Reduce Ad Hoc Chaos by Holding More Efficient Team Meetings

When many top performing commercial real estate agents go out on their own, they often avoid internal meetings like the plague.

Having come from workplaces where meetings felt like a chore, they don’t want to bring time-wasting meetings and negative energy into their new business.

But scrapping meetings altogether (or avoiding them at all costs) isn’t the answer.

Instead, the key is to decide to only have productive meetings that drive results.

You see, when done right, team meetings can help keep everyone focused on the business’ priorities.

Meetings reduce unnecessary interruptions, because ad hoc communication is funneled into one place.

They reinforce culture, through the way they’re run and the ground rules that people follow while interacting with each other.

And the right agenda ensures everyone knows what they need to do to help the business move closer to its vision and hit its financial goals.

On the podcast this week, I break down the format I’ve used over my career to hold efficient, effective and purposeful team meetings that create individual accountability and support business growth.

If you’re avoiding meetings, or you need to refresh your team’s meeting agenda, take a few minutes to listen to episode 193 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership.

And here’s the agenda outline that I cover in the episode. You’re welcome to borrow this for your team meetings:

🙌 MD’s Messages (vision & strategic priorities)

📈 New business (new opportunities in the pipeline)

💼 Work in progress (focus on converting listings/requirements into revenue)

📚 Learnings & case studies (win/loss debriefs, review of transactions, training moment)

📋 General business (operational items, housekeeping, open discussion re market, marketing initiatives, etc.)

Episode transcript:

Here at CRE Success, the majority of our clients are Commercial Real Estate Principal that used to be Top Performing Commercial Real Estate Agents at the big global commercial real estate firms.

And the reasons that they give for why they've decided to go out on their own are often quite similar and they say they fall into three main categories.

The first category is that they want to start building wealth for themselves.

They want to stop making shareholders money and start making money for themselves, keep more of what they earn and build their wealth through the business that they are building.

The second thing that often comes up is around culture, whether they've been dealing with people at work that they didn't enjoy dealing with or maybe just too much office politics or the values of the business or the people within it didn't reflect their values and they want to lead a business lead a team that really is aligned with who they are.

And the third thing that often comes up is, well, just “red tape”, BS meetings and let's just focus more on getting stuff done, serving clients, making money.

And what I want to talk to you about today is how we need to do some meetings. Yes, we can do less than we used to do in the big businesses.

But let's do some meetings, meetings which reduce ad hoc communication elsewhere, meetings that drive productivity and that improve efficiency.

Let's talk about.

Hello and welcome to episode 193 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. I'm your host, Darren Krakowiak, I really appreciate you joining us for another episode.

I'm here to help you work fewer hours, deliver more value to your clients and ultimately have a business that is growing faster than it was previously.

That's what we're trying to do.

And today's topic is very much aligned with those goals because we're talking about the importance of meetings, but meetings that matter.

And a mistake that I see some commercial real estate principals making is that they detested meetings that they used to have when they were an employee so much that they just avoid doing meetings at all costs.

But here at CRE Success, we believe that meetings are important and there are three key meetings that we recommend that Commercial Real Estate Principals hold as part of their, if you like meeting cadence that they use to help them manage and run their business and lead their people.

So, one of those meetings is one-on-one meetings.

The second one is an operations meeting to sort of run the back of house.

And the third meeting is team meetings or department meetings.

And today, I want to talk about department meetings because I think this is one that most people accept is important, but I want to give you a little bit of a framework around why we should be doing it every week and how those meetings should operate.

Because we want to use meetings to help you manage the business, to drive performance and also enhance efficiency.

And the goal really is to make sure there's less ad hoc communication so that you can focus more on generating revenue and also on strategizing to grow your business.

And also, so your team can do the same thing as well.

The more time that we've got our team members focused on revenue generating activities, the more money that they can make and the more that the business can grow.

So, let me give you a simple outline of how I recommend an agenda for a team meeting or a department meeting should go.

The first agenda item should be something around your messages. You can call it MD's messages.

I used to call it not on the actual agenda, but in my mind, it was like a sermon. And imagine that you've got to address your parish or address the troops if you like and just talk to them about what's important to you.

And it's a really great way if you've actually got a vision that is if you've set a vision for the business around where we're going, why it matters and how do we know if we've arrived or if we're on track, you can talk about that.

And enlist people's support and show them how they can help you achieve that vision and help them buy into it.

It's also a time when you can talk about your strategic priorities.

Again, if you've set them, they're typically 3 to 5 things that if everyone is more focused on these things, then the business will get closer to its financial targets and to achieving the vision.

And if you don't have a vision or strategic priorities. Yep, that's OK. There are other things that you can talk about in terms of growth objectives.

You might talk about what's going on in the market from a seasonal or cyclical perspective.

For example, it's October. So, in October, we're probably talking about campaigns which have launched recently or are going to be launched imminently.

And what we need to be doing in this type of market to reduce the gap between buyers and sellers.

And also ensure that we're doing more than is typically required to move deals forward, given we've got some evidence in the current market that things are moving a little bit more slowly.

So, the point of having that conversation with your people is to give them information, which reduces the likelihood that we're going to be carrying more style listings into 2025.

So, the first agenda item is your messages.

The next agenda item is new opportunities. You might call it business development. And it's just about what is it that is out there that we're chasing that hasn't yet been secured as new business.

And I think a mistake that is sometimes made is that people go straight into going through the listings or the work in progress, but they don't actually talk about business development.

And if we don't talk about business development about growth-oriented activities, that kind of sends the message that it's not important.

Or if we do it later, it sort of signals that it's less important than what we're currently working on.

I think we always want to be replenishing and filling our pipeline with new opportunities even when we're busy and we can make it more likely that will happen by giving that topic pretty high importance and priority in the list of the agenda that we're running through with our team every week.

So, after business development, then we can talk about the work in progress, we can go through the listings, you can do that line by line.
And one thing I'd recommend that you do if you're not already doing this is to actually list the anticipated revenue that will be generated for the business from that deal.

Because that allows you to focus on what's more important, to ask questions around what are we doing to get this deal over the line?

It allows you to plan, it allows you to help your team and focus your energy and attention and focus on what is more important from a revenue perspective.

The fourth agenda item that I'd recommend that you have in your weekly team meetings is something to do with either case studies or maybe learnings from recent business development activities.

So maybe a win loss debrief or we can talk about other things that are going on in terms of projects that we've completed and what we learnt, what the wins were, what the learnings were, etc.

So, it's a training moment, but we're making it practical by applying it to actual deals that are going on.

And this is something which you can rotate amongst the team, don't take on all the burden yourself of having to deliver all that training, get your people involved and get them to share their learnings.

Often there'll be things that they've got to say that perhaps you haven't even thought of and it reinforces the learnings when people are able to talk about it and teach it to others.

The last item is general business.

So, this can be asking questions, it could be open discussion. We might have an area around market gossip or market information. And also, we've got the opportunity to talk about what's going on from an operational perspective.

So, if people aren't filling in their annual leave forms correctly or anything of that administrative nature that you need to talk about, you can come under that category.

So that's a broad outline of what the meeting should look like.

And I just want to give you a couple of principles or guidelines that you might want to put in place because I think we need to establish the rules.

As I mentioned in an episode two or three weeks ago, we've got to set the expectation. We can't just assume that people understand what we want.

And as the Principal of the business, you've got the right to have expectations, but we've got to communicate what they are so then people know and then they can follow them.

So, some examples here might be no phones. You might say that it's not acceptable to even have your phone on the desk or look at your phone or it's not acceptable for the phone to ring.

There might be a fine if the phone does ring and that fine, then goes into a jar which is used for a charity or for drinks or whatever. You could have a start time and an end time and commit to starting and finishing on time.

So, that means that you turn up on time and that you let people go on time.

So, they know that if they book a meeting after that hour meeting, that you're asking them to attend, they can confidently do that, knowing that they're not going to be held back.

We can also set the expectation that if people aren't going to attend, they need to let you know in advance. That if you're a non-attendee, you need to apologize in advance.

And one other thing that you might want to consider is just setting the expectation that everyone is expected to contribute in that meeting, that there's no passengers.

Everyone needs to be talking about their business development opportunities, everyone needs to be talking about their work in progress.

Everyone will be expected to offer up case studies and learnings from wins and losses.

So, this is the very, very sort of high-level outline of how we look at meetings when we're teaching it to our clients within CRE Suite, which is our program for Commercial Real Estate Principals.

And I guess the point I want to leave you with today is just because you hated meetings, it doesn't mean that your meetings will be hated by everyone.

You've got the opportunity to make meetings matter, to make them more engaging, to ensure that it's something that people don't dread and for them to actually have a meaningful impact on the performance of your business.

That is our episode for today. Thank you so much for listening and I will speak to you soon.