Once your business has been running for a little while, and is starting to make a bit of money, it's worth spending some time to figure out what it is that drives the activity in your business.
Every business will have a different type of "driving process", but in all cases, they are activities (often meetings) out of which many tasks flow out.
The driving process for a project to deliver a piece of software will be the weekly or daily meetings to assign the tasks for the coming day or week. The driving process for sales is a sales meeting where currently active leads are reviewed and actions decided. The driving process for a service being provided to a number of clients might be reviewing the status of all the clients and deciding on next steps for each of them.
Some of those business activities need a certain rhythm in order to pick up momentum. There are various ways to achieve that, but meetings is certainly one of the most common ones. However, in a young company, meetings don't happen unless you make an effort to keep them happening - there's always something else to do that seems more appealing than having a meeting. Unlike the corporate environment, where meetings seem to thrive and multiply until the only thing being done is having meetings, startups have the opposite problem: startups are a toxic environment for meetings.
If, however, you know that a certain kind of meeting drives a key, critical process in your business, you will probably find it much easier to summon up the effort to keep that meeting alive - especially once you see the effect of the meeting on getting stuff done.
Two concrete examples
Here are two concrete examples of meetings driving key processes, taken from my own business, GrantTree. The two most important meetings we have are both weekly, and are scheduled on Monday morning, to drive the work for the rest of the week.
The first one is a sales meeting. We keep all our leads in Highrise, and the meeting consists of simply going through all the active leads in the database, adding any that are missing, updating the information on each of them, and deciding next steps for each lead. This creates a number of actions and follow-ups which end up driving the sales activity over the next few days. It's a clear, tangible, useful meeting.
The second meeting is the tax credit process review meeting. We track the status of all our clients in Trello, and go through all of them (active or inactive) to make a conscious decision as to whether actions are needed, what actions should happen this week, whether a client needs urgent attention, etc. This creates a number of actions and follow-ups which end up driving the tax credit process for the week. It's also a clear, tangible, useful meeting.
Those are the key drivers for GrantTree: sales and delivery. Each business will have its own specific driving processes, which will result in different types of meetings (or even things other than meetings!). I'm not suggesting that your business should have the same structure as mine - however, what you should do is think about what those key driving processes are for your business, and see if giving these activities a weekly or daily rhythm helps to make them more effective.
If you read this far, you should follow me on twitter here.
