Was the last meeting you had worth $2,000?

Enjoy complimentary access to top ideas and insights — selected by our editors.

I recently saw that Shopify, the Canadian e-commerce company, rolled out a calculator embedded into its employees' calendar app that tells them how much their internal meetings cost the company. For instance, a 30-minute meeting with three employees can cost $700 to $1,600. Adding an executive can raise the meeting cost to over $2,000.

That caught my attention because I was thinking about how much time and money we waste on internal meetings at our firms. Accountants can get behind this because every CPA knows the value of their time — so many still charge billable hours.  

Yet, how many inefficient meetings do we have in which 10 people, each billing out at $100 to $400 an hour, sit around talking about things without having a clear-cut objective or next steps from the meeting? Meetings like these are costing you thousands of dollars. How many do you have every week and month? Ouch!

When you're getting everyone together to share information, you don't need a meeting for that. The same thing could be accomplished by email. You don't need to keep your critical stakeholders tied up for four hours to make a group decision on something. Have them review all the information in advance; it could be a 30-minute meeting. 

Another potential time-waster is the dreaded weekly meeting. Firms have them whether they're needed or not. Most attendees are on autopilot with nothing to contribute, no action items to take, and they are just counting the minutes until it's over. 

Instead, couldn't one of your client service associates gather the relevant updates from each party, and then email the information to everyone who would otherwise have to attend the meeting? Now your meeting time is zero. Everybody stays in the loop and nobody is spending unnecessary time obtaining the update information that they need. 

The same goes for your meetings with clients. It's always nice to chat, but I tell my clients if I can't deliver $2,000 worth of value to you, then I don't think we should have a meeting. I want to respect your time. Instead I could send you a two-minute email or a 90-second summary video and accomplish the same thing. You hire me to protect your time so you can focus on things you enjoy. If we're going to get together, let's make it a valuable meeting. For more on summary videos, see my article Video, the busy season time saver.

Productive meetings have accountability, owners and outcomes

I'm not bashing meetings per se; just meetings with no accountability that waste people's time. If you're going to have a meeting to make an important decision, you should only have the absolutely necessary people there to make the decision. Everyone should have action items that must be completed by a specific deadline. At the next meeting, the owner either says "done" or "not done." That's why we have note-takers or scribes at all of our firm's meetings. At the conclusion, there should be a shared understanding of the discussion points and actions on who's doing what and by when. 

If we're just sending out updates, we have all kinds of great technology coordinating the correspondence. You don't need to put anybody in a room for that. Most meetings should have a timed agenda: "We're spending five minutes on open items. We're spending three minutes on this issue and five minutes on that issue." That keeps the discussion on track and prevents a few "oxygen hogs" from dominating the proceedings to hear themselves talk. 

Again, I can't stress enough the importance of clarifying who's doing what by when and having follow-up action items with an owner for each action item. When you own an action item, you'll pay close attention at the meeting because you know you'll have to do something by the next time everyone gets together. 

Real-world example

We just had a tactical meeting to review our office lease. We had discussion points outlined in advance in which we went through four things we needed from our next lease and how much we were willing to compromise on each. "Great," I told the group. "I'm going to call the leasing agent right now, give him the points and send out an email to let everyone know what the next ETA is." 

One partner said: "Great. I don't need to hear about it. Just keep me up to date." The others said they had time to sit in on the call with the leasing agent, and we got the whole thing done, including the call to the leasing agent, in 20 minutes. 

Agenda. Outcomes. Ownership. I'd love to hear how you and your colleagues are streamlining meetings — or just not having them at all.