Episode #224 – The Standing Meeting

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing in Your Car. Alright everyone, so some of my new friends in the Inner Circle were teasing me about our introduction man, what he says, “and now your host Russell Brunson”, so now that I hear that it makes me laugh, so I hope you guys are laughing too.

Some of you might be wondering, why haven’t you done a podcast for a while, and then the second question would be Russell, why are you talking so fast right now? And the reasons are the same. Both of those reason’s are the same. It’s because we started this new thing in our company that’s really cool. It happens every day at 9am, which is in three minutes from right now. So I’ve got three minutes before I am officially late. So as the CEO, I can’t even call myself the CEO without laughing, it seems like such a real business term. Anyway, as the CEO of my corporation, I gotta be there, or else that’s just not cool to not be there. So I’ve got three minutes to explain this concept to you guys and jump on the call.

So this is what it is. What we’ve been doing in our company, the dev team started doing it a month or two ago and then recently we’ve kind of pulled in me and some of the other guys, because I think it’s really effective. So we do these really quick stand up meetings and we do it every single morning at 9am. And it typically takes less than 15 minutes and we’ve got 15 or 20 people that attend that meeting. So it goes pretty quick for how many people are involved. The way it works we use gotomeeting, and when we log into gotomeeting there’s a list of all attendees in alphabetical order, so it starts with the first person on the list at exactly 9 o’clock, which 2 minutes from right now. So the first person gets on and says, “Hey, this is Russell. Yesterday I did blah blah. Today I’m focusing on blah blah. And these are the roadblocks I have.” The next person goes, “Hey, this is Russell. Yesterday I focused on this, it went awesome. We crushed it. Today I’m focusing on this. I have a two potential roadblocks, I can’t figure out this or this. Can I get so and so to talk to me afterwards?” Boom, next person, next person, next person. And we go through and what it does is a couple of cool things. First off, it holds everyone accountable for what they did yesterday, to make sure people actually showed up and did your jobs, so that’s a cool thing.

If you’re having issues in your company wondering, “What do these people do all day?” And I know that’s a real thing because I have thought that in the past with other companies we have built. I remember firing 60 people in one day and coming in the next day waiting for a million balls to drop, and nothing dropped and I was like, “What did all these people do?” Anyway, that lets you know what they’re doing each day. And what’s cool about it is you can be like, “Why are you wasting time on that, that’s the stupidest thing in the world. You should be focusing on this.” And you can quickly redirect people to the correct behaviors, so that’s number one. Number two you find out what they are focusing on today, which once again half the time our dev team or other people on the team are focusing on something that you don’t really care about as the CEO. You could be focusing on something, for example: We’re launching Funnel University and everyone’s only focusing on something that means nothing to anybody and it’s like, “No, that’s cool but that’s our number one priority, you should be shifting to this.” And third thing is all of us get stuck. We have blockers in our business that hold us back from the thing we’re trying to accomplish and a lot of times other people on our team don’t know what those blockers are and that’s what’s actually keeping you from the success you want and need. And so we find out what the blockers are while you got everyone on the team there, so now you know, “Hey I gotta help Todd with these two things because he can’t progress with his job until those two things are done.” It’s pretty cool.

So I’d recommend….because I hate meetings. We haven’t done meetings in years because meetings are so boring and so long and everyone wants to talk about stuff that doesn’t actually matter. We do a meeting and I count…I remember sitting in a meeting and counting how much I paid each person per hour and doing the math and being like, “ That meeting cost me $2300.” Or whatever it was. And being so angry because not only does it cost $2300 but the opportunity cost of us getting our crap done was even bigger. So this is awesome because it’s like 15 and if you a small team you could get done in 5 minutes.

So I highly, highly, highly recommend it. And that’s about it, I’m late for the meeting so I gotta bounce. I hope that was helpful for you guys. Start doing standing meetings, that’s the process, there’s the format. So far it has become magic for us, I hope it works for you as well. And that’s what I got for you today. Talk to you soon, bye.