From Chaos to Clarity: Transform Your Team Meetings for Better Results

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, your go-to podcast for eliminating random acts of strategy and marketing in your highway construction business. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm a third-generation asphalt contractor and an absolute brand strategy and marketing geek.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter Podcast. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. Here on the podcast, we dive into the ins and outs of running successful asphalt businesses. Today, we're going to be talking about an essential aspect of running a business that often gets overlooked: Managing and structuring your business meetings inside of your company to ensure that you and your team stay on track with your growth strategy at every level throughout the entire year without everybody being sunk in meetings when we know we need to be out in the field, taking action, engaging with clients, all the things we need them to be focused on.

This is going to be jam-packed, but before we dive in, make sure that you hit subscribe to the podcast. I want to make sure that as I connect with people when I'm having conversations with clients and then creating great content to help you guys, that you're actually getting access to it. I want this to land in your hands and I want it to help you grow your businesses.

Also, a resource that we've created that you absolutely should get your hands on is our Growth Strategy Assessment Tool. It takes less than 10 minutes and it's going to tell you are you on track and where do you need to be focused in order to grow your business?

If you're ready to know where you need to be focusing your attention, which is always the first step, take the assessment. It's at storybuilt.marketing/assessment. We're going to have a link for that in the show notes for you.

All right, in today's episode, it's going to be jam-packed with actionable insights about how to implement and manage a really structured meeting system. This has the power to keep your asphalt business on track with its strategic goals and ensure that every team member is aligned and laser-focused on driving growth.

They know how they can impact it and they know what their priorities are in any coming week or day. I'll be sharing a proven meeting framework that includes different types of meetings, like annual quarterly reviews, quarterly strategic updates, monthly OKR reviews, bi-weekly tactical sprint plans, and weekly standups.

Each type of meeting serves a unique purpose. When this is done right, it can significantly impact your business, keep you informed, keep information going streams so that your team can perform, and keep relevant information coming upstream about how that performance is going, what the metrics look like, helping you make better strategic decisions.

Let's kick things off with the annual quarterly review meeting. This meeting is held once a year, typically in January, but it can be any time of year depending on when you want to put and roll out your strategic plan.

It should involve somebody that is equipped to be the strategic advisor, a strategic planner, or the owner that has that ability to really manage and roll out that strategic plan.

Sometimes I show up with my clients as that advisor in that strategic plan. I'm somebody that has that background in the industry, I have a non-objective point of view, and I can put time into analyzing this stuff and be a partner in helping those business owners build that.

Some business owners do this just themselves. We actually recently did a webinar walking through our entire process. Make sure that you are following us. We'll probably put a link to where you can get that in our show notes as well.

The main goal of this meeting is to review and approve the annual strategic plan. This meeting should be short. It should be sweet, around 60 to 90 minutes. Usually as you're getting started, it may take a little bit more.

But if the person leading the meeting can stay on task and if the prep work designing the strategic plan has been done leading up to this event, then it should run really smoothly.

After you've been doing this for a few years, it should not be a problem to hold this to 60 minutes. Like I said, you've built the strategic plan leading up to this. You may have had a few check-ins and doing this for the first time, it's really a great idea to have somebody supporting you through the process and helping you get a really honest birds-eye view of your business, the market that you're in, and applying some data to this.

Thanks to the preparation that you've done in advance, here's exactly what an annual quarterly review meeting looks like. You might have a quick welcome introduction, setting the stage, getting everybody ready to go, letting them know how it's going to roll out, should take less than five minutes.

Next, you overview the annual strategic plan. This should take 20 minutes. One thing that you need to understand about a strategic plan is when you start the research, investigation, looking at the market, looking at competition, the abilities and SWAT of your company, the team capabilities, all of those things, you end up with a ton of information.

A really good strategic plan, what makes it great is distilling it down to what really matters, given the moment that you guys are at, the market that you're in, and the objectives that you want to attain.

It should be able to be reviewed quickly in 20 minutes at this point because you've already done that work and you've weeded out the less important stuff. You've figured out what needs to be the priority and the focus.

Next, you would shift into a departmental localized plan. One of the things that is a critical step that most people do not take in their strategic planning is localizing it into their department and their individuals.

This also should have happened in that strategic planning preparation leading up to this. But you want to review what does that plan look like in every single department. Based on the top-line measures, based on the company objectives, what is each department's objective and what are the KRs for those departments? We call this localization. This also should take no more than 20 minutes. It will depend on how many departments you have inside of your organization.

Next, you're going to shift to discussion and feedback. Since we've done all the preparation, we are really doing a high-level overview. This has primarily been approved, but it's an opportunity for all the departments to be in the same place and have that final input all sitting in the room together.

So if there's any final things that need to be discussed or feedback that needs to be put on the table, this is the time to do it. Then you approve it and move on to the next steps, knowing that this has been approved and we are moving forward with this as our plan.

We know that on a quarterly basis, we might need to tack this elbow a little bit and we'll talk about that when it comes to the next meeting that we're going to talk about. But we have to have a plan in place and everybody has to be on board.

Let's talk about what that second meeting looks like. It's a quarterly meeting and we call it the quarterly strategic plan progress and update meeting. These meetings take place at the end of each quarter. They include the strategic advisor, the business owner, key stakeholders, and department leaders.

The focus here is to review your monthly metrics. You will have been tracking stuff from some of the meetings that we're going to be talking about so you'll see how that moves upstream so that you have this data and information in front of you.

It's also going to address any blockers that are coming back upstream from the team that are maybe keeping them from having success, getting in their way. Any shifts in the market or competition or product issues that you're having as you roll things out or as you're delivering to your clients or your customers.

These are all things that need to come up during this quarterly strategic plan progress and update. If there are going to be minor quarterly shifts, this is where that information needs to come onto the table and needs to be evaluated. This is where we make those necessary strategy adjustments.

Let me just tell you a little bit about what this meeting would look like. I like to see these meetings once again be very, very effective, no more than 60 minutes. Hold yourself to this, have an end time so that your team feels like you're valuing their time, you're organized and prepared, and you're rolling this out quickly.

Once again, we start with opening remarks. You're covering the agenda, letting them know what is going to happen in the next 55 minutes, that's the first five minutes. Then You review the monthly metrics. You should have a dashboard in place. You should know what metrics based on your strategic plan and that localization plan you are looking at and measuring for progress.

You should be able to benchmark those every single quarter and you should be able to take 15 minutes to review these because you have a nice clear dashboard in place that you're not just looking at quarterly, you’re looking at all the time so you're very familiar with this and you can review this quickly in 15 minutes.

Also, moving upstream is information about blockers that are getting in the team's way and also team wins. This should also be documented coming up from that localized level and we should be able to review this in 15 minutes. We want to lean into the wins and we want to solve the blockers.

We want to make sure if there's something that's consistently getting in our team’s way from success, how do we eliminate it, how do we work around it, turn it to our advantage? What is that? We have to know what those are, and this is the time where those are put on the table.

Then based on those, then we shift into the next 10 minutes being what are the needs to overcome those blockers to amplify the wins? We give ourselves 10 minutes for that. We can always have breakout meetings if necessary at this point, but we want to hold ourselves to this agenda and then set up breakout meetings if that's necessary.

I love it when my localized teams have the power to make changes. So if at the top level, they've given us the information, they've told us what's blocking, they've told us what their wins are, we can generate some ideas, but I like to see them solve these at the department level, come up with their own recommendations first.

That doesn't mean that there can't be some back and forth and you're not going to have final say and insight into that, but we want to empower our teams and who should know better. If the right people are in the right roles in your company, they should know their roles better than anybody.

The next 15 minutes is strategy adjustments. Are we going to be making any adjustments on the higher level? Not necessarily the localized level because we want that to happen at a little bit lower level. Then closing remarks, wrap it up, moving into next steps.

Let's talk about what the third meeting looks like. We call this a monthly department leaders OKR or metric review meeting. Really, it's a department-level monthly metric review meeting.

Held on the last Friday of the month, typically, but it really once again can be whatever works for your company to logically be doing this. Then these meetings should include a strategic advisor, department leaders, and the owner.

The aim is to quickly review the progress and identify any of those blockers. This is where I said is a great opportunity to be addressing those coming up with the actual tactics to get around things that are getting in their way, to amplify wins, and to make small pivotal adjustments that still keep us aligned with the top strategic objectives of the company.

What this looks like when it's rolled out or an agenda is the first five minutes we talk about what we're here to do and the purpose of the meeting. It's always good to review the purpose and the top-line measures and objectives of the company.

Then we look at a progress review. Where did we expect to be at this time of the year and where are we currently at? Once again, your metric dashboard is going to play a really key role in this.

Then on that localized department level, you get into the blockers, the wins, the things that are going to require that you make minute shifts in order to keep the strategic plan on focus and moving forward and progressing.

Then you wrap it up and you create action items. This is where things start getting much more tactical at this level when you're at that department level and the monthly level. You're actually going to have action items coming from there. You may even have revised or updated objectives for the department if you find that metrics aren't working or they weren't set high enough.

Moving on to the next meeting. This is a bi-weekly department tactical sprint planning meeting. What does this look like? These meetings happen typically on every other Monday and they should involve a strategic advisor or team leaders at minimal.

You have to have the department leaders in this meeting. I'm usually, for my clients, meeting with them on a bi-weekly basis, and we call this the sprint planning meeting. It's where every department really decides what is our focus, what are we accomplishing over the next two weeks, and we call this a working sprint.

What tactics are the team deploying? What are the things that we're going to make sure that we get accomplished? What are our top priorities? Two weeks seems to be a really nice fit because you can keep a team focused during that time period, you get much past that and they start to lose focus or start chasing shiny objects. So I really like the two-week sprint method. The main goal here is to create a tactical plan for the next two weeks.

Here's what the structure and agenda for this meeting looks like. Once again, opening an overview of the company objectives for the first five minutes, then we review what I use in my strategic plans as a functional mission statement.

This is really what the company plans to do, buy when it's going to do it, and why it matters. This is really nice to refresh people over and over again on a localized level. Functional mission statements are meant to drive our actions, meant to drive results.

They are updated annually for fast-growing companies or new companies. Sometimes they're changed quarterly or once or twice throughout the year depending on fluctuations in your market or if you need to set shorter-term functional mission statement objectives and then reset them again later in the year.

But it's really great if your team is always reminded what this is. It helps them connect to their department objectives and to the daily activities that they're doing, and it helps them really visualize how they, in particular, make an impact at the very top level.

Then we go into a current status update. What's been happening, what was working, and what do we need to be doing next? That moves into sprint planning. We actually have forms that we use to help people plan their next few weeks, set their priorities, anticipate anything that might be coming up that could get in the way of this, asking for any help as they're planning that out, and then closing remarks.

The next meeting is our weekly department stand-up meetings. These are short, they are designed to be done with everybody standing on their feet, there's no need to have a meeting room and sit down.

These are focused meetings that happen every Monday morning and they include the department leaders and their team members. They serve as a quick check-in to discuss what are your wins, what are your blocks, reminding them of their priorities, so always reviewing those priorities.

Here's what this agenda looks like. First off, you do that opening, talking about your department objectives and maybe reminding them about any priorities that were rolled out for the two-week sprints, and then updates.

So you want updates, that's the next 15 minutes from every single person in that department, which gives you a nice comprehensive department update. Then is there anything that is going to be getting in your way this week?

Is there anything unexpected that is showing up on your calendar, anything that on a project is going wrong, a piece of equipment that's giving you problems, something like that, because this is the time to get ahead of that.

We know these things all happen throughout the week, but this is a really good time if there's anything that we're anticipating for everybody on the team to be aware of. These are great opportunities that I find once we're doing these last two meetings, the weekly department stand-ups, and the two-week sprints.

This is where you also see the magic happen. People are sharing what's working, what's not working. The things that are working, we can actually start distributing across our team, learning from each other, but also sometimes we can solve each other's problems and the things that are slowing us down are getting in the way.

The last thing that I'm going to talk about is individual bi-weekly sprint planning. I like to do this inside of those bi-weekly meetings, but I wanted to mention it separately. Sometimes if your company is bigger, you have too many people involved in that, it gets really hard to keep that bi-weekly sprint meeting on track and still be able to touch everybody's individual bi-weekly sprints.

Like I said, we actually have templates that we give to our clients that we use when we're managing these meetings for them that they can use as a personal priority one-pager that each individual can fill out for these bi-weekly sprint periods.

For two weeks, they can keep this right in front of them in a planner, they can make it digital so that they can be looking at it if they're out and about moving around on job sites. It lists the company department. It talks about the top-line objectives, department objectives, and their personal priorities and action items.

If your company is a little bit bigger and it's starting to feel like those bi-weekly meetings are taking too long, this is something that once you get your team trained in this process, they can start doing on their own, but we want to make sure that there's always transparency between the department leader and whoever they report to, and this.

You might want this in a Google document or some document that you can actually see and they can go back and forth. A manager or a department lead, part of their responsibility in keeping the progress of really managing a strategic plan, keeping everybody on task, should be that they're checking these every single time.

They know what is on every single individual that they're in charge of, they know what's on their priority one-pager. They understand what problems might be getting in their way.

They understand what actions that person is going to be taking over the next two weeks so that they can also make sure that there are no red flags and that it's on track and that they're that second level of litmus testing making sure that, yep, this aligns with the department objectives. It aligns with the company's overall objectives. It aligns with the metrics that we've lined out for our department and for the company at large. It's driving those top-line measures forward.

You're almost litmus testing all the way back up this process. As you're gathering metrics in the monthly meetings, those are reporting back up to the quarterly meetings.

As you can see, all of this moves downstream and back upstream like a full circle all the time. It really empowers your team on a localized level. It frees up top leaderships, stakeholders, and department leaders to be able to focus on things that they need to be focused on, and it gives clarity to your team.

We know that teams really like to perform and be engaged in companies that have clarity that they feel like they are making an impact on those top-line measures. This gives them a clear vision of what those top-line measures and objectives are and how they directly impact them in a way that's easy for them to manage, stay connected with, and it makes it so much easier for you to manage.

By holding to these agendas and to these time frames, you can keep your meetings on track, they don't become overwhelming, but you always feel informed. Having a structured meeting system in place can transform the way your asphalt business operates. It ensures clear communication, aligns efforts towards company objectives, and it helps in tracking and adjusting strategies as needed.

To see how well business meetings are aligned in your growth strategy, take the Growth Strategy Assessment that I mentioned earlier. Take it today. It's going to help you identify and focus on the right things in your business while you're busy growing your business. It's going to give you a little bit of clarity and help you dial in. Make sure that you grab that assessment and take that. It's at storybuilt.marketing/assessment.

Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of The Contractor's Daughter. Stay tuned for more valuable insights and practical tips to help you run a successful asphalt business. Until next time, keep paving the way to success in your business.

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Contractor's Daughter. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and review. But most of all, share this with all of your friends, partners, and customers in the highway construction business. Thank you for building the infrastructure that we all rely on.