Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Grow Show Powered by Steel. The Grow show is brought to you by Marty Grunder's Grow Group, where we specialize in teaching landscaping companies how to clarify their platform, grow their people, build their processes and realize profits. Everything we teach is grounded in real experience. Our team is actively involved in the day to day operations of Southwest Ohio's Grunder Landscaping Company. New episodes of the Grow show are released weekly on Wednesdays. Remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Filling in today from Marty Grunder is Grow Group Vice President Vince Torchia.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Hi everybody, Vince Torchia, Vice President of the Grow Group, here for another exciting episode of the Grow show Powered by Steel. It's spring. We're in the run. We're in the hundred days of victory. There's a lot going on in all of our companies and something I want to talk to you about today is the fact that when we are busy, one of the first things that seems to lose track of any company are effective meetings. So today I want to talk to you about what an effective meeting looks like. And I want to encourage all of you to stay the course, stay on track and keep your meetings going through a busy spring. So number one, before we have any meeting, we want to decide what is the purpose of this meeting? What are we here to do? Is there a mission statement for the meeting? Why are we having this? Right, there's that old adage, hey, this meeting could have been an email. How do we avoid that? We avoid that by saying this is why we're meeting. This is the point of it, right? Whether it's a sales meeting, an operations meeting, a leadership team meeting, a finance meeting, an admin meeting, an over under hours meeting, whatever the case may be, we have to think about why are we having this meeting. If we can't clearly articulate why we are having this meeting, then the meeting needs to go away or find some other way for the information that you are using in that meeting to be effective for other people. Which means, hey, maybe that meeting does need to become an email or, or a memo or a process or a check in somewhere else. So this spring, as you're looking at your meetings, number one, ask yourself, for all the meetings we have on our calendar, can I clearly articulate why we are having this meeting?
Number two, once we've decided why we're having it, we need to figure out what's the agenda, what are we covering, right? Who is covering what on this agenda and what do people need to either come prepared to discuss or, or no is going to be discussed at this meeting. So for that to be effective, the meeting needs to be set ahead of time. I'm somebody that thinks, hey, if you do it 24 hours in advance, you're probably in a good spot, right? Sometimes it can be 12 hours, 24 hours, whatever the case may be. But let's get that meeting out ahead of time. Let's give people an opportunity to review what's on there so they can start to think about, process and see what they might need to think about or come prepared to think about for this meeting, right? So that will be the topics we're going to cover. Who's supposed to be covering them, how much time we're going to be spending on each one of these topics, and if there's something really specific we need to cover, what is the goal of that conversation? It might be nice to know on the agenda, like, hey, we are leaving this meeting with this decision made, right? That is maybe the point of the meeting. But without an agenda, we don't know what to come prepared with. Some people don't like surprises. Some people really want to know what's going to be covered. Other people aren't that way. Right? Other people like to just show up for meetings and say, hey, what are we here to talk about? And that works well for them. But we can't be scheduling and preparing a meeting around that person. We have to be scheduling and preparing a meeting around the person who wants to know ahead of time what we're going to cover. So, number one, we talked about why we're having the meeting. Number two, we have a specific agenda for that meeting.
Third, we want to know what role everyone is playing in that meeting. Somebody's got to be keeping time. Somebody's got to be keeping us on the agenda. Somebody or some AI tool, right, has to be taking notes about what is being said. A personal frustration of mine, because I do it, I am guilty of it, is not pausing in a meeting to say, did we properly capture that action item? Or who is doing that? Or what am I doing as a result of this meeting? Because I get moving, I get excited, there's a lot to cover, and sometimes I blow right through who's doing what? And then you leave a meeting. And like, that was an awesome meeting, but who's doing what? What are they doing it by? What's our next action? What's the next thing that's happening? So somebody in the meeting, right? You know who that is based on your company, right? You can feel that from a skill set or Attitude, perspective, has to be able to hit the pause button, say, hey, great point, Vince, but who's doing that? Great point, Marty. What's the next action coming out of this? Right, so we need to have defined roles. And again, if you're looking for a place to start, think about somebody running the meeting, right? Like the owner or the facilitator of the meeting that are keeping track of what's happening on the agenda, keeping track of timing, keeping track of what we're covering, what we're not covering, pulling us out of those rabbit holes, right, that we like to go down, right? So that facilitator, owner of the meeting, who's going to be the note taker, it might be AI, right? That's fine. We use AI for our meetings too. It's great. But if we're not using AI, who's keeping track of that? Or who's at least setting up the AI to take the notes? And then again, who's going to be the person who's going to pause us and say, hey, what are we doing as action items? What's happening next? That person who can hit the pause button, slow everybody down for a minute and ask what are we doing as a result of this meeting?
We've got our why, we've got our agenda, we've got our roles for the specific meeting. Now we've got to talk about what are we actually doing in this meeting. Is this a meeting to make decisions? Is this a working meeting? Is this some combination of those two items? But we've got to be clear about when we're walking away. When we're done with this meeting, what do we expect to happen? What do we expect as a result? Sometimes meetings are just informative, right? It's kind of a one way update. This is what's happening. We're here to get on the same page, make sure everybody knows what's happening. This is informational. Sometimes meetings are decision meetings. Hey, we're all going to come prepared to talk about this one thing. We're all going to come prepared with our ideas and thoughts around this. We're leaving this meeting with a decision to be made as a result of it. We're not going to be on this meeting if we don't have a decision made. And sometimes meetings are working meetings. All we're going to do in this meeting is build the process for sales to production handoff. All we're doing in this meeting is coming together and we are resolving, deciding and rolling out our sales goals. What we're doing in this meeting is making a decision on the trucks, the fleet, the equipment, what we're buying for 2026. That is great. And by the way, there is no right answer or wrong answer to those meetings. The only wrong answer or the only wrong meeting is one where it's not clear what we're doing. Again, we've got to prepare these meetings for the people who want to be prepared, want to take notes, want to come ready to speak about them, and not for the person who's okay with there being no agenda or okay with there being no real accountability coming from those meetings. Okay, so again, clear purpose for the meeting. What's the agenda for the meeting? What's my role in the meeting? What is our attitude towards this meeting? Decisions, informational, communicative, working. What is the point of what we're doing here? And finally, the major point I want you all to think about as we're doing this is what do we need to do to ensure we have this meeting at the agreed recurring basis that we're having it?
Especially during spring, it becomes very easy to say, hey, I can't come to this meeting because I've got to meet with this important client. Hey, I can't come to this meeting because I got to go out on this job site. Hey, I really want to get this sold. I could take this person to breakfast, but I'll miss this meeting. I'd rather get this job sold. We'll figure it out. Beyond that, it becomes very easy this time of year to skip these meetings. So you, as an owner, as a team member, as a leader in an organization, need to say, we make commitments here. Commitments are part of what we do as an organization. Commitments build trust. When we have trust in our team, we're going to be more effective. Nothing breaks trust faster than not honoring commitments or breaking commitments that we've made to the team, even if it's for the right reasons that day, long term, there are consequences. So everyone has to have respect for those meetings. And if you find that a meeting is being disrespected in terms of people coming in late, not prepared, I look at yourself in the mirror and say, well, what am I doing? Am I not getting a clear agenda? Have I not made the roles clear? Have I not stated the case for why we have to have this meeting? Maybe I'm the problem here. Maybe we don't need this, or maybe there's a reason why no one respects this meeting, but we've got to look at ourselves first. And so the old adage, right, you've heard it from our ace facilitator, Jim Kalai. Babies and bleeding, that's the only reason why we're going to miss a meeting, right? Somebody's having a baby or somebody's bleeding. Otherwise we're going to keep having this meeting because this keeps the momentum moving forward. And when we have momentum, we can be more effective. When we have these meetings, we can save them, we can slot them into the conversation that needs to happen. We're not interrupting one another, we're doing our work because we have an opportunity right when we're all together in the same place at the same time to work through and talk through this solution together. So that is my challenge to you for this spring. Keep your meetings, whether it be a one on one meeting, a weekly meeting, a monthly meeting, a quarterly meeting, whatever the case may be, stick to your meetings. You all know the easy answer is to cancel things. The hard answer is to rearrange your schedule and your priorities around the skeleton of meetings that you already have, because that's what's better for the team. And I want your team to be on your mind next time you want to change a meeting or cancel a meeting. Don't think about yourself, think about the team and think about what you can communicate in that meeting to ensure that we are in a more effective organization going forward.
So for those that are curious about what meetings you maybe should be having on a weekly basis, there's three areas of every organization that need to be successful. Op, sales and finance and admin. Those should be meetings that we're having on a weekly basis, right? What are we doing to some more work? What are we doing to schedule the work and perform the work that we've already scheduled? And what are we doing from a finance or admin standpoint to support the rest of the organization? We use a sales meeting and an ops meeting. And then we have a bit of a crossover where we have a sales and production meeting, where that's mostly a schedule. Look, what work is scheduled, what work is being completed, what's going on with the schedule, how does that affect ops? How does that affect sales? At a minimum, we should be having a monthly review once financials are closed for a month to talk in detail about where money went, where it was expensed, what was sold, what was earned, and giving everybody, from a management and leadership team perspective, an idea about financially how we are doing on a quarterly basis. We always look for teams and leaders to take a step back, think about, hey, what went well last quarter, what's Coming up next quarter, how are we taking a step back as an organization to work on our business for a couple days, a quarter and not in our business? And finally write the mother load of them all, the weekly one on ones to drive results with the people that you report to and those that report to you so that we can not only have time together to not interrupt each other's week, but to have that access from a personal one to one standpoint so that we can have momentum together. I can look at your body language, you can feel mine, and we can work through things together again, stealing it from our friend Jim Kalai. The perfect one on one is past, present, future. What did we cover last week? What are we covering this week? What's coming up next week? And so that allows you to have an open conversation with people on a weekly basis to be successful. If you have those meetings, if you know why we're having it, if you have the agenda, if you have the roles, if you have the reason that we're meeting and you have respect for that agenda and for that meeting, you will build momentum and you will move quickly. That's all for this week from Vince Torchia at the Grow Show Powered by Steel. Thanks for listening and we'll talk to you next week.
[00:11:53] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Grow Show. A special thanks to the folks at Steel whose support makes this podcast possible and whose outdoor power equipment makes our jobs easier every day. Remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode and head to growgroupinc.com to learn more about our other offerings or to find more information to help your landscaping business. We'll talk to you next week.
