MBA959 How to Reduce Meetings in Your Business

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night, not working on my business, but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things, of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with Intuit QuickBooks. QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts. So doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to save on new tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits provide perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey O. Welcome. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. When it comes to your business you gotta be on top of your game. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the hundred dollar MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100 MBA net and in today's lesson you will learn how to reduce meetings in your business. Meetings in business can be important, but too many of them can take away a lot of your time as well as the time of that are supposed to be working for you, right? Supposed to be producing things for your business. In today's episode I want to show you some regular strategies, some procedures you can put in place in your business to reduce the number of meetings you have. I'm going to ask you to question some of the things that you do in your business. I had to question the number of meetings I do and why I do them. In order to reduce the number of meetings and not have unnecessary meetings, you need to meet with your team. But if you can keep your meetings to a minimum, you can save time, money and a lot of headaches as well as the fact no one likes meetings. So your team will be happy too. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. When it comes to reducing the number of meetings you have, the first thing I want you to do is take a look at how many meetings you have, every single meeting you have, every single week, every single month, and write down what you actually do on these meetings. Be critical and write down everything. Right now, we're just going to analyze what we're doing. We're not really going to question anything right now. We're just going to take a look at the hard facts. Now, these exercises we're going to go through today are applicable to you, regardless if you have a physical team in a physical office or you run a remote team like we do, where your teammates are all over the world and you're communicating online. So you're going to write down everything that you discuss in all your meetings, each of your meetings for the past month. Now, after you've done that, I want you to ask the question for every single thing that you do in each meeting. Can I do this thing outside a meeting? Can I accomplish what I was trying to accomplish in this meeting, outside a meeting? For example, I want to ask my sales manager a few questions about our sales process. Do you need a meeting for that? No, you don't. And in fact, a meeting is probably the most inefficient way to do that. Why? Because when you meet, whether it's on a video conference or in person, you're just talking and nothing's really being documented or tracked. Now, this is important, not so I can be like, hey, I said to do this, and you didn't do this, but just so we can follow up and make sure it gets done. Now, when I say document, it's not like, so we can get evidence so we can, you know, point the finger later on. No, it's just so we can follow up and make sure things actually get done. In fact, there's a lot of tools that I'll be mentioning today that do this job a lot better when it comes to gathering information, getting information, whether it's asking questions, whether it's clarification, whether it's even planning for the next project you're working on with your team. This is a lot easier to do in text format. And even if you have multiple players on your team that are working on this project, you don't need to hold a meeting to discuss something. For us, we use a tool called basecamp. This is a great software. It's actually one of the best things we've ever done in our business. Because it centralizes all our conversations and all our projects. So everybody's on the same page. Let's say, for example, working on a new feature with our software, Webinar Ninja. I can present this new feature or this feature idea on Basecamp, and then I can have everybody who's involved in that project chime in and tell us what they think, and I can put a deadline to it so I can get all their feedback in a timely fashion. What's great about this is that everybody can kind of talk to each other, can give their input in their own time, so they're not interrupted. Often when you're in a meeting, you don't really need to be there for the whole meeting. You can actually leave for 95% of the meeting and you'd be fine. And I actually did an experiment. I ran meetings with my development team or regularly. These were video chat meetings online. And then I started doing my meetings, quote, unquote, discussing the same things on Basecamp, which is basically like a message board, which is like a discussion board. And we actually got the project done faster without meeting. So often, everybody knows what they have to do, because I can assign tasks, I can assign deadlines, people can ask questions, people can follow up, and they can hand over things from one person to the next when it comes to completing the project. So I discovered when it comes to collaboration or discussions, I don't really need to meet for that. So does that mean I don't need to meet with my team at all? No, you do have to meet with your team. Let's talk about the reasons why I like to meet with my team and how by just meeting for those reasons, it reduces the number of meetings I do tremendously. Number one reason I like to meet with my team is what I call milestone meetings. This is when you reach a certain milestone in your project, in your business, in your whatever, and you kind of like to meet with your team to kind of recap and a chance to really recognize their work. Really, meeting with your team is a great opportunity to praise and to motivate and to recognize the people that really made it happen. Appreciation doesn't communicate via text very well. Text is really good for cold cut instructions and discussions that really don't have any kind of sense of emotion. But when you want to express gratitude or you want to evoke emotion, that's when you really need to meet face to face online via video. So I like to meet in certain milestones, whether it's we just did a major push to an update or Maybe it's the first quarter of the year, or maybe you just launched a new product that, that everybody's been working on for months. Basically, anytime you feel like you need to motivate or recognize your team. Now, I don't like to schedule these meetings, like regularly, like have it in the schedule. Every three months, we're gonna have this meeting. Because what happens is that when you do praise in these meetings, when you do kind of give recognition, it just seems mechanical because you have this meeting scheduled in advance and it seems like you just are putting yourself a reminder to say, hey, say good things about my team. But instead I like to schedule them just in time where it kind of coincides with an event. Now, it doesn't have to be super last minute. You can schedule it a week or two in advance. But the point here is, is that you need to have a reason to meet. People don't like the feeling of going to a meeting just because it's in this calendar. I have to meet. When you have a reason to meet, people feel like you're not wasting their time. Another piece of insight I want you to take a look at. Now that you have everything written down, all the meetings you've done in the past month, do you have to actually meet with the whole team or the whole department every time you meet? Maybe you just need to discuss that with one or two people and you can call an impromptu meeting with just those people. Often we like to invite as many people as possible to our meetings so we can make them feel included. But often they're just sitting there listening and they feel like they're really wasting their time. And if you're wasting their time, you're wasting your money. Right? Because you're paying these people to be in these meetings. Right? Personally, I don't like to have anybody in a meeting that doesn't need to be, because they could be working on what they need to be working on. So reevaluate who needs to actually be in this meeting. And you could just say, hey, Sally, there's no need for you to be in this meeting. We're going to be discussing X, Y and Z. You can go ahead and do your work or continue the project you're working on. You got lucky this time. The point here is that just inform them and just obviously communicate why certain people are in this meeting or not. So no one feels that they've been left out for some reason. This is especially important if you're making changes now to the way you run your meetings or how many meetings you run, people don't want to feel like, hey, what's going on here? All of a sudden, I'm not invited to these meetings. So if you're making a change, make sure you're communicating why you're making this change. There's nothing wrong with saying, hey, I'm. I'm trying to evaluate how many meetings we do. Maybe I can reduce the number. I'm discovering that, hey, maybe not everybody needs to be at every meeting. And they'll be like, hey, this is awesome. Our boss actually cares about if we are wasting our time or not. When you reduce the number of people in a meeting, you reduce the time it takes to do that meeting because there's less people talking. Sometimes when I evaluate, I'm like, wow, I only need to talk to two people in this meeting rather than 10. So when we actually do meet on video conference, it's a quick call. It's like 10 minutes, and we're done. If I had to invite the whole team, 10 people, I would want their input. I want them to feel like they're participating. That could take over an hour. As your team grows, you'll discover that you'll do more frequent meetings with key players versus meetings with the whole team. So, for example, at Webinar Ninja, our lead developer, Shane, I meet with him more often than anybody else because he's the one who's really leading the technology. And then he speaks to the rest of the team later on, either individually or with his own meetings. But we don't have regular scheduled meetings. We have impromptu meetings based on our needs. If we can't communicate things on Basecamp or via Slack Chat, or I need him to show me on his screen what he's doing, or it's a very complex idea we're trying to discuss and we're getting lost via all the texts, I'll say, let's just jump on a call tomorrow and we'll hash this out. And usually we're able to kind of hash it out within 10 to 15 minutes. It's much clearer, and both of us know what we have to do moving forward a lot better. Sometimes you just need to meet more frequently with key members of your team and let them cascade that message to the rest of the team. But the most effective way to reduce the number of meetings is to create a culture of responsibilities in your business. Let me explain. If it's super clear to everybody on their team what they have to do to do a good job in their role, it's going to be a Whole lot easier for you to not have to meet with them all the time. A lot of people just meet with people to make sure that they're on top of them. They make sure that they're doing their job, that they don't have any questions, all that kind of stuff. But if you outline using a tool like Basecamp or anything else, where it's like, here are your to do's, these are the things you have to do. Here's the deadline. This is what I expect you to do. If you have any questions, you know, put them below. And if they don't have any questions, they gotta hit that deadline. There's no roadblocks. There's gotta be a sense of responsibility. Where does that sense of responsibility come from? Well, it comes from where that one time where somebody doesn't hit their deadline, something's gotta happen. If you are assigned a task and you don't complete the task by the deadline and nothing happens, then the deadline's meaningless. If you want to be on top of them, then you need to make sure that you respect the fact that they're going to actually abide by the deadline. But if they don't, you got to follow up. You got to figure out, hey, it's the deadline, why isn't this completed? That's what life's all about. It's about consequences. If there's no consequence, if they're not going to be, you know, asked about what's going on, there's going to be no follow up. Why would they stick to the deadline? There's no urgency. So instead of being on top of them every week with a meeting, just be on top of them. If they don't make a deadline, that's a lot less times. And if you have great teammates, that's going to be few and far. At Capella University, learning the right skills could make a difference. That's why our business programs teach you relevant skills you can take from the course room to the workplace. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella Eduardo. To wrap up today's lesson, write down every meeting you do or have done in the past month. What did you discuss? And ask yourself the question, do I have to meet for all these items? Do I have to meet with everybody for these items? Or can I do this offline? Or with a tool like Basecamp, or with tasks and to DoS or with discussions via Slack or a campfire or something like that? Can you meet with the key players more frequently but with the whole Team less. Can you schedule in milestone meetings so you can actually connect with your team, get to know them as well as praise and encourage them? Can you keep your meeting short by having less people at the meeting? People that don't need to be there don't need to be there. I hope this lesson has helped you. I hope that it inspires you to actually make an effort to reduce the number of meetings. I'm telling you, it's going to help you in the long run because it's going to save you time. It's going to save your team time and they're going to get more of what's important done. Thank you so much for listening to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show. We love doing this podcast for you. Let us know what you love about the show. Just leave us an iTunes rating and review. It takes two minutes and we read every single one of them. It helps us know what you love. That's it for me today, guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. As your team goes, start handing over the responsibility of meetings to those leaders in your business, your managers. You can't do this alone. If you're going to grow in the long run, in the long term, you got to get other players involved that can lead your team. There's not one leader in every organization, there's several. And your job is to lead the leaders. And by doing that, you lead the whole team. All right, thank you so much for listening. All right, in tomorrow's listen, I answer a question from a listener for Q and A Wednesday. The question is, when is the best time of year to run a conference or event? I answer that question and give you my insights when it comes to that topic in tomorrow's lesson. So make sure you hit subscribe and I'll see you then. Take care. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With usaa, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a'@usaa.com bundle restrictions apply.