4 meetings that matter

As I stated in a previous newsletter: when I heard Verne Harnish say that leaders should spend 80% of their time on market facing activities, I fully committed.

I’ve since tried to spend 4 days per week with clients; on sales and marketing; or on recruitment. I probably managed 3 days each week, but given that a lot of the conversations I have with agency leaders are about helping them to make enough time to invest maybe 1 or 2 days per week on the things that matter, this seems like pretty good going.

Aiming to spend 1 day per week running the business is not a lot of time, so I chaired (or co-chaired) 4 weekly meetings that covered most things within my remit (sales, client service, strategy, operations - including HR and IT - and the general responsibilities of ownership).

You likely have different responsibilities. Your agency might not yet be of a size to do this. But I do think there are one or two things you might want to co-opt from my schedule from when Rise at Seven was scaling at its fastest.

Other than these 4 meetings…

Most of the time I spent with my direct supports was at lunch; in the car; in the pub; or in some other place where we’re just as likely to be social as we are to talk business. Since this newsletter is mostly read by business owners, you’ll instinctively know that those two things and now one and the same. I try to provide constant feedback and do my best to make sure my people know where they stand at all times so, while formal one-to-ones did occasionally happen, they were generally unnecessary.

When non-recurring meetings had to happen (e.g. passing on feedback or updating people on something), I stole my approach from Vicky Finn, my manager at Pendragon PLC: the meeting would be called “15 minutes on…” or, sometimes, “30 minutes on…” and the description would contain the bullet point agenda. That helped to keep the contents private and make sure the participants knew what we would be talking about.

I had a brilliant Executive Assistant, Ella, who could get away with being bad cop and still be well liked: she refused to add me to meetings without an agenda, for example, and would frequently ask the employee who wanted to meet with me whether “this is absolutely something Stephen should be dealing with”.

(It’s worth noting how different this approach is to the Slack-based approach many agencies have, where the owner is basically begging to be bothered with absolutely everything.)

Meeting #1: weekly SLT check-in

On a Monday afternoon, the senior leaders at Rise at Seven got together. This happened after the management meeting (which I didn’t go to), so whoever was chairing that meeting (usually Nick Hussey, our Chief Operating Officer) would report back on issues. We’d attempt to talk about our progress towards the agency's priorities (each senior leader owned an action or two, lasting a whole quarter, which we called a Rock - each quarter, that senior leader needed to update the whole business on whether they’d done it or not) but generally we’d just chat about the goings on.

As the owner, this is my peer group: my friends within the business who know best what we’re going through and who generally clean up the mess we’re inevitably making in pursuit of scale. So this meeting could be fairly social. The group included several of the aforementioned direct supports, so most of the conversations we had one-to-one were in social settings.

Meeting #2: the money meeting

Once per week, everyone with sales responsibilities got together to talk through the pipelines (we had two: new business and cross-sell). We’d pull up the CRM and go through the kanban board from right to left over the course of half an hour, asking where each deal was at, and peer pressuring everyone to keep things moving. When you ask for something one-to-one, it’s a lot easier to make excuses or let someone get away with not doing something than it is when a whole team of people are holding you accountable.

Plus, at the time we had a distributed sales team, meaning that qualified opportunities were handed off to the department heads to lead, rather than a centralised sales department managing everything (we had a full time BDM and a part-time BDE). This was necessary because a) our pitch was expertise led and used some elements of Challenger, meaning we wanted people who were the most knowledgeable in the room to own the deal; b) sales was a cultural cornerstone at Rise at Seven and was celebrated (our company values were stolen from The Wolf of Wall Street, for example); and c) I can remember occasions where we had three pitches simultaneously in different rooms in the office, which necessarily required a wider group of people able to pitch. A decentralised structure is not right for everyone (and if it’s something you have and feel like it’s holding you back; or something that you want to move to; that’s something we should talk about).

The idea for this meeting was stolen from Ben Horowitz’s book What You Do Is Who You Are, which basically highlights that your people will prioritise the things that you seem to bang on about the most. As a result, the money meeting sometimes happened twice in one week.

Initially, we had a separate meeting with the operations team to prepare them for work that might come in, so that we knew whether we had capacity; and a separate meeting with the Head of Finance to tell him what’s likely to need invoicing; after doing a calendar audit, we realised that all of these people could get what they needed in this one session so, against common wisdom, we held a weekly meeting that had, on average, 12-15 attendees because we found it to be more efficient…

Meeting #3: RAG status

Two of my direct supports were our Client Partners (similar to Group Account Directors): they each had ultimate responsibility for half of the clients we had relationships with (again, “pod” structures are increasingly popular, so if that’s something on your agenda, we should talk) and updated a single spreadsheet weekly, which we called the “Client Bible”.

The Client Bible held an enormous amount of information, such as:

• A link to the contract
• The client’s contact information
• Our personnel on the account
• What the client was paying for, in tick boxes, so we could easily filter by department

…but it began with 6 colour coded columns (after the name, which read Client - Project, since we sometimes had multiple projects for the same business). The themes of the columns were:

• Are we on track to hit KPI by the deadline?
• Are we getting things done? (Could be our problem or the client’s, the effect is the same)
• Is the relationship good right now?
• Is the client’s business performing? (It doesn’t matter if we’re fulfilling the contract if the client is running out of cash)
• Is the client open to cross-selling? (It doesn’t matter if there’s a live opportunity; rather if we had something to talk to them about, would they be receptive).

Green means everything is fine (obviously); amber means there are concerns, but it’s under control; red means serious corrective action is needed or we’re going to miss.

The sixth column was the contract end date, conditionally formatted: if it was 6 months away or longer, it was green; 3-6 months went amber; and within the next 3 months was red.

This meeting was not for me to rescue the Client Partners: my assumption at all times is that the two extremely capable we had in those roles had everything in hand and that they would tell me at any point if they needed me to make something happen. Sometimes an action was for me to check in with a client; sometimes it was to move a blocker internally. But, for the most part, this meeting was our early warning system: are contracts going to be renewed or not?

Meeting #4: All Rise

Last thing on a Friday, Blue’s All Rise played in every office (which was absolutely Thierry’s contribution, not mine), signalling that everyone should grab a drink if they wanted one and gather round the screens.

We’d run through what was good and bad that week; plus what we could expect the following week; and general updates that everyone needed to know (which would be followed up on email and Slack, while we still used it). This would cover:

• New starters the following week (bearing in mind we had a new starter most weeks, reaching 110 people in our first 30 months) and leavers
• Pitches we’d had this week and would have next week, plus wins and losses
• Shout outs based on our values, nominated by the team
• HR policy updates (which happened maybe once a month, especially as we invested in a team of 4 people)
• Social events
• Q&A

The meeting would be chaired by a member of the SLT and we’d take it in turns. It probably lasted 20 minutes and we were done. We’d do a much longer version of All Rise, with team updates and fairly open book financial information, once per quarter (which we usually attached to a social event).

In general, we approached communication like great sports teams do (according to Sam Walker’s book The Captain Class) - frequent touch points and course correction. We wanted the senior leaders to speak to the whole team across offices and countries at least once per week, for example, and remind everyone what we were trying to do.