Hey, Mike Agugliaro here, bringing you another episode of Fast Track TV. That’s right. We’re talking about episodes that you can take things, implement them and get massive action, right? Massive action and massive traction, right? That’s what’s going to give us results and profit. Today I want to talk to you about how do you make your meetings the most effective meetings that you can?
Now when you look at marketing, right, we have this theory of pre-pre-launch and then we have pre-launch, launch and post-launch, right? I’ve learnt that stuff from Dean Jackson, a real smart marketer out there. I have taken that concept and I don’t know if he is the one that invented it or not, but I have taken that concept and I have applied it to all different areas of my business.
One area I have put it in is, when you are going to go and have a meeting, and we are not talking about a little jump-in and jump-out meeting. We are talking about something we are going to go in and take action, because I always say a meeting without action, that’s a social gathering, and if you’re looking at social gatherings, do that during lunch or something. But you don’t need to bring a whole bunch of root people in, have a social gathering and then leave with no action taken.
Now, the pre-pre-launch is, you can let the employees know or whoever you are going to have the meeting with, let them know, “Hey, we are going to be having a meeting in the near future. Here’s the subjects we are going to be looking to tackle here. Here’s the things we are looking to solve.” This way, there is this kind of mindset starts, right? They are already preparing for it, instead of a lot of times what I do, and I still sometimes get stuck doing it.
It’s like, “Hey. Meeting now.” People are like, “Man, I’m in the middle of things. I’m not prepared.” The pre-pre-launch of the meeting lets people start to get into the game a little bit. The pre-launch is, “I set the date for the meeting. This is what we’re going to get together” and I send out a little agenda to everybody. I say, “Look, here is the time-frame. Your life is going to be between this time-frame and here’s what we are going to do to the agenda. We are going to tackle these three subjects, and the target that we are going to leave with is a solution, right? We are going to leave with action items and a solution.”
Now, at the bottom, when I send this out to everybody, and I could either post it on a bulletin, send it out by email, do a little video like this about the meeting. I’m going to ask them if there is anything that is missing from the agenda that you see, if there is anyone missing from the agenda you think should be there or there is anything real important that should come out, or you have questions or concerns, send me a message ahead of time.
I want to give them about three or four days to do that because what will happen is if there is any of these people out there, right, the sabotagers and stuff that are out there in the world, in your company or wherever you are going to have the meeting. Let that come forth, right. They will send that in an email to you. Now it will let you to not only prepare the mindset of the meeting. It allows you to make any changes ahead of time, right? That’s real important.
The other thing is when you go in the meeting, a good way to set your time-frames is first off, never go over 60 minutes if you don’t have to, and always have your start time at a weird time like 10:03, right, and have your end time at whatever, it’s 10:57 or 10:59, because when you set these odd time-frames, it makes people just think a little different, and instead of thinking, “Oh, the meeting is going to start at 10” they are like, “Oh, around 10.” No, it’s 10:03, and at 10:03, the doors shut and we are going to start our meeting.
The other thing is if you want to get everybody’s mind in the game before the meeting, you want to make sure you have a little video that you can play for them, normally something funny just brings the room up a little bit, the level of energy, builds some quick rapport, gets everybody in the game of the meeting. Then stay on track, right.
Don’t let your meetings go left and right. We have a track. If anything comes up that doesn’t fit the meeting, just let them know, like, “Hey, we can’t cover this there. We’ll put that aside right now. We’ll parking lot that thing. We’ll get back to it later.”
One thing I did many years ago with my business partner, Rob, and when we had another partner, sometimes the meetings would get really heated, I mean, aggressively heated. We picked a word, we called it “bamboo”. I don’t know where the word “bamboo” came from, but if you called “bamboo” that was it.
Everybody got up, you left the room, we came back in. If we called “bamboo” twice, guess what? That was it, there was no meeting today. We were going to come back another day because it just meant that there was so much emotion, it was not going to serve us to stay in the room. Make sure you have this special word like “bamboo” that says, “Hey, we are going to get out of the room before somebody kills themselves.”
I hope this helps you with some insights and guidance on how to have more effective meetings. I’m Mike Agugliaro, I’m wishing you a very great day today and every day, yes, and I want to help you get what? Massive wealth, tons of freedom and market domination.
