As you sit through a 60-minute meeting, have you ever thought of how you can use this time to do something more productive?

Perhaps you just count the remaining Powerpoint slides hoping that it will soon be done or listen inattentively to a single person dominating the entire conversation. 

Scenarios like these are common but instead of addressing the issue, it seems that inefficient meetings are only becoming more frequent. In fact, it is said that there are 56 million meetings in the United States every single day! That’s more than double the population of Australia! So as you are reading this, millions of employees are getting frustrated with their unnecessary gatherings.

There are two reasons why company meetings are still being conducted regularly: a decision has to be made or a problem needs to be solved. However, seldom do we achieve these through team gatherings alone. The consequences of ineffective meetings can lower employee morale, reduce productivity, and negatively impact your company’s bottom line.

EXERCISE: Calculate the ROI of Your Meetings

Here is a powerful exercise our growth consultants do frequently with our new clients to better understand the value of time spent in meetings. Let’s do this exercise together. 

STEP 1: Calculate the Labor Cost of a Single Meeting

Pick a meeting you have frequently. How many of your staff attend the meeting? Write down their names and allocate an hourly cost for their time. This is a very important exercise to better understand the value of each staff and what you’re paying them. For example, let’s take your leadership meeting:

• Marketing Rep Sally – $120/hr
• General Manager Bill – $30/hr
• Sales Manager Ralph – $60/hr
• CEO (You) – $90/hr
• Total an Hour for your leadership team: $300/hr

A crucial part of this equation is to calculate the cost of YOUR time as CEO. Many CEOs trying to take the next level in their business tend to forget the value of their time, therefore, spending time on efforts that are way below their hourly rate costing them significant opportunity cost in doing so. Make sure you do a fair assessment of you and your staff’s hourly cost.

STEP 2: How often do you meet a week/month? 

If your company gathers for an hour every day, you may think that this only takes 5 hours from their 40-hour workweek. A small amount of time, right?

Using this example of $300/hr x 5hours a week = $1,500 a week for the labor cost of meetings with staff

= $6,000 a month labor cost of meetings alone

Now this $6,000 would be worth it if you were having highly effective and productive meetings. The question you need to ask yourself is… Are you? Ineffective meetings cost businesses $283 BILLION each year. 

For entrepreneurs, time is money –  every minute wasted gradually decreases your company’s revenue! 

This isn’t based on observation and personal opinion alone. In fact, even executives consider 67% of meetings to be failures. If middle managers spend 35% of their time in meetings while the upper management spends half of their time in these gatherings, when can they start working on their business?

STEP 3: Calculate Preparation Cost for Meetings

Take note that for a simple status update meeting, employees spend up to 4 hours a week for preparation alone. So if you know your hourly rate for everyone in the meeting is:

$300 an hour, multiplied by 4 hours a week of preparation that comes to = $1,200 a week 

= $4,800 a month just in preparation 

So now using this example we are up to $10,800 a month, $129,600 a year in ineffective meeting costs between preparation and time spent in these ineffective meetings. This is only if your staff met for an hour a day. Does your team have more meetings than just one hour out of 8 hours a day? Most likely they have way more.

Can you understand how ineffective meetings are one of the first priorities we work on with our clients when they come into the Ultimate Sales Machine world? This is why the first and second chapter of our world-renowned Ultimate Sales Machine book is Time Management Secrets of Billionaires and How to Run Highly Effective Meetings. If you improve just the use of your meetings, the whole organization can change very quickly.

CASE STUDY – Doubling Sales in 52 Weeks

Take one of our clients in Los Angeles California. The CEO runs two beauty schools in Hollywood. She attended one of our events and came home with our guide for How to Run 52 Highly Effective Meetings to Produce Results. She followed this workbook like it was her Bible once a week, every single week. By the end of the year, she had DOUBLED her sales. She told us the one thing she did was follow our formula for running effective meetings. It was so powerful she did it again the following year and doubled sales AGAIN. Just by improving one simple skill – How to Run Highly Effective Meetings.

To pick up your 52 Week Workshopping Playbook, Click Here!

While the compounded effects of inefficient meetings are critical to your business, the good news is that this problem can easily be avoided and solved. How you address this issue and fix the system depends on one company to another, but the general solution is to IMPROVE YOUR MEETING EFFICIENCY SKILL.

As Chet always said, “Mastery isn’t about doing 4,000 things, it’s about doing 12 things 4,000 times.”

Although company meetings are often overlooked, improving their quality alone can result in better communication, strong working relationships, a more organized time for planning and decision making, and ultimately increasing sales!

One helpful hint: No more than 37% of meetings in the US use agendas. Start implementing the mandatory need for agenda’s in every meeting and see how it changes the dynamic.

TAKE ACTION!

To help you have more effective meetings see our 52 Week Workshopping Playbook -How to Have 52 Weeks of Effective Meetings. 

If you’d like more personalized assistance you can always schedule a 7-minute breakthrough call with one of our growth experts to see how your organization can work faster, better, smarter.

BONUS:

Check out Amanda Holmes’ interview with Digital Marketer’s Justin Rondeau on how they optimize their team’s resources to product so much amazing content.