Each of my companies has daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual meetings.

Each type of meeting has different goals, and not everybody is part of every meeting, but EVERY meeting is run a specific way and I firmly believe that EVERY MEETING results in growth for my companies.

Now it wasn’t always like that…

I remember reading a book, YEARS AGO when I was just starting in business, and the guy who wrote it said how great MEETINGS are to an organization but the tips he gave for running a meeting were so general and vague that they didn’t work for me.

In fact, that first year of running meetings was like pulling teeth with my team. They’d all show up, but they all hated showing up and after the meetings they were no more productive than before.

And that’s the way it was in my business for over a year. But I kept running meetings because I wanted to grow.

And eventually I started tweaking the meeting process, and with every small change we got better (our revenue went up, our productivity went up, and our team started taking ownership of key tasks – and because of that we grew – a LOT).

Now flash forward 20 years, and I’ve built dozens of leadership teams in my companies, and I’ve also sat-in on meetings with companies I advise who are doing a few million dollars a year to companies doing billions of dollars a month and…

Every Successful Meeting I’ve Run Or Sat-In On Includes These 5 Things

If you add ANY ONE of these to YOUR meetings, they’ll become an accelerant to your growth.

The 1st rule that’s common among all successful meetings is that everyone needs to know in advance Where and When the meeting is, What exactly will be covered, Who’s going to be in attendance, and How to come prepared.

That’s all automated by creating a simple Meeting Agenda and sending it out before the meeting.

In my companies – the agenda gets sent out:

• 2 weeks before annual meetings
• or 2 days before quarterly and monthly meetings
• or 24 hours before weekly and daily meetings

And when you create and send out a simple, yet clear agenda covering those things, people come prepared, and they come ready to participate.

The 2nd rule is that all meetings begin with a REVIEW of the agenda (and ground rules like no phones), and we follow the agenda closely during the meeting, because that trains people to stick within time frames as opposed to getting into conversations that are either not important to the meeting, or that are not important to EVERYONE in the meeting (so if there’s a topic 2 people need to discuss more, but the whole team is not needed for, then those 2 people agree to Take it Offline and meet after the meeting to discuss it together).

Take it Offline is a term we use a lot in meetings for ANYTHING that’s best discussed after the meeting because it takes our focus off of the important topics we NEED to delve into in order to keep the company (and everyone on the team) moving forward.

The 3rd rule is that all meetings start and end ‘on-time’.

Nobody should ever show up late. In fact, everyone should get an email and text reminders the morning of the meetings, then 15 minutes before it begins, and if someone arrives late, DO NOT RECAP what the team covered so far because if you do, you send the message that it is okay to be late for meetings and waste valuable time.

So if Mary shows up late, we don’t stop the meeting to find out where she was, cover what we spoke about so far, and make sure she’s comfortable! No, we keep up with the agenda, and if an important member comes in late (once), just assign someone to bring them up to date after the meeting is over.

…and if someone NEEDS to miss a meeting due to an emergency, request their notes/reports ahead of time so you can review their work and use their notes during the meeting, as if they’re there. Otherwise the entire team is slowed down because they’re missing key numbers of notes from the missing team member.

The 4th rule is that all in-house meetings (which would be our daily, weekly and monthly meeting) are run in a room that has no distractions, and is set up for the meeting (with paper, pens, whiteboard, waters, etc.)

In fact, we don’t even allow food in those meeting, and when we have food in our quarterly and annual meetings, we always cater it so WE DECIDE when to bring the food in so it’s less distracting.

That goes for skype callers as well. If a team member is a vendor calling in from out of the country, they need to be on video and there’s no food allowed on their end either.

We need to be able to see them clearly because when someone is on video, they’re less likely to get distracted by email or kids or anything else that takes their focus off of our team meeting.

Small things like this make a huge difference in determining if the meeting is going to bring the team closer together and GROW THE COMPANY or if it’s going to be a struggle to run.

And if possible, you should assign a note taker. But even if you don’t have a note taker, within the same day of the meeting everyone should receive a summary of the decisions made and action items assigned to each person.

The 5th rule is that all meetings should be focused on KEY METRICS. And every team member should know the company key metrics (what’s most important to the company) AND their own key metrics that – when achieved, help the company to meet or exceed its key metrics.

Now there’s a lot of other components to great meetings like being sure to recognize team members who are exceeding their goals because people work insanely hard for positive recognition, and also knowing what kinds of questions to consistently ask…

My team knows that EVERY meeting they’ll be asked 3 questions:
1. What have you achieved so far this week?
2. What are you focused on today (every team member knows they need to have a list of the top 5 things they need to accomplish that day to help the company reach its daily targets)?
3. What’s the biggest obstacle to achieving those 5 things?

By asking those questions to each person in every meeting, eventually they start to come prepared with better and better answers, and then they start to answer those questions before I even ask them, and that’s because they’ve changed their thought process.

When that happens, the results your team gets will become noticeably bigger!

Running team meetings is simple when you set yourself up for success.

If you’re growing and you’re interested in getting a customized blueprint showing the FEW actions that can create the greatest growth in YOUR business right now, so you can scale faster, get more growth, make more money and have more profit, then grab the Built To Grow blueprint for free.

You’ll see how to get more lift and scale in your business right now, and for a limited time, it’s 100% free.

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