0:07: Welcome to the Blue Collar Nation podcast, the podcast dedicated to making the lives of home service professionals better. 
 0:16: Now join Eric and Larry to talk about all things home service. 
 0:21: My name is Larry. 
 0:22: I'm here with Super Tech University and my business partner is not here. 
 0:26: Anyway, we've got a great presentation here today. 
 0:30: And we're going to learn about meetings, which meetings are important. 
 0:33: It gets really boring, and this isn't a pitch for Super Tech University. 
 0:38: But, and it's not gonna be slandered that way. 
 0:41: It's a matter of communicating with your team and keeping everybody on the same page and moving in the same direction. 
 0:47: That's the whole goal. 
 0:48: But, a quick plug on Super Tech University because we gotta keep the doors open here. 
 0:54: If you have a team that's not engaged, they're not accountable, and you have a lot of turnover, and you're having problems, we could help you out, get your team on the same page with you every single day. 
 1:07: And lose some of your headaches and make you much more profit. 
 1:11: So, anyway, go check out Super Tech University. 
 1:15: And back to the presentation here, and I got a picture. 
 1:18: This is a presentation I did earlier today. 
 1:20: With our inner circle. 
 1:22: If anybody knows Howard Partridge, so yeah, this guy, you might know him. 
 1:26: He's in the cleaning world. 
 1:27: Howard Partridge, he was our coach for many years. 
 1:30: He helped us get to where we To grow our business, to have quite a lot of zeros and sell our business, so he's a wonderful guy. 
 1:39: Anybody wants to check him out, that would be great. 
 1:43: And we're going to, usually, we're talking about operation systems that Howard has a lot of. 
 1:48: But today we're gonna be talking about creating fruitful meetings, OK? 
 1:52: And meetings help your team stay dialed and stay focused. 
 1:56: You don't always want to do them. 
 1:58: You can do them sitting, standing, fast. 
 2:01: You know, or long meetings, depending on what needs to get accomplished. 
 2:05: But to be successful, you need to have meetings so that your whole team is on the same page. 
 2:10: And why do we have meetings? 
 2:13: They're very important with your team. 
 2:15: Like I was saying, you can have them with your technicians every morning if you have a production meeting, keeps everybody on the same page, where everybody's going through their jobs and their service business. 
 2:25: Whether you have a cleaning business, HVAC, carpet cleaning. 
 2:28: , plumbing, restoration. 
 2:33: You wanna be meeting in the morning. 
 2:36: And the reason I say this is because I wasn't into it at first. 
 2:39: Our team was really, they really want to know what everybody else, everybody else was doing. 
 2:44: So when we had a meeting in the morning, OK, you guys are going, truck one's going over here to town A, Truck 2's going to town B, and you're both are gonna see Mr. 
 2:54: Jones and Mrs. 
 2:54: Smith, and everybody would know whether you have 5 trucks. 
 2:59: For 10 trucks, you just go through it real quick. 
 3:01: Everybody knows what everybody, the other clients, and they always have something they want to say, and they always seem to want to know. 
 3:08: Granted, it takes a few minutes to do it if you have 10 trucks, but if you put it on the board and you dial it on your whiteboard or your blackboard and you go running through it where everybody's going. 
 3:18: It pleases them. 
 3:19: For some reason, they wanted to know where everybody was going to be, and it created culture at the same time. 
 3:26: And then if you're meeting with your management team, That makes a big difference too, OK? 
 3:33: And that's why you need to meet, have meetings. 
 3:35: And the meetings create a daily rhythm of business. 
 3:38: Most people like each day to be similar. 
 3:41: They want time to meet and connect with their colleagues. 
 3:44: It gives you opportunity to train, and it gets people there on time. 
 3:49: One day maybe you can have donuts. 
 3:51: One day, or maybe you have coffee on a regular basis or something. 
 3:55: But getting them there on a regular basis. 
 3:58: Changes the rhythm of your day, and you wanna have a good rhythm of your day. 
 4:02: When your day doesn't start well, somebody leaves a part in the shop after they get to a job that they need, that screws things up. 
 4:09: If one guy comes late, another guy's waiting for him, he's blocking out the truck, and they can't get out, that screws things up. 
 4:17: But when everybody's there on time and focused on the same thing, things go really smooth. 
 4:24: So the daily rhythm of business makes a difference. 
 4:27: Then you need to have a, somewhere that everybody meets and it's comfortable. 
 4:32: OK, this is one of our client's shop. 
 4:34: This is Eric meeting. 
 4:36: And then you can see the boards in the background. 
 4:39: If you put your stats that are significant to your team on the wall. 
 4:44: And you put your, you know, things that are going to keep your team engaged. 
 4:49: You put them on your wall, in your office, but you put up the numbers, job costing, is everybody selling well? 
 4:57: Where is everybody with their upsells? 
 4:59: Where is everybody with their performance, reviews. 
 5:03: There's so many things you can put on the wall that are going to get the team engaged. 
 5:06: They want to come in and look at them. 
 5:08: So, the environment that you have for your meetings makes a big difference. 
 5:12: You try to make it clean and comfortable for them. 
 5:15: And this is not with your team, this is also with management. 
 5:19: This is also with, if you're having a family meeting. 
 5:23: These are all important things, clear objectives, objectives. 
 5:27: Establish clear purpose of the meeting, why you're meeting, whether it's to align a daily task, discuss challenges that are coming up, or if you have updates that are happening. 
 5:37: Know the objective to keep the meeting focused cause you don't wanna be drifting off. 
 5:41: A five-minute meeting or 2 or 3-minute meeting can turn into a 20-minute meeting. 
 5:45: Or a 20 minute meeting could turn into a 2 hour meeting. 
 5:48: You don't want to do that. 
 5:49: You want to get the objectives. 
 5:51: Accomplished, set up beforehand. 
 5:54: And then when you have them consistently at the same time, whether it's every day or every week, it creates a routine. 
 6:01: Everybody's expecting something. 
 6:03: They know the drill, and it helps them planning and ensures obviously high attendance because people can get there pretty easily. 
 6:10: Efficiency. 
 6:11: You want the emission, the means to be efficient. 
 6:14: You want them short and to the point. 
 6:15: Unless you have a big topic, but you want to aim for 15 to 30 minutes cause it's, it's an attention span thing, OK? 
 6:23: It respects everybody's time, keeps the team energy, energized. 
 6:27: If you go a real long time, you need to have breaks, and you need to be able to pivot between every topic, and you want to keep people engaged. 
 6:35: I was the guy always in the back of the room falling asleep. 
 6:39: And that's not a good thing to do. 
 6:41: When everybody's engaged with the meeting, it goes really well, and you want to prepare for the meeting. 
 6:46: That was me. 
 6:46: I was never good at preparing for the meetings. 
 6:49: My business partner, Eric was great at preparing the meetings. 
 6:52: You encourage team members to be prepared with updates, questions, or issues. 
 6:57: This makes the meeting more interactive and productive. 
 7:00: You have to be prepared and you ask your teams to be prepared. 
 7:03: OK, does anybody have any questions for the meeting tomorrow? 
 7:06: Put them on paper, write them down so we're ready to go, or talk to me about them before then, so I can present them to the team. 
 7:13: Go a lot further. 
 7:15: And you want to have everybody engaged. 
 7:18: One involve all your team members by encouraging participation, participation feedback. 
 7:24: Ask him questions. 
 7:25: That's what we do at Super Tech University. 
 7:27: We've got Brian on here. 
 7:29: He has a team with Super Tech University, and he asks his team questions. 
 7:34: It's not a quick, it's not a plug for Supertech. 
 7:37: When you have your meeting, any type of meeting, you want to keep people engaged, so they're not falling asleep, so they don't feel like it's a, it's a chore to be there. 
 7:44: So they're there for a purpose and if they're involved with a purpose, it goes a lot far. 
 7:49: You wanna create, create culture, openness and collaboration and have an agenda. 
 7:55: You know, hand it to everybody in the, before the meeting, OK? 
 7:58: These are the topics we're gonna cover. 
 8:00: Let's make it happen. 
 8:01: Include topics, the time for each topic, who'll be leading the discussion, and get other people on your team engaged. 
 8:08: Makes a huge difference. 
 8:11: And Action items that are inside of the agenda. 
 8:18: Clear action items and responsibilities. 
 8:20: Ensure that everyone knows what's expected of them following the meeting. 
 8:24: So you go around the room, OK, you're gonna do this, you're gonna do this, they you're gonna do this. 
 8:29: And everybody's clear because there's a lot going on in the meetings sometimes. 
 8:33: I had a meeting with Eric and two of our people the other day. 
 8:36: And talks about a lot of stuff. 
 8:38: And I said, OK, hang on, let's pause before we go cause everybody needs to know what they were doing. 
 8:42: We talked about a lot of things, and it took a good 10 minutes to hash out what everybody was doing based on what we're talking about. 
 8:48: Because if you leave a meeting without any benchmarks or goals or expectations. 
 8:54: It's a waste of time of being there in the first place, OK? 
 8:58: That's just hanging out. 
 8:59: A meeting accomplishes things. 
 9:02: And while consistency is key with your meetings and all the things that I'm talking about here, you need to be flexible with things. 
 9:09: Somebody has something going on, they're not gonna be able to be there. 
 9:11: Maybe you can zoom them in. 
 9:13: Or maybe you can pipe them in with a phone. 
 9:16: Yeah, there's other things you can do, as long as it's not consistent. 
 9:20: You're flexible with the meeting format or timing if it benefits the team or the business. 
 9:25: If a major project requires more hands-on work, adjust the meeting structure to accommodate that. 
 9:30: So you might want to move the location of the meeting to somewhere where the people that need to be at the meeting are and they can't be there. 
 9:38: There's a lot of things you can do. 
 9:40: And then this is the last slide here. 
 9:43: The longer the meeting, the less is accomplished. 
 9:46: That's Tim Cook. 
 9:47: He's the president of Apple. 
 9:50: So it's not necessarily the longer the meeting. 
 9:52: It's the less efficient the meeting is, the less easily accomplished. 
 9:56: So, that's pretty much what I wanna share with everybody. 
 10:00: I hope that was helpful. 
 10:02: There's a lot that goes into having a team. 
 10:07: If you're a solopreneur, nothing wrong with that. 
 10:10: It's a little bit easier. 
 10:13: But you still have to have meetings with yourself to get things accomplished, looking at your P&L and planning for the next day and all kinds of things. 
 10:20: But when you have a team around you, it takes a lot more collaboration and organization, and I hope these things were helpful for everybody. 
 10:32: Thank you for listening to the Blue Collar Nation podcast. 
 10:36: For more information about Eric and Larry and Super Tech University, please visit us at supertechu.com. 
 10:44: That is supertech U, the letter U.com.