How to Find an Extra 8 Hours Every Week. In Blackboard Fridays Episode 37, Jacob talks about Productivity. Need this implemented into your business? Talk to the international business advisor who can do exactly that – Contact Jacob, Learn More, or Subscribe for Updates.

Most business owners I speak with would like more money; EVERY business owner I speak with would like more time. So what separates those of us who always have enough time, from those who are always playing catch up?

The Momentum Meeting Schedule. Being too busy as a business owner generally means being too reactive – losing time, every day, by reacting to the needs of your team and your clients. Who knew that more meetings could save you time!

Now we know that bad meetings can be terrible time wasters, but as we discussed in Blackboard Fridays episode 28 blaming ‘meetings’ for a lack of productivity is like blaming ‘spoons’ for all the ice-cream you eat. Used properly, there’s power here.

And a proper meeting schedule – which we walk through in this episode – fast tracks communication and decision making across an organisation. Faster, more frequent communication allows you as a leader to be proactive instead of reactive.

Take back control of your time, to release you to do more of what you want in business.

In this week’s episode:

• What are the critical meetings every business needs
• Who will attend, how long will they run, and how often will you have them
• What flexibility or personalisation do you need to include

And stay tuned to the end where I connect your meeting schedule with your business lifecycle, to empower you to begin connecting different pieces of my proven advisory system and methodology.

Who is Jacob Aldridge, Business Coach?

“The smart and quirky advisor who gets sh!t done in business.” Back independent since 2019.

Since April 2006, I’ve been an international business advisor providing bespoke solutions for privately-owned businesses with 12-96 employees.

At this stage you have proven your business model, but you’re struggling to turn aspirations into day-to-day reality. You are still responsible for all 28 areas of your business, but you don’t have the time or budget to hire 28 different experts.

You need 1 person you can trust who can show you how everything in your business is connected, and which areas to prioritise first.

That’s me.

Learn more here. Or Let’s chat.

Transcript

Good morning. Most business owners would like more money, but every business owner I talked to would like more time.

The focus of this week’s episode is shifting your time management from being reactive to your team and client needs to be much more proactive and in control of your schedule. By following something aligned with the momentum meeting schedule, you will usually find an enormous amount of your time suddenly gets given back to you and that’s time that you can invest exactly where you want to be investing in within the business.

Now every business is different—this is not a one-size-fits-all, but it’s a good starting point for understanding where you need to be spending your time and where your team need to be spending their time. Meetings can feel like they are in fact a waste of time, but that’s generally because you’re doing the wrong things. You’re not running a solid agenda and you don’t have this consistency.

Now you’ll see first that I’ve broken these different meeting types into the different colors. Now this aligns with the roles and responsibilities video series we did blackboard Friday’s episode 7 & 8, where black is around creating wealth, Green is about growth, blue is about revenue, and red is your overhead administrative functions within the business.

The first reason I’ve seen meetings within a business falling apart is because they have agendas that bounced around between all those different colors. If you color code your agenda, you’ll very quickly realize that for example, you’re getting the leadership team together, the people who are helping you grow your business and yet you’ve got them talking about a whole lot of operational and administrative things, not the best use of their time.

By breaking up these different meetings, with different focuses, you can be a lot more productive from the existing meeting time that you’re doing. Now you as the business owner certainly don’t need to be in all these meetings. This varies a little bit.

In a small business, below say around 12 people, maybe you do and maybe some of these meetings need to be combined. You’ll find that the shareholders, the leadership team, and the salespeople are in fact the same two or three people.

Similarly, for much larger businesses, some of these meetings need to be broken down. Instead of having a single administrative process oriented red meeting each month, you might find you need an accounting team, and an administrative team, the legal team, all catching up in their own way to focus on improving the processes.

The one meeting I find most controversial and most helpful is the idea of an operational meeting every day. This All Hands are the very least all client-facing. Now I say that’s a five-to-fifteen-minute meeting. When you first start it, it will be enormously clunky. There’s a lot of communication that isn’t happening within your business and this daily meeting is designed to make sure that those messages are getting through.

So, the first few times you do it, there’ll be a lot of a backlog of conversation. Persevere with that clunky-ness with the fact that the first few may take 20 or 30 minutes.

The first few may not get through the whole agenda, because after two weeks you will start finding an enormous amount of momentum and speed in those meetings. Nobody wants to be sitting in that meeting when they could be out there working with clients, but by having that meeting, you find you suddenly get all those communication things but now are bouncing around slowly, taking time, mistakes are being made and all those things are adding up to being less of your time that you have available for where you want.

You as the business owner want to be spending time in the green and the black. So, the more you can get the blue and the red meetings running efficiently and regularly with a set agenda, the sooner you’ll have more time every week to grow your business. Now there’s one last connection that I want to make here to help you personalize this.

To start showing a little bit of how the businessDEPOT way, all these different pieces fit together into a coherent business system that I work with my clients to implement. If you go back to the very first blackboard Friday video, we talked about speed bumps Turtles and brick walls.

The different phases of the business lifecycle. Startup which is blue scale-up which is green, step up which is red, and sell up which is black. Where you are in your business will give an idea of which of those colors needs a little bit more of your attention. So, if you’re a startup business, you need to be spending more time running these kinds of blue meetings.

You don’t need to be spending as much time worrying about wealth of shareholders. Get out there and bring that revenue in.

Similarly, if you’re in that third phase that step up, that usually means a lot of the admin the process, the business support is falling around. You as a business owner are probably not the best person to fix that that your focus in starting to run and attend those meetings helps make those changes that then continue to drive the business forward.

Understanding some of these different frameworks, the different conversations, the different videos that we’re releasing here on a weekly schedule, how they all fit together will help you start to focus your activities and your time. As I say, every business owner would like more time.

Next Steps

Want to learn more about how this can apply to your business? It costs nothing to chat:

• Email me jacob@jacobaldridge.com (I read them all)
• Call, Text, or WhatsApp me +61 427 151 181
• Or just Subscribe https://jacobaldridge.com/about/subscribe-to-jacob-aldridge-com/ to stay in touch