Ryan DeissCo-Founder & CEO, The Scalable Company

Bad, better, and best meeting habits from $200k to $20M

30 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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In this presentation, Ryan Deiss explains how scaling companies must transition from ad‑hoc, leader‑driven meetings to a disciplined meeting rhythm that functions as an operating system. He advocates scheduling regular meetings with clear agendas, defined outcomes, and a unified scorecard and playbook that guide every discussion. Each conversation must conclude with a concrete decision and a named owner responsible for execution, ensuring accountability even when the leader is absent. By institutionalizing this structure, the organization reduces unnecessary meetings, maintains decision quality, and enables the business to continue making good choices without the founder’s constant presence.

Chapters

We're a real company now, so we need to have real meetings. Let's have a meeting to decide when we're gonna have all of our meetings. I pull people in when things come up. If it's important enough to me, it's important enough to call a meeting. I still sit in on every meeting we run. It's the only way I know what's going on. We're small enough to just talk and figure it out in real time. We have an established meeting rhythm, which means we actually have less meetings because decisions that come up just wait until the next scheduled meeting. Every meeting runs on the same scorecard and the same playbook, whether I'm in the room or not. We can talk whenever we want, but every conversation must end with a decision and a name for who's accountable for getting that decision done. We have an established meeting rhythm, and all meetings have an agenda, an outcome, and most importantly, a scorecard. Our meeting rhythm is the operating system. I could miss a month and good decisions still get made without me.