Podfly Productions, Audio editing by Albert Burge and our show notes are compiled by Ayn Codena with proofreading by Tim McGowan. If you got some value out of today's show, please share it with somebody else and let us know the parts that you loved. Drop us a note, email us send to bill@scalingupbusiness.com or social media. Whatever works for you. Thanks again for listening and keep scaling up.

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