Setting The Right Meeting Cadence

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

I’ve worked with many first-time founders and CEOs over the years and sometimes they are surprised at how much hands-on management is required to keep everything on track. 

I get it. You create a company because you want to build a product or impact a market, but who wants chase down employees to make sure they get their work done? (I love solving those types of problems. But this is not about me, it’s about you!)

There’s a famous quote “Ninety percent of success in life is just showing up.” While that’s certainly overstated, there’s a case to be made that “Ninety percent of success is following up.”

Creating a regular, predictable meeting cadence can systematize followup and decrease the likelihood that important things fall through the cracks. You can ensure that steady progress is being made with less angst by gaining visibility and creating the opportunity to take action when things aren’t working as planned. Regular review meetings also inject discipline into the management team to measure results and take action on a timely basis. 

It Starts With The Annual Plan

At the broadest level, startups should develop an annual plan. This provides the basis for quarterly objectives and meaningful reviews. 

You might deviate from the annual plan as circumstances dictate, but the baseline plan helps you develop a basic framework around revenues, expenses, hiring, ship dates, equipment and infrastructure costs, and so on. In the early stages, the annual plan is largely a projection of what you hope might happen. Everything looks possible when it’s in a spreadsheet! 

You’re not building a plan because you have high confidence of hitting the targets. Instead you’re engaging in a “what if” analysis to prepare the company for different possibilities. You want to develop an understanding of the various growth levers you have to scale up (or down) as necessary if things heat up faster (or slower) than expected. The annual plan is less about forecasting the future than giving you a framework for understanding how to balance your growth and burn rates.

For example, if sales accelerate and you beat your Q3 target, then you might have increased confidence in hiring a few more customer success agents to ensure customers get into production with a minimum of delay. But if you miss the target, then make do until it becomes clear you can afford additional hires and keep them busy. If the mix of sales opportunities shifts to a higher proportion of Enterprise deals than planned, you might consider kicking off your SOC-2 project earlier. 

What Are Your Key Metrics?

You don’t need to go through every conceivable scenario but it can be worthwhile to consider what signals from the market might cause you to reprioritize initiatives and re-allocate budgets or head count. You should identify the key metrics you’ll monitor on a regular basis, such as pipeline, bookings, churn, headcount, burn rate and so on. At a departmental level, there will be more granular metrics specific to their charter. For example, marketing should be monitoring customer acquisition costs, campaign effectiveness and so on. 

In my experience, most management teams are too quick to increase spending when there are early positive signs and they take too long to make the hard decisions when sales or pipeline are lagging. Thinking through these scenarios can provide discipline that makes these decisions a little less nerve-wracking. 

Quarterly Objectives

Quarterly objectives are how you transform the long-term vision and strategy into execution. This includes setting goals for product roadmap, ship dates, marketing launches, hiring, training, etc.

Quarterly goals don’t just happen, you’ve got to set expectations and manage. For senior people, that generally means checking in once or twice each quarter on how things are progressing and what can be done to remove any blockers. This can be part of your regular one-on-one management meetings or a meeting dedicated to this topic. 

 I always remind people as we get toward the end of the quarter to make sure projects are getting wrapped up on time and people are planning for the next quarter.

In the early stages, before you have repeatability, it’s not uncommon to have a twice quarterly board meeting. The purpose is to review your top level metrics and identify what experiments are under way as you look for signs of repeatability. As things become more predictable with product market fit, a quarterly board meeting should suffice. 

You should deliver preliminary results to your board as soon as possible, ideally within 48 hours, at the end of the quarter. This should include the top level bookings results and an assessment of your quarterly objectives. 

Progress Review Meetings

For projects that might take some months to complete, it can be useful to have a review meeting every two to four weeks. This helps you avoid the situation where things are gradually slipping, whether it’s ship dates or deals. Like the frog in the pot of water on the stove, you may not realize there’s a problem until it’s too late. 

For example, the product teams would normally meet weekly as they work through new features, product improvements, launch plans and so on. Progress and deviations from the plan should be presented at a Product Council meeting (a subset of the management team) scheduled mid-quarter and also at the end of the quarter. If something seems likely to slip, there should be an open discussion of trade-offs that could be made, contingency plans, re-prioritization, or re-allocation of resources. The goal is to ensure that teams are considering all options.

Similarly, sales teams should be meeting weekly to review leads, pipeline, deal progress, objection handling, competitive plays and so on. It can be helpful to undertake a major deal review monthly with senior executives. This provides the teams with the ability to share concerns and brainstorm actions that can be taken rather than just hoping for the best. I also recommend a Quarterly Business Review (QBR) to look at broader trends and actions that can improve sales efficiency.

I recommend cross-pollinating meetings with people from adjacent organizations so that if there’s a pipeline review meeting, Sales and Marketing are operating side-by-side to discuss the results and determine any changes that may be required. 

Weekly Meetings

Managers should be having one-on-one meetings with their direct reports every week, or at least every two weeks for senior employees. These meetings should include discussion of current projects, identification of roadblocks, discussion of approaches, whether assistance is required, tradeoffs in decision making, etc. If there’s a particularly critical project, make it part of the regular one-on-one agenda. 

At the end of the quarter, managers should review the employee’s goal attainment and areas where improvement is possible. That said, if someone is falling behind and not getting the job done, don’t wait until the end of quarter to provide direct feedback.

Setting a meeting cadence with regular reporting on results and actions helps create a culture where execution and steady progress are valued. Review meetings can be useful for brainstorming new ideas and ensuring that everyone is up-to-speed with decisions in adjacent areas. By making follow-ups automatic, there’s a whole lot less chasing and anxiety required.

The photo above is from REM’s video “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth” from their 1994 album “Monster.” That song has it’s own bizarre origin story.