How I Do One-on-One Meetings ($43M CEO)

Most businesses only know one way to hold people accountable: compliance and correction. This means scorecards, audits, performance reviews, SOPs, employee handbooks, catching mistakes, fixing mistakes, and repeating that cycle. Now, look, those things matter. And this past year, my business was valued over $43 million and I have over 120 employees. I use scorecards, I use dashboards, I use pay for performance. I use monthly reviews. But if that becomes the culture of the business, you have a problem because the best people do not want to feel like someone is constantly looking over their shoulder. Average performers will tolerate that culture. Your best people usually won't. What I've found is there are really two ways to build a business. The first is compliance and correction. The second is goal alignment. And if you only have the first one, you create employee churn. That churn is expensive. It kills momentum, it kills culture, it kills trust. Most owners have no idea how much poor leadership is actually costing them and their business. So in this video, I'm gonna show you how I use both, how I keep standards high, how I still measure performance, how I still know the numbers, but how I do it in a way that makes leaders feel coached not controlled. And if you manage people, whether you've got 5 employees or 100+, this matters because if your accountability system makes your best people want to leave, it's broken. I saw this really clearly in a turnaround I recently did with a business called Club Clean. They had more than 60 employees, most of which were cleaners doing commercial cleaning, and they did $2.4 million in annual revenue. Their average tenure for their cleaners was around 2 months.

Cleaner turnover rate is pretty high, but it varies on county. So we're in 6 different counties right now. This, LaPorte County, is our, our county with the highest turnover rate.

And the reason was not that they didn't have rules. It wasn't that they weren't measuring things. They were already tracking quality control, call-out rate, complaints, all of it. Are they citing quality control issues? Okay.

The main things that we're supposed to be auditing, which are consumables, floors, glass, and trash.

—look to see if they have the OSHA folder, the trainings folder, closet standard and core values.

So she has like a site check, which is a site audit, in addition to checking the closets.

The problem was that the employees did not see how any of it connected to their own life. They were cleaning in the middle of the night. For a lot of them, it was their second job. They weren't there because they just loved cleaning office buildings or medical buildings at midnight. They were there because they needed money.

The nighttime stuff gets to them, which I don't blame them because it's hard for me too. Like, I have a 5-year-old, so like I get off work, go home, sleep for like 2 hours, get up, take him to school. Like, yeah, it can be like rough if you have like a lot going on. Me and my son wouldn't be in the position that we are now, and like I just got us like a car and everything, so it's been like a huge like 360.

And when the owner would get up in an all-hands meeting and talk about the mission of the company, some of the employees would literally mock him afterwards. Not because the mission was bad, because it felt disconnected. It had no clear impact on their goals, their money, their future, or their career path.

I always wanted to be a beautician. Always. That was the unlock.

The numbers were already being measured, but the numbers were not tied to something that the employee actually cared about. That is usually where accountability breaks. This video outlines the feedback I gave Club Clean so they could dramatically improve employee retention. So let's go over the two ways to build a business. There is the first way, which is compliance and correction. And a lot of times I see people default to this after they've been burned a couple of times by bad actors. It's like, well, that person tried to sue me, therefore I will have more corrective, more compliance, More SOPs, more checklists. The second way to build a business is through goal alignment. And the entire turnaround with Club Clean was trying to get them moved in the direction of more goal alignment so that when the owner got in front of the team and talked about the mission of the business, the goals of the business was aligned with that of the employees. So compliance and correction. This is audits, and when I went to Club Clean, they kept doing these, they had these actual words that they just kept saying over and over in the coaching of like audits, performance reviews, performance improvement plans, scorecards, SOPs, employee handbooks, quality control checks. And again, all of that matters. I'm not anti-compliance. I am not anti-metrics. I'm not anti-standards. As you grow, those things become more important, not less. You need standards. You need numbers. You need clear expectations. You need to know if you're winning or are you losing. If the culture of the business becomes, I am here to catch what you're doing wrong, people stop feeling led and start feeling watched. And that is where micromanagement begins. The second way to build a business is through goal alignment. And that is where you connect the goals of the business with the goals of the employee. This is the part most businesses skip. They assume that employees care about the same things that the owner cares about, and they don't. They do not wake up every day thinking about your EBITDA— earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization. They don't think about that. They do not wake up thinking about your valuation. They don't wake up thinking about your profit margins or how to make you richer. They care about their own goals. They care about making more money, buying a house, getting out of debt, taking care of their family, earning a promotion, getting more flexibility, being able to move forward and build their career. And once you know that, accountability changes. Now it becomes, how do I help you hit the numbers that get you closer to what you want? That feels completely different than Here's another thing you did wrong. Honestly, people don't care about your business goals until they can see how hitting them helps them hit their goals. So let's talk about why compliance alone creates churn at the employee level. This is where owners fool themselves. They think, "We have standards, we have handbooks, we do reviews, we track KPIs." Okay, good. But that doesn't mean people feel bought in to that mission. That just means that you're organized. Organization is not alignment. A lot of businesses are highly organized and still have terrible employee churn. Why? Because their people feel like every conversation is about fixing mistakes, checking boxes, getting corrected, and being told what they're doing wrong. That culture might keep things clean on paper, but it doesn't keep your best people long-term. Honestly, I feel like the biggest unlock in business is being able to keep high performers for the long term and having high tenured employees that have been here 5, 10, 15 years is a huge unlock because high performers want autonomy, progress. They want trust, they want coaching, they want ownership, and they want a path upward. If all they feel is pressure and correction, they leave. And the expensive part is not just replacing them, it's retraining their replacement. It's lost momentum. It's lower trust in the team that sees their manager get removed. It's disruption for customers halfway through the project when that leader leaves. It's also the time of management cultural damage that is made because of constant churn, especially at the leadership level. Employee churn is one of the most unspoken costs of poor leadership. Most owners measure payroll, but very few measure the cost of having to constantly start over with new employees. So let's talk about what accountability should actually feel like. I come at accountability much more like a coach now, and I didn't used to think about it this way. It was a lot of lost opportunity and lost A-players until I figured this out. Instead of saying, "Why did you miss the number?" Now I'm gonna be saying, "What can I do to help you hit the number?" That is a different posture because if a leader misses a goal in the business, I'm trying to tie that back to what's in it for them. If their personal goal is to make more money and make more money is tied to better performance in the business, then the conversation becomes, let's figure out how to help you win. Now I'm not lowering the standard, I'm making the standard relevant. That matters because measuring something for the sake of measuring, it means nothing to the employee. A KPI by itself is just a number. A KPI connected to more money for them, a new role, a title change, a promotion, more responsibility, more autonomy, That gets attention. The metric itself doesn't motivate people. What the metric unlocks is what motivates people. So when I think about compensation, incentives, titles, and KPIs, I want measurable change tied to meaningful progress. Not just, here's your score, but here's what happens for you when you win. Now let's talk about how we make this happen. Now that is the monthly one-on-one system that I use for leaders as well as technicians and entry-level team members. This is why one-on-ones matter so much. It is very easy to get very busy in day-to-day operations and the busyness of running a business and forgetting to do one-on-ones. And it is by far the biggest unlock in the culture of your business, especially when you look at the leverage that you as a leader can bring. In my opinion, one-on-ones should happen monthly between a direct report and their manager. Quarterly is honestly too long. 3 months of having bad performance or having someone not culturally aligned or not feeling like they are aligned with the goals of the business is too long. It can ruin culture in that period of time. Now, especially for new team members, we're onboarding someone new, I'd probably go from monthly to weekly or biweekly for a period of time, just because the feedback loop needs to be really fast to correct any behavior that's negative and to make sure we are aligned very early on in the hiring process. If you wait too long, people turn before they ever really get aligned. And at Club Clean, they were doing quarterly reports or quarterly assessments and audits of someone that was new to the organization.

Mistakes are constantly being emailed to me and I'm quick to just, hey team, there's this. They also conduct their quarterly reviews. You do those? Yes.

But within that first quarter, they were losing more than half of their team. And the whole point of the one-on-one is is not just status updates. It is to understand for the employee what they want, what stage of their career they're in, what matters to them, what's frustrating them in their current role, and what progress looks like for them inside the business. Because once you know that, you can start connecting their path in the business to their goals outside the business. And if you don't know what your people want, you can't lead them. You can only manage them.. And so if you're tired of constantly managing and micromanaging and you would rather lead, we need to know what their goals are and then simply align their goals outside of work with the goals that are inside of the business. Let's talk about how we actually create a system to create goal alignment using the High-Low Buffalo framework. So in our one-on-ones, we use the High-Low Buffalo framework, and the entire objective of this is just to be able to eventually know what the goals of the team member are. So we built a one-on-one structure that makes these conversations feel more natural. It's called the High-Low Buffalo. So here's the flow for the one-on-one meeting. First, we're going to do high, which we're going to ask for a recent personal and professional win from the employee. And then the manager is going to share their own personal and professional win that they've had. That's the high. And then the low is we're going to ask them for a recent personal and professional low, and the manager shares their own personal and professional low. Buffalo is the key unlock before we go into goal alignment, where we're going to share something that they likely don't know about me as the manager. And then I'm going to ask them to share something that I don't know about them. Now, why does this matter? Because when you share too, when you become vulnerable, it stops feeling like an interrogation. It stops feeling like an audit. It feels human. It makes it easier for them to open up when you ask the next most important question, and that is, what are your personal goals? That is the unlock. That's where we're trying to get to. But I've got to warm them up with a high, low, and buffalo to be vulnerable and unlock the ability to ask this question and get real answers. Because now you can stop managing them only through standards and start coaching them through alignment. So let's talk about the next question inside the meeting because it's the most important. After we do the warmup, high, low, Hello, Buffalo. We, as the manager, have had this conversation that's shown that we are human. We have wins. We have losses. There's things that we go through. And I'm going to customize these things to what the person I'm talking to is going through. If someone's 19 years old and they're a single guy, I'm not going to talk to them about my marriage and the things that I'm winning in my marriage. I'm going to talk about things that when I was 19 years old, what I was going through and be able to connect with them on a much more personal basis. The buffalo part, same thing. I'm not gonna talk to someone that never goes to the gym about a win that I've recently had with my PR. I've lifted so much weight. But if someone's going to the gym and that is something that is personal to them, I might share that as a buffalo of a recent win in my own life. So this is the warmup system to be able to get to what their personal goals are. We wanna know what are they actually trying to achieve in their life right now? Not just in your role of the business, in your life? Because that becomes the North Star for retention. If I know that someone wants to buy a house, they want to get out of debt, they're trying to save up for a car, they're trying to make 6 figures, that's like their whole goal, pay off some student loans or be able to get more stability for their family. Now we can work backwards. We know what their goals are. And this whole High, Low and Buffalo strategy is just warming them up to then when you ask what their personal goals are, they're going to give you an honest answer. Then we got to ask, what stage are they in right now inside the business? And what would the next stage of success inside of the business look like? And what do we need to be able to get them there? What can we, as a business, do to help get them there faster? That's the conversation. It's not, here's what you're doing wrong, but rather, how do we get you to the next stage of your career? How can we get you to make more money? How can we be able to get these certain KPIs in the business, allowing you to make more money, that then allows you to be able to hit these personal goals that you have? It means performance now has a purpose. And this is where career progression happens. At Augusta, we have 21 stages of success that an entry-level technician can move through. There's 7 for a technician, 7 for a general manager, and 7 for an owner. The reason we do this is that after we now have what their personal goal is, we're going to try to tie that to how their professional goals can be aligned with it. If they're at stage 4 of being a technician, What did they need to do to become a stage 5 technician? And this is where Club Clean was really seeing the opportunity to be able to keep their cleaners longer. They were already measuring quality control, upsells, call-out rate, their performance out in the field, whether or not they were doing a good job. Great. Those numbers already existed, but they were just numbers. So what we needed to create was a clear roadmap, a stage-by-stage path where each level unlocked more money, more progress, more opportunity, more status— side of the team— and more ownership. Those same metrics actually mattered. We were already measuring them, but tying them to the goals of the employee and how they got ahead in their career. Now the employee could see, like, if I improve my quality, I move up. If I improve attendance, I move up, I get to the next stage. If I improve the number of upsells that I get for the business, I move up. If I improve consistency and I don't have to have someone come and doing quality control checks and audits on me, I move up inside the organization. Now the business goals and the employee goals are tied together, and this is what they were missing. The problem was never that the company wasn't measuring enough, 'cause we all wanna know numbers and we gotta have spreadsheets and have software and everything in a nice spreadsheet. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that the employee couldn't see how any of it changed their future. Employees do not get excited about metrics. They get excited about progress and making sure that you have a roadmap, a place for them to move up inside of, keeps them from the wandering eye of going after the next position at some other job simply because you haven't given them a ladder to climb. So let's talk about how to use KPIs without becoming a micromanager, 'cause this is the real balance. Some people will hear this and they're like, okay, so just be nice and stop measuring stuff? No, that's not my point. That's not leadership either. You still need scorecards, you still need metrics, you still need standards. You still need quality control. You need reviews and you need accountability. People want to know what winning looks like, but the way you talk about them, these numbers that you're measuring, matters. Instead of here's where you missed, try here's what needs to improve so you can get to the next level or stage of your career. Instead of saying why are your numbers so bad, try what's getting in your way and how do we fix it? Instead of saying you need to do better, try here's the gap between where you are and where you said you want to go. That is still accountability. It just feels like coaching instead of policing. And that difference matters a lot because one approach creates defensiveness, the other creates buy-in. So after all of this, the high, the low, the buffalo, we understand what their personal goals are and we've aligned it with the stages of their success inside the organization. That's when we then ask the 10 out of 10 question. Now at Augusta, we ask this to every customer on the phone. It's on our website. What can we do to make sure your experience with Augusta is a 10 out of 10? But we use that same exact language inside of our one-on-one meetings, and that is, what can we do to make working here a 10 out of 10 experience? I love that question because it gets to the same place without sounding negative. Because if I ask, what's going wrong? Or what don't you like about working here? That feels very heavy, very fast. It puts the conversation in a negative frame and they might have to feel like they got to tattletale on someone else or say all the things they hate about working there. But if I ask, "What would make this a 10 out of 10 place to work?" Now it feels like we are on the same team solving the problem together. That phrasing really matters because leadership is not just about what you ask, it's about how you ask it. The exact same issue can come out of both questions, but one feels like I'm saying, "I'm evaluating you." The other feels like, "I'm with you." One feels like, "Tell me everything bad that's happening." The other feels like, "What's the problem? Let's figure out a solution." The words can be similar, The posture is what changes everything. So here's what this all changes. Having this one-on-one meeting, having the ability to warm them up, figure out their goals, figure out the stages of success in your organization, and then be able to know what you could do better as a leader inside the culture to keep them long-term. What does this change in the culture? When you do this right, people stop seeing one-on-ones as punishment. They start seeing them as progress meetings. They stop feeling like my boss is against me and start feeling my boss is helping me win. That changes everything. It changes retention. It changes trust, which is key inside of an organization. It changes performance, which is key to make a profit. It changes the buy-in from your team, the promotion paths that you have, the career progression, and the way that people receive correction. Because correction lands differently when people know you actually care about them getting to where they want to go. And this is the key point. You are often saying the exact same thing. You still want them to improve, You still want the numbers to get better. You still want the standards to be met. But the framing changes from here's what you're doing wrong to here's how you get closer to your goals. That is the difference between accountability and micromanagement. And so quick cautionary tale here. This does not mean everyone gets whatever they want. It does not mean that every personal goal can be solved by the business. It doesn't mean that you tolerate poor performance forever because You're just trying to be empathetic. You still need standards. You still need KPIs. You still need to track your numbers. If someone is continually missing expectations and there is no improvement, eventually the business has to make a decision because alignment is not replacement for accountability. It is the context for accountability. The goal is not to remove consequences. The goal is to make expectations feel fair, clear, and connected. That way, when hard conversations happen, they do not feel random. They feel earned. This is exactly why I care so much about systems around leadership, career paths, compensation, and metrics. Because if you can connect the goals of the business with the goals of the employee, you keep great people longer. And if you can keep great people longer, everything in the business gets easier. Building a business is hard. Building a business when you're constantly losing team members is way harder. If you're trying to build a team that stays, grows, and actually performs, you need systems that make accountability clear. This is one of the reasons I spend so much time building systems for home service businesses. And if you want help with the operational side of this, like you don't even know the KPIs, the scorecards, what performance metrics you should be tying their levels inside your business to. That's why we created HomeWorks, because the more clarity your managers have, easier it is for them to coach instead of micromanage. And if they don't have the numbers inside the software, if they don't know the budget hours, if they don't know how much they're earning, their efficiency scores out in the field, they can't tie that to how I then align those things with the goals of the employee. They don't know the hash marks on the field. And if the goal is getting to the end zone, I need clear markers along the way to know exactly where we're at to be able to align the goals of the employee with winning inside of the business. If your version of accountability makes people feel watched all the time, you probably don't have an accountability system. You have a correction culture and correction cultures create churn. So use compliance, use scorecards, use systems, and use metrics and use software to do that. But don't stop there because the best leaders do not just measure performance. They connect performance to progress. And when your people can see how winning in the business helps them win in life, accountability stops feeling like pressure and starts feeling like partnership. That's how I hold leaders accountable without micromanaging. Now watch this video here if you want to see how I manage my time as the CEO of a business with over 120 employees.