The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [10]
We broke the company down into nine “impact areas” and held weekly one-hour meetings in each area. An impact area is any part of your company that has a direct impact on the bottom line. Your impact areas may include sales, customer ser vice, product development, and marketing, for example. In order to improve and perfect each of these areas you need to give them a dedicated one hour per week when everyone involved can focus exclusively on improving that area.
Once I established weekly impact area meetings, my team learned to hold their ideas until the appropriate meeting instead of coming to my office to share their ideas as they got them. I even put out a pad that had the words “With Chet” on the top of the pad. My staff was then to write down on the pad the things they’d normally interrupt me with and keep that pad in their desk drawer until the weekly meeting.
The memo went out on Thursday, and I recall distinctly that on Friday no one came to my door. It was the first time in years that that had happened, and I did not know what to do with all this uninterrupted time. I could actually concentrate at the office, and I didn’t need to bring home the normal mounds of work to be done at nights and on weekends. I had a whole new learning curve headed my way.
No one came to my door on Friday, but, by Monday, the madness started all over. I had to have the pigheaded determination and discipline to train my staff to follow these rules. When someone comes to your door with a “got-a-minute” meeting, you stop them cold and say, “Is this something that can’t wait until the weekly meeting?” They will still try to get you to focus on it right then and there. And if you lack pigheaded discipline, you’ll cave and jump right into it. So I had to discipline myself and the staff to hold almost every thing until the weekly meetings.
And the best part? I went from reacting to the business 70 to 80 hours per week to proactively running and more effectively managing and growing the business in only nine hours per week because I broke down my responsibilities into nine major impact areas. The meetings were way more productive than the got-a-minute meetings because these meetings were more formal, structured, and results-oriented. The key staff for each impact area attended their meeting together, so major progress could be made and every one was there who then needed to take the next step or learn our latest breakthrough. I kept nine pads (one for each impact area), and on each pad I would keep notes of what we had worked on and who had promised to do what before the next weekly meeting.
Yes—to-do’s, tasks, and deadlines must be assigned after every meeting. But the key is not to ask for too much to be completed. Make the gains small but constant. If you are having the meeting every week and you are making small incremental gains each and every week, think of the profound transformation you’re going to have in 52 weeks. A year from now your company, division, or department can be massively improved. More on this later.
If you run a large company, you will have more impact areas. I helped one executive break down his company into the main impact areas and initiatives he was working on, and he ended up with 17—which means 17 one-hour meetings per week. That might sound crazy to a small-company owner or executive, but it is the way to take your company to the next level if you’ve got a lot going on. This particular executive was working 70 hours per week and getting less done than when I made him break down the company into 17 hours of meetings. Each meeting moved each impact area forward.
Decisions were made weekly. Everything of importance got addressed every week. Everyone was happier. The employees in each area felt more important. Prior to this program,