Marathon Meetings
July 27th, 2007
Have you ever had a marathon meeting? I have one with my eSlide partners every month. We have been doing it for over five years. We’re in the meeting support business, and this makes it difficult to have our own meetings. The problem is that since most of the week we are dealing with challenging client meeting deadlines, it leaves us very little time to meet ourselves.
It started out as just being a Friday night meeting, because it is the only night of the week that we don’t have production deadlines to meet the next morning – most of the Friday work is usually due Monday morning.
For a small company we take our meetings very seriously. Designing and developing presentation visuals for some of the biggest and most successful companies in the world, we have learned from some of the biggest and the best. We always have an agenda, objectives, usually a few slides, budget numbers, AP/AR, cash reports, client updates, a long list of challenges and new business development ideas. We fly in our management consultant from Chicago to assist in facilitating progress, and success.
Our consultant, Barry Moltz guides us through the perils and challenges of building a small businesses. He’s sometimes the meeting facilitator, business coach, financial consultant, and referee. I think he was surprised at first, at the dedication of the management team. After a typical week of late nights and little sleep, we were still willing to start a meeting at 6 or 7pm on a Friday night and meet until we completed our agenda/objectives, sometimes meeting until 3 or 4 in the morning.
The meetings were and can still be long, intense, serious, and always productive with some rare, but occasional fun. I believe we have good meetings due to a fair amount of pre-planning, detailed written agendas, and notes about any of the major issues to be covered. We also make good use of projected visuals that keep us all focused on the same shared information. Most important we share information that we hope will lead us to the next level of success.
And sometimes we have had to review and redefine what success is for us. After a few years, eSlide was financially successful on the books with money in the bank and zero debt, but had absorbed our lives. It was almost absurd having discussions about Quality of Life issues at 4am Saturday morning. It seemed QOL issues were more like GAL, Get-A-Life issues.
After many QOL discussions, suggested solutions, tries, and implementations, I have a life outside of eSlide. I work from home one day per week, leave the office at a more reasonable time, get to see and spend more time with my family and friends. We’ve hired more people, adjusted our prices and operating hours. And now, I almost have time to write this blog.
Our monthly marathon management meeting now starts at 2pm and ends around 9 or 10pm. Last month was the first time in five years that it ended early enough to go out to dinner instead of ordering in. Progress continues. Maybe someday we’ll be able to move the meeting to Monday and finish by 6pm. I’ll be sure to put this new meeting schedule challenge on tonight’s agenda.