Episode 207: The Meeting Framework Behind a Self-Running Firm

What does it actually look like to run a meeting system that keeps your firm moving without everything falling through the cracks after every conversation?

In this episode, Thomas walks through the full meeting framework Wize teaches firm owners, from the daily huddle to the annual planning meeting, so you can build a clear cadence that keeps your team aligned and your action items from disappearing into thin air.

You'll learn:
 ✅ Why the daily huddle is one of the most powerful change management tools in your firm
 ✅ The difference between a daily huddle and a productivity unblocker, and why both matter
 ✅ How to know when an agenda item has outgrown your weekly tactical
 ✅ Why the monthly board meeting is the backbone of your operational rhythm
 ✅ How one well-run annual planning meeting can reduce chaos for the rest of the year
 ✅ Where to store and track action items so nothing gets lost between meetings

If you've ever walked out of a team meeting with a full list of action items and watched half of them quietly disappear by the following week, this episode will change the way you think about your meeting structure and what happens after each one wraps up.

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Transcript

Welcome And The Freedom Goal

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to The Wise Way, the show for accounting and bookkeeping firm owners who want more time, profit and freedom and a business that can run without them. I'm Bren Ward, your host, and each week we deep dive into the real stories, proven strategies, and battle-tested tools from successful firm owners just like you. Our wise mentors want to share their journey of how they've scaled and systemized their way to freedom so you can too. If you're stuck in the grind or you're ready to scale smarter, this is your blueprint. Let's get into the episode.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Okay,

The Core Meeting Cadence Overview

SPEAKER_01 0:39

so let's get a start on today, and we'll have people joining us along the way. Today we're going to be discussing the various meetings that here in WISE we teach and have IP on, which are best practice for your firm. So these are the sort of meetings that happen either on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual basis. We'll go through a list of what they are. I will try to avoid like going into like what makes them a good meeting, but I'll, depending on the room size, I'll just go around and try and probably ask about a challenge with a specific meeting or maybe asking for what the if you have a question on the value of what a specific meeting is when we get to that part. I

Where Action Items Actually Live

SPEAKER_01 1:21

want to focus the majority of this session on uh a question that we hear most from firms about this, which is so where do we store all these action items? So it's great. We've got all these different types of meetings. Where do we actually store them? And we have a place for that, and that is in the Wires Hub. And that's where Raul's going to take us uh through how to store them and the task management system that comes through in it. And I really love it because this is a workspace for tasks that relate to working on your firm. We have plenty of workflow management systems and accounting, but they're all about managing the tax return, managing the financial accounts getting done by the team on time. It's a lot to do with the delivery of the client and our internal admin. But here in the Wires Hub, it's about having a dedicated space for things that are going to drive uh development in your business itself. Okay. And that is all in the YS Hub, and it's growing more powerful as it's connected to all these other parts like the quad activities and delegation. So then as you're adding these action items into your meeting routines in the Yes Hub, you're able to delegate it onto other people and it will appear on their list. Anyway, I won't go into too much detail. Raul's got uh will be able to take us through this. All right, so we're your three hosts today, myself, Danny, Raul, and myself. So we'll get right into it. So here's a list of meetings next to a photo of myself.

unknown 2:48

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 2:50

Here's a list of meetings. There is a lot. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Some of these are situational. So, for example, a weekly merge meeting that would happen during an acquisition of a firm, and you would meet weekly with the vendor uh to ensure that the acquisition goes through smoothly. Okay, so that's more of a temporary sort of thing. But of course, when we talk about meetings, aside from these situational ones, we do mean something that happens on an ongoing regular basis. Okay. I want to go through uh each of these in brief, and that will be a lot of content. And we'll just go straight into like where do you actually store them as you're conducting them now. And uh to assist, I've got the material here too, so uh I I thought it'd be easy if we could just see words as well. Okay, I I think the first one is fairly straightforward. This daily

Daily Huddles That Surface Roadblocks

SPEAKER_01 3:50

Huddle meeting. Uh this 10-15 minute check, okay, surfacing the priorities for today. Uh it's quite interesting because it often uh is easy to argue why it is inconvenient or not and not value adding. So for example, you might be in a physical office with other people, okay. You might chat with each other all throughout the day and go, what's the point of doing this daily stand-up? Well, it is a ceremony in which the team gets together and they would uh communicate clearly and calibrate themselves for the day about three questions. One, what am I doing? What are we going to complete? And what are my roadblocks? Okay, so this is a place for this to happen. Okay, it's it's about everyone get out on parade ground and get in line and let's call out and then we can start our day rather than everyone just sort of meandering into the office, okay? It's just about this daily huddle meeting that's the the deep and narrow team requires a very clear line of communication throughout the deep and narrow team structure. So this daily huddle ensures this. Look for that as a leader. If you think about it as a manager, you'll think, okay, how can I get it implemented and how can I delegate it away? Fine. That's you're managing it. Thinking as a leader is what does this tell me about my team when I listen to them on their daily huddles? I would say like 80% of my change management for my own firm has occurred through the daily huddles. Like out of desperation. Because that's where everyone was there, they're fresh. I'm like, guys, hold up before you start, before you guys get going, I have to say something to you. Okay, I had I don't have to do that anymore, but this daily huddle was critical. It's a critical communication junction for your team every day. I'll move on. The

The Post Huddle Productivity Buffer

SPEAKER_01 5:48

daily pub productivity uh umblocker meeting is an extension to the daily huddle, and it's either 15 minutes before or after your normal daily huddle. Uh, usually after. Ed suggested this to me when I asked him, oh, you know, the team struggles with knowing what the you know workflow schedule is like for the next week. How do I get them aligned on this? And he was like simple. After the daily huddle, stay for five minutes and then talk about it. And I thought, well, I didn't know it was that simple. We haven't stopped doing it. It's been years. So this post 15 minutes is a buffer on everyone's calendar. And during their daily huddle, when they mention their roadblocks, sometimes people can't articulate the specific task uh of their roadblock, and they would just say, I need someone's name, help. And that productivity buffer after that daily huddle allows people to meet together. Okay, it's only 10-15 minutes, sometimes all it takes. Sometimes it's a job brief. Hey, I'm about to start this job for the day. Can you just brief me the job? That 10-15 minutes is the literal sharpening of the saw, and that like phrase from Stephen Covey. I'll move on.

Weekly And Monthly Meeting Essentials

SPEAKER_01 7:02

Now, weekly sales, team, executive, merge, these weekly meetings, everything here that you see weekly, I can summarize in these terms. At the bare minimum, you would have as a team one weekly tactical. And depending on the size of your firm, each of these could simply be an agenda item on that weekly tactical. However, the larger your firm grows, certain agenda items warrant their own space. So sales often ends up warranting its own space later outside the weekly tactical. Uh review performance solving problems on the so that's usually a a mainstay. That's this is the weekly tactical, okay. The executive meeting, typically in the weekly tactical, you want to remove executive discussion elsewhere. You don't want like certain team members hearing it. An emerge meeting, I said, was situational. SLP development. It's a healthy thing to be able to have team members bring up their SLPs during the weekly tacticals and then ask for approval. Okay. And it is, it counts as training the office on it if you bring it up in the weekly tactical. Now, sometimes that's all it takes. Five minutes, everyone's ready to hear it. That's what I've also learned from WISE Mentoring and what they've implemented it. You know, it's always in our WISE mentor meetings, the SOPs are shown, and it's great. Monthly one-on-ones with your team, managers' meetings, board meetings, of course, and we have our annual performance-related ones. So there are a lot of meetings here, and as you can see, some of them are situational. Yeah.

Annual Planning That Reduces Firefighting

SPEAKER_01 8:40

So outside of the weekly tactical, the monthly board meeting is critical here. And then the rest get extended on. Of course, the annual performance reviews are critical. And then you extend this by making them bi-monthly, uh biannually, so six-monthly. And then finally, you must have an annual planning meeting, which is where you set out the company's annual goals, strategic plans, workflow schedules, priorities. You basically go around and collect all the goals and dreams and aspirations of your managers and leaders. We put it all into a big pot together and we go, let's try and make that happen. So this is the annual planning meeting. The better it is done, the less there is to worry about for the team for the rest of the year. Like that's the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is you meet operationally once with your firm, and that is it. The monthly board meetings are just tracking along everything from that point onwards. That makes sense. That's the ideal wise withdrawal state.

SPEAKER_00 9:40

Thanks for tuning

Subscribe Review And Keep Talking

SPEAKER_00 9:41

in to this episode of The Wise Way. If today's episode sparked an idea or helped you see things differently, please don't forget to leave us a review. And if you haven't subscribed to the podcast on your favourite platform yet, please go ahead and do that as well. Let's continue the conversation here through YouTube or any other social platforms that you can find us on. And just remember, if you're not a subscriber of our weekly Friday tip newsletter, you can get that to your inbox every week going forward. Whether you're starting out or scaling up, you don't have to do it alone. Let's build a business that works for you, the wise way. We'll see you in the next episode.