Meet Like a Billionaire: 5 Tactics to Slash Meeting Times by 50 Percent
Posted Mar 11, 2024
Barry Raber, an Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO) member in Portland, Oregon, is president and CEO of Business Property Trust, a Portland-based real estate investment firm that owns and manages covered RV and self-storage in Arizona and Texas. As a thought leader who shares experiences for businesses at Real Simple Business, we asked Barry how he runs a successful company with minimal meetings.
Billionaires almost universally hate (and avoid!) meetings. Elon Musk says meetings are what happens when people aren't working. Mark Cuban calls them a complete waste of time. Although billionaires have the same number of hours in the day as the rest of us, they must be more deliberate about how they spend each minute, including meetings.
Harvard Business Review states that 71 percent of executives think meetings are unproductive and inefficient. My experience is that the longer a company exists, the more meetings are created -- almost like a cancer.
I reached out to successful entrepreneurs for insight. My research started with studying my organization's meeting behaviors and culminated in a survey of 20 business owners in the $1 million to $30 million revenue range, asking for details about their meeting habits. Here's what I learned.
The Biggest Culprit: Weekly Meetings
Let's focus on weekly meetings, the low-hanging fruit in my quest to eliminate unproductive meeting time. You'll need to perform some surgery, but oh wow, is it worth it! Bonus benefit: Your team will love you for it.
Start by killing the company holy grail -- the weekly staff meeting with a wide-ranging agenda. If it takes 60 to 90 minutes and includes most staff, it is a complete waste of time. Kill it, then bury it.
If that sounds radical, consider that any group discussion of four or more people does not belong in a weekly meeting. Further, don't call them "weekly meetings" anymore; say "meetups" instead. That captures the spirit of what I'm suggesting. When I hear "meetings," I envision large rooms of people kicking a subject around. If that happens every week in your company, you are setting time on fire.
Adopt these five rules to gain back half your time spent in meetings:
1. Eject topics that do not require weekly review. In my informal survey, the biggest issue involves the agenda. It often includes subjects that don't require weekly discussion, including sales, issues, problem identification and solving, key numbers, and initiative updates. All are important, but should be addressed bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly. I repeat: Group discussions do not belong in weekly meetings. Shrink it to a meetup.
2. Hand out hall passes. The next most common mistake? People who do not absolutely need to attend. Attendance is required only if it is essential to their job. If they don't make a material contribution or gain necessary information, they shouldn't be in the meeting. Emphasize the value of each team member's time: You don't want unnecessary meetings to hinder their priorities. The goal is a bare bones agenda and attendee list.
3. Follow the pizza rule. No big meetings allowed. Billionaire Ray Dalio says if two pizzas won't feed everyone in the meeting, it's a waste of time -- and he won't attend. Two large pizzas typically feed 10 people. Anything over 10 should be a team meeting, not a weekly occurrence. Less is best, both for people and agenda.
4. Leverage one-on-ones. Make check-ins with direct reports as short as possible, on Mondays. The two-question agenda is simple: What are you working on this week, and did anything happen last week that we need to talk about? Most check-ins will be 10 minutes or less; a few may stretch to 20 or 30 minutes. The purpose is to make sure they are working on the right things and get them unstuck when necessary.
5. Adopt the 10-minute rule. Weekly meetups necessary to keep the company moving forward should be no longer than 10 minutes. Establish a specific agenda that gets right to the point and covers only critical issues. My company has two 10-minute meetings. "In the Loop," where each lead shares three things they plan to accomplish that week, and "Greatest Hits," where each person shares two things that went well the prior week, plus one personal hit.
The overriding thought process: Get on a meeting diet and skinny things way down. When structured properly, meetings can be far more productive in a fraction of the time.
Re-Synch Your Meeting Rhythm
Even with these five rules, two facets of meetings still cause frustration: inefficiency and frequency. These happen when discussions are not organized into the right buckets or the meeting rhythm is wrong.
Topics unfit for weekly meetings are better suited to less frequent discussion. Use these guidelines to re-sync your meeting rhythm:
Monthly: Key performance number review; sales meetings.
Biweekly or monthly: Company initiatives and progress toward them should be discussed biweekly in growing companies, and monthly in mature ones. The same is true for issues and problem-solving. The popular Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), originating in the book Traction, suggests an hour of problem-solving every Monday. If your company faces that many weekly problems, you'll never make it! Plus, it lowers morale to start the week focused on problems. I like the EOS Identify-Discuss-Solve (IDS) method, but only biweekly or monthly with minimal attendees. Another issue: IDS does not address what is going right or why you should ideate about doing more of that. If IDS was monthly and addressed those factors, it would be far more effective.
Semi-annually: Forthcoming strategy; brainstorming around brand and direction; company-wide, in-person meetings.
Significant time savings on meetings come from getting the right frequency for the right topics, with the right people in the room. Ask your team to consider you a "meeting maverick" with a 10-minute time limit, then put on your hero cape and go to work.
Goodbye meetings, hello meetups. Your team and calendar will love you for it.