"this meeting could have been an email"

Long before the widely popular meme started to make its rounds on the internet – I had my own “this meeting could have been an email” moment. And it forever changed the way I look at meetings at Organize 365.

Unfortunately, when I concluded that the meeting I was in could have been an email – I was not the employee in the meeting…I was the business owner running the meeting.

The meeting was supposed to last 30 minutes and we were in hour 2 (yes- HOUR 2) of the meeting and NO decisions had been made, yet. There was no end in sight. 

Let me set the stage for you so you can understand what a costly mistake this was:

At the end of 2017, I hired seven people in seven weeks to make visible the invisible things that had been in my head and spoken on the Organize 365 podcast for years – like the Sunday Basket®, Friday Workbox, The Paper Solution® Binders, and The Productive Home Solution®. I had been talking about these products and courses for years and it was time to bring them to life with the help of my new team. The seven people who joined the team were all contractors that had been hired for anywhere from 5-10 hours per week.

I was such a novice leader and manager so I didn’t understand the value or even know how to prepare for meetings (whether one-on-one, in small groups, or with the whole team). I would often call a meeting EVERY. SINGLE. WEEK. All these contractors were joining at their contractor rates and then I would verbally process through what was done, what needed to be done, and what needed to be done after that.

In hindsight, I now realize that my lack of clarity in these meetings meant that the contractors were probably leaving these meetings with more questions than answers. They would raise questions that I didn’t have answers to, and I was left to go back to the drawing board before my team could even start to make good on my dreams.

You may be the contractor working with a business owner who is not clear on what they want yet, they just know they want it done. Or maybe you are the business owner who is reading this thinking – oh yeah that’s me.

It was about a year later that I started to hone my meeting skills. I started to segment my team and spend as much time (or MORE) planning for meetings as I did conducting them. 

There’s no way around meetings. If you want to start gaining traction and grow your team and your business to be bigger than you – you’re going to have to get good at meetings. They don’t have to all be “all hands on deck” meetings and they can’t all be emails. Each meeting has a different role to play inside of the ecosystem as a business. 

At Organize 365 we have identified the meeting structures that are essential for teams of 15 or less. 

I hope you’ll join us in the 2024 Friday Workbox Meeting Agenda Course to learn how effective meetings can help you win and grow your business in 2024. Meetings are expensive; and through this course, you’ll learn how to make the most of these valuable opportunities with your team.

Lisa Woodruff and Stefanie Ardoin team up to bring you the Friday Workbox Meeting Agenda Course, to help you get the most out of your team and show you how to effectively use meetings to drive results. This course is for learning, participating, and sharing.

Friday Workbox Meeting Agenda Course includes 4 live “Meeting Agenda Quarterly Planning Hours” per year starting at 2:00pm – 3:00pm ET on:

• Wednesday, November 22, 2024

• Friday, February 28, 2025
• Friday, May 30, 2025
• Friday, August 22, 2025
• Friday, November 21, 2025

This will allow you time to learn, use, and create habits for meetings.

Replays will be available to all registrants in your Organize 365 Dashboard.

*This event is nontransferable and nonrefundable.