Bill Gallagher describes a company that paused a banker meeting to run its daily huddle, showing how consistent meeting rhythms build trust and rigor. His advice: identify ideal times for daily, weekly, and quarterly meetings, book them, and let everything else adapt around that cadence.
Do you ever feel like there's no good times for all the meetings that we talk about or that you've heard your friends talk about? The daily huddle, the weekly meeting, monthly meetings, one on ones, quarterly off sites, annual planning, the strategic council, all of these kinds of regular meetings that we say are great to run your business. Well, seem to be really hard for a lot of people to do that. If so, listen in. I've got a story and a tip for you on how to make this right. Make this work. Foreign. Hi there, I'm Bill Gallagher, scaling coach, host of the Scaling up podcast. And we've got loads of tips like this every week for you. So tips talks with our gurus and authors and experts in the world of scaling up, getting real conversations with CEOs who are growing their businesses. All this and more@scalingcoach.com or, or wherever you get your podcast and video content. So I was working with one of our larger teams in the last couple of years, and this team's over 1,000 people, so good sized team, large footprint and so on. And like everybody else, they said the same thing. Hey, we got no time for these meetings. Whether the companies are large and small, everybody kind of says the same thing. But they were committed to it and they had the discipline to do it. So they, they started in with the cadence of quarterly, weekly, daily huddles, all of that kind of meaning. In particular, the daily huddle was the thing. They embraced the first thing. And then as one of their daily huddles came up, they had a team of bankers in the office and there was a conversation about a refinance in place. The bankers are there to meet with them over large, multi, multi million dollar loan or financing that they were working on with the bankers. And, and they paused the meeting in the middle with these bankers and said, excuse me, we've got to step out for just a second. And the roughly three or four people that were in the meeting went out of the meeting, joined the other handful from their leadership team, had their daily huddle and then came back. In the meeting, the bankers asked what was the reason for that meeting and you know, what were they doing? And they were just out of curiosity and friendly, like inquiry. And the CEO said, well, that was our daily huddle. We do that every day. We get on the same page. All of our teams throughout the company do these daily huddles to get on the same page and sync up. We find it's really powerful. And they're like, so you interrupted our meeting to do that? And they said, yes, we do that at the same time every day. And so it's important for us to honor that, like rigor and tradition. And the bankers smiled, they looked at each other and they said, yeah, that's exactly why we're doing this very large multimillion dollar fund. Because of that kind of rigor, we know that you'll be a good. You'll continue to be a good banking customer. These rhythms and routines, we say they set you free. No restaurant would open the doors without first having a quick huddle up with the wait staff in the front of the house to talk with them about the menu, the specials of the day, that kind of thing. Not so much of that going on right now while I record this. But you get the idea that we do let our customers, not even the best customers, let us run all around with all kinds of things. Hey, they asked for a meeting. This time I put it in. If you don't get proactive and design in the ideal cadence, you'll never find the right time for it. So what we say is this. Simply get in there and imagine and identify what is the ideal timeframe to do these kinds of meetings, and then book that in and run that time and protect it, like, take care of it. Do that first. And when a customer asks you if you have time available and you see you've got already a huddle or weekly meeting or whatever else in there, say, oh, no, I'm sorry, I'm already booked. Don't tell them it's for your huddle. Don't tell them it's for just an internal meeting. Protect that first. Keep it. You're already booked in that time frame. Now, once you've designed the ideal time frame, you'll see in the beginning there won't be really good slots for it. You'll have to move things around. But if you start to put it in proactively, you'll work it out in the beginning, but soon enough, you'll start to plan around it, and your business life and your customer interactions will conform themselves to this cadence. Now, it's not perfect. There will be times when you have trade shows or other major group public events that don't lend themselves to it. That's fine. You'll work around those and you'll have the meeting when it works for you. But if you get proactive, go and do it at the assigned ideal time and let the rest fall around where it is, you'll do better. Thanks again for listening watching. I'm Bill Gallagher. Your scalingcoach.com.
