In this video Leila Hormozi explains why meetings are a massive hidden cost for American companies—averaging 65 hours per employee per month and $30 billion in payroll annually—and why they are also the primary vehicle for building culture in remote organizations. She argues that poor meetings are not a symptom of a broken system but a skill gap, and that CEOs should treat meeting design as a learnable competency. Hormozi presents a practical framework of five questions to ask before scheduling any meeting: (1) Who truly needs to attend? (2) Does the leader need to be present? (3) Does anyone need to stay for the entire meeting? (4) Who will prepare the pre‑work and agenda? (5) What specific outcome must the meeting achieve? She illustrates each question with cost calculations, examples of partial attendance, and a concrete weekly‑meeting workflow where participants review a slide deck in advance so the meeting is purely discussion‑driven. The video concludes with a call to audit upcoming calendar slots against these questions to eliminate wasteful meetings and improve both productivity and cultural health.
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What is up? In this video, what I want to talk about is how to run meetings without wanting to kill yourself. So I want to make this video because I've had a lot of discussions recently with CEOs about meetings and meeting cadences and should we have meetings, should we not have meetings, etc., etc. And I'll tell you this, is that I know that the average American spends about 65 hours per month in meetings. This This is just the average working person. This isn't even an executive. And so if you look at America as a whole, we spend about $30 billion a year in payroll on meetings. It's freaking insane. However, there's a lot of people that have come to say that meetings are not necessary, that meetings take up too much time, that meetings are ineffective. Well, I trust Google, and Google did a study on its own business and essentially came out with the understanding that meetings in doses are better than not having meetings. I happen to subscribe to that because I have run a company where I didn't have meetings. I've also run a company where I had too many meetings, and I've also run a company where I had the right meetings. And so I just want to share what I've learned because I think that a lot of people believe that they shouldn't work on the skill of meetings. It's not something most CEOs even think about. They don't think, oh, I should work at the skill of meetings, especially nowadays. Like, if you're a virtual or an online entrepreneur, you're probably not thinking how I can run the best meetings, right? That's a lot of like, oh, that seems kind corporate, whatever, whatever. But the reality is, is that it's not corporate. It's freaking smart. And corporate is around and stays around for a long time for a reason. Sometimes those reasons are things that we should look at. And one of those is that they're really good at running meetings at times. Okay? I'm not talking about every company, but I have been in corporate settings where it is very obvious they are skilled at running meetings. What I want to share is how to run meetings effectively. And you do that by asking yourself 5 questions when you're deciding if you should have a meeting. Or not. Okay, the way that I would think about meetings if I were you, and what I think about meetings is this, especially if you're a virtual workplace, right? You're all remote or you're half remote even, which many of us are at this time. I've never had an in-person company. I've worked in in-person companies, but I've always had remote companies. Then the meetings are the most time you spend with other people on the team. So what a lot of people say is, well, I just want to spend more time focusing on the culture. I don't really want to think about the meetings. And I'm like, what the actual fuck? Your culture is literally built from your meetings because that's the only time you spend with people. Like, let's be real, the time you spend with people is on those meetings. So that is what creates your culture. So if you have shitty meetings, you have a shitty culture. That's why I actually think that if you want to create your culture, have good meetings. It's that simple. Because it is a skill, it is one that can be learned. And to say that you don't like meetings, that meetings are a waste of time, no, it's that you're not good at them. Therefore, they're a waste of time. And so I think that we need to start taking a little more responsibility when it comes to that. Every time that I'm on a meeting and I don't like it, I'm like, fuck, what am I not doing right? What am I not saying right? What did I not do well to prepare for this meeting? Right? And it usually comes down to the fact that I didn't ask one of these 6 questions. When you're thinking about running a successful meeting, the first thing that you want to ask yourself is who really needs to attend this meeting? And when you ask that question, I want you to think, Who's actually going to speak in this meeting? Whose opinion do I actually want? It's not who do I want to loop in. You can loop people in via an email or Slack. You don't loop people in for a meeting. You don't have a meeting to status update people. You have a meeting to make decisions and drive an outcome. And so this took me a long time to get. The first 2 years of business, I don't think I got it. And then when I did, I was like, oh my God, I've wasted so much freaking time and payroll on meetings. And so it's really thinking, who is actually going to contribute to the conversation to be had here? That's the first one. The second one that you have to consider as the CEO is, do you need to attend the meeting? There are oftentimes where I'm like, a meeting is missing, it is not one that I need to attend. So the meeting might be between two departments, the meeting might be between some of the leaders I have, the meeting might be between a vendor and somebody else on my team. I can coordinate the meeting, doesn't mean I need to be there. Or you could even go further and say, do I need to attend the entire meeting? Right? Like sometimes what I'll do is I'll hop on, I'll introduce, I'll explain what I want the outcome to be, and I'll hop right off. Right? That's often when I don't attend the entire meeting is because of that. That's what I'm doing for that meeting. Or per se, it's like a company meeting. I might only come in when I'm talking for that company meeting, not for the entire rest of the meeting. Where it's just the same as it was in the meeting prior that I was already in? That's the second question, right? Do you need to attend and do you need to attend the whole thing, right? So this could also go for the participants. If you're coordinating a meeting and you're thinking who needs to be on there, who's gonna contribute to the conversation, then maybe they only need to be on half of it. Maybe they only need to be in the beginning or the end or whatever, right? But maybe that person doesn't need to be in the whole meeting. And so if you can save time, that would be fantastic because I looked at the average cost of a meeting in my company And for 4 people, all at different levels combined, the average cost of a 1-hour meeting was $300 for me in payroll. And so when I'm thinking about who I want in the meeting, it's important because imagine if you have 10 people on a meeting, that's like $1,000 gone like that. It could have been an email. You could have saved $1,000 because a lot of people, they're hosting these 10 or 15 people meetings just to give a freaking update. You don't need to do that though. Right? And sometimes you don't even need to be there. You just need to set the agenda and let it go. The fourth question is, who's going to be responsible for the pre-work for meetings? So I'll give you an example of this, right? A lot of people do weekly meetings. You might do weekly meetings, which is you get departments together, you get the company together, you go over things in the meeting. Basically, it's like a review of last week, going forward this week, etc. So what I have done over the last 6 years is basically refine this weekly meeting to be— we are expected, if we attend that meeting, to review a slide deck ahead of time. That slide deck is prepared by my finance department the week prior. It's sent out on Friday. Monday is when the meeting occurs. You are meant, you are required to review that over the weekend before you come into the meeting. And then the meeting is to discuss things, and the discussion items are added ahead of time. So when we go in the meeting, there's not reviewing of any information. We're not relaying anything. We're not— nothing, none of that at all. Okay, it's not status updates. We are all expected, because we're all adults, to have reviewed it ahead of time. So that is what I mean when I say who's going to do the pre-work for the meeting. If you're getting on a meeting, especially when it's like an hour long, you need to have an agenda set ahead of time. Okay, so that goes into the last question, which is what is the outcome of the meeting? Okay, and so a really good practice for this that helped me get in the groove of learning to set outcomes for meetings was when I was onboarding people. So anytime I onboard someone, I want to introduce them to different people in the company. And so I want them to face-to-face interaction because I think it builds trust faster than them just being on Slack and just seeing them at the next quarterly meetup. And so what I always make sure to do is say that I want to drive the outcome of that interaction they have with that person, which might be, I need you to explain X, X, and X. I need you to share X, X, and X. Or it might be, I just want you to build trust, right? Whatever it may be, the outcome of the meeting needs to be there. And so if you're calling an ad hoc meeting and it's not one that's regularly scheduled, I think that a lot of times people are actually doing that in this frantic state. They're like, we need to, uh, yeah, there's a problem, meeting, let's do a meeting, let's do a meeting tomorrow, 2 hours, yeah, 2 hours, yeah, 7 o'clock, yeah, let's go. And you're like, what? And your whole staff's looking at you and they're like, oh my God, again? Like, they're so reactive. This isn't a big deal. This isn't a problem. Why are we doing a whole meeting with the whole team over this? Right? And that's when you have to really ask yourself, am I actually driving an outcome with this meeting? And a lot of the times that's what you see is just super reactive. Let's put a big meeting on the books, not paying attention to who's on there, no preset agenda, nothing to review ahead of time. And then we get on and super disorganized and we usually feel worse after. Right? We might get something by the very end, but it really wasn't as productive as it could have been. And so I have had my fair share of those meetings where they're absolutely freaking terrible. Okay, back in the day, I remember there's a meeting that I hosted and I didn't understand why. I was like, why is nobody talking? Why is nobody contributing this? We were trying to essentially build a new strategy, and I was like, why am I the only one talking? I'm so frustrated. That was when I was like, okay, It's my fault. I realize that I didn't set the agenda for the meeting. I didn't have an outcome for the meeting. I didn't even give anyone information about what the meeting was about. They barely even know. So how could I expect more from them than I would from myself? I think that if you ask those questions, right, who really needs to attend the meeting? Do you need to attend the meeting? Do you need to attend the whole meeting? Who's going to set the pre-work for the meeting? And then who— what is the outcome of the meeting? If you ask those questions, your meeting is going to be good. If you can ask those and answer them with reasonable points. If not, then the answer is probably that you don't need a meeting, you need to do something else, or maybe you have a discussion with just one person. Next time, or even looking into next week when you're planning meetings or looking at what's on your calendar, think about it. Look at them. Do they have outcomes? What are they there for? Why are you talking to these people? Reasonable questions to ask when you're dedicating a lot of time and resources. Okay, so ask yourself those questions, review your calendar for the next few weeks. Let me know what you think. If you want more videos like this, go ahead, hit subscribe, and I will see you on the next one.
