In this talk, Ryan Deiss explains how a company's meeting practices must change as it scales. At the $200,000 revenue stage, the team is tiny, so formal meetings are unnecessary; real‑time, ad‑hoc communication and a focus on outcomes over effort are sufficient. By $2 million, the organization needs a regular meeting rhythm—weekly scorecards, monthly business reviews, and quarterly strategic planning—to replace the ad‑hoc sessions and to deliberately optimize broken processes. At $20 million, meetings should no longer be about assigning tasks; leaders must instead define standards, articulate vision, and codify culture so that teams can self‑assign work. The progression highlights a shift from informal, effort‑centric interactions to structured, outcome‑driven, and culture‑focused governance as the company grows.
Chapters
How you do meetings at $200,000 in revenue is nothing like the way you're gonna do meetings at $2 million and $20 million. Here's what I mean. At $200,000, we don't want formal meetings. You don't need formal meetings. What we want instead is just real-time communication. The team is small. Just let people talk about it, figure it out in real time. We don't need a freaking meeting for that. If you want to ascend, what we need to do is we need to start emphasizing outcomes and not just effort. It's very easy to look busy at this stage and to reward that, All I care about is outcomes. At $2 million, this is when we actually have to get rid of all of those ad hoc meetings that we were doing at $200,000. Those go away, and this is when you need to establish a meeting rhythm. For us, we do scorecard meetings once a week. We do monthly business reviews once a month. We do quarterly strategic planning meetings once a quarter. You gotta establish a meeting, and ultimately, we need to ritualize optimization. Optimization can't be something that just happens randomly. We need to have meetings that are focused on optimizing the things that are broken. Now at $20 million, what we got to get away from here is having meetings for the purposes of assigning tasks. Your job is not to assign tasks. Your job instead is to uphold, define the standards and set your vision so that your people can then assign tasks to their people. And really, if we want to scale beyond this, we got to codify the culture. We've got to be clear on this is our values. These, this is where we're going. This stuff doesn't matter at $200,000. At this point, $20 million, it absolutely matters. It's everything.
