the agenda, minute by minute
The agenda is fixed, and the clock is part of it. Ninety minutes, in this order, every week:
- segue, 5 minutes. Everyone shares one personal and one business good from the week. It sounds soft. Its actual job is to get every voice in the room used before anything hard comes up, and to mark a clean start.
- scorecard, 5 minutes. A short list of weekly numbers, each with a target and an owner. You read them, you mark each one on track or off track, and you say nothing else. An off-track number is not discussed here — it goes on the issues list.
- rock review, 5 minutes. Rocks are the quarterly priorities, three to seven of them, one owner each. Same rule: on track or off track, no discussion. Off track becomes an issue.
- customer and employee headlines, 5 minutes. Short factual news from both sides of the business — a customer who is unhappy, a tech who gave notice. Anything that needs action becomes an issue.
- to-do review, 5 minutes. The seven-day commitments made in last week's meeting, read back as done or not done. A list that clears at half means the room is committing to more than it can carry.
- ids — identify, discuss, solve — 60 minutes. This is the meeting. The issues list gets prioritized to the top three and the team works them one at a time. Identify means finding the real issue under the reported one. Discuss means saying it once, not five times. Solve means a decision that turns into a to-do with a name and a date.
- conclude and rate, 5 minutes. Recap the to-dos, decide what gets communicated to the rest of the company, and rate the meeting one to ten out loud.
Note the arithmetic: thirty minutes of reporting, sixty minutes of solving. Everything before IDS exists to produce a good issues list, and nothing before IDS is allowed to turn into a conversation.
why it works when it works
The same numbers appear on the same day. A weekly number you look at fifty-two times a year develops a shape you can feel. You stop asking whether a bad week is bad and start recognizing the third bad week for what it is.
Every number and every rock has exactly one owner. Not a department, not “ops” — a person, by name. Shared ownership is how a number goes unwatched for a whole quarter while everyone assumes someone else is on it.
Issues get solved at the root. The reason IDS gets sixty minutes is that the first version of an issue is almost never the issue. “The Johnson job is late” is a symptom; the thing underneath might be that nobody owns the handoff between mitigation and rebuild. Solve that once and the symptom retires instead of reappearing on next week's list.
And the rating keeps the meeting honest. If the room says five out of ten, someone has to say why, and the why is usually structural — we started late, we drifted, half the scorecard was blank. A meeting that grades itself every week either improves or gets cancelled. Both of those beat a meeting that limps along for a year.
why l10s go stale
We run this meeting weekly inside a working restoration company, so this list comes from experience rather than theory.
The scorecard gets filled in by hand the night before. Somebody — usually the person who least wants to — opens the CRM, opens QuickBooks, opens the ads dashboard, and types numbers into a spreadsheet at nine at night. That work is invisible, unrewarding, and the first thing dropped in a busy week. A blank column turns the scorecard segment into an apology.
The numbers live in four systems and nobody trusts them. When revenue in the CRM and revenue in the books disagree, the first stretch of IDS gets spent litigating which number is right. That is the most expensive possible use of the room, and it repeats every week until the wiring underneath gets fixed.
The meeting gets moved. Once. Then again, and then it is monthly, and then it is a call about one job. Same day, same time is not a preference — it is what makes the numbers comparable week over week.
To-dos have no owner. “We should look at that” is not a to-do. A to-do is a name, a verb, and seven days. Without all three the issue returns next week with more people annoyed about it, which is exactly the loop the meeting was built to end.
what to fix first
Make the scorecard automatic before you touch anything else.
Almost every stale L10 traces back to the data, not the discipline. Owners try to fix a limp meeting with more facilitation — a stricter timer, a better agenda printout — when the real failure is that the numbers arrive late, arrive wrong, or arrive with a footnote about where they came from. Fix the source and most of the other symptoms go away on their own, because the room stops arguing about inputs and starts arguing about decisions.
That is why we built our scorecard (now moving into axial): it pulls from the crm, the books, ads, and slack, so the numbers are on the board before anyone sits down. Nobody types them, so nobody skips them, and an off-track number arrives with the detail underneath it attached instead of a shrug.
If the cadence itself is what is missing — no rocks, no issues list, no rating — that is coaching, and we install it with the tooling rather than handing over a workbook. Say your ad spend, your job margin, and your AR days each live in a different system today: the order of operations is wire them together, put one name on each, and only then worry about whether the meeting starts on time.