Running the weekly meeting. The 90 minutes that run the company.

Borrow the agenda — don't invent one

You do not need to design your own meeting. We didn't, and the times we tried to wing it were the worst. Our evolution went in three stages: for years, nothing — just reactive, ad hoc meetings when a fire broke out. Then we adopted Scaling Up, which gave us a real weekly agenda for the first time. For the last five years of the business we ran the EOS Level 10 Meeting, and it's the one I'd hand any leadership team starting out.

The L10 agenda is the same every week: a quick personal and professional segue to open, a scorecard review, a rock (quarterly priority) review, customer and employee headlines, the to-do list from last week, then IDS — identify, discuss, solve — for the issues list, and a clean conclude. Ninety minutes, same shape, every single week. The specific framework matters less than this: pick a proven one and run it consistently, rather than reinventing the meeting each week based on whatever feels urgent.

Run it on rails

I ran the meeting as the integrator, and I followed the agenda — and the clock — rigidly. That rigidity is not bureaucracy; it's the entire point. The structure is what stops a leadership meeting from degrading into the two things that kill it: a status update where everyone reports and nothing gets decided, or a rabbit hole where one topic eats the whole hour. Only on occasion, when a discussion was genuinely deep and genuinely worth it, would I let us go off agenda.

On very rare occasions a topic was too big for the weekly slot — a strategic question that came up mid-quarter and needed real room. For those, we didn't hijack the L10; we scheduled a separate, single-item meeting dedicated to that one thing. That kept the weekly meeting sacred and on time, which is what let everyone trust it enough to keep showing up prepared.

The scorecard readout, and how a number becomes an issue

The heart of the meeting is the scorecard. We did a fast readout: whoever owned a metric reported it — not me reading the whole board, but each owner speaking to their own numbers. That ownership is half the value; a number with a name attached gets attended to in a way an anonymous dashboard never does.

The mechanic for turning a number into action is simple and strict. If a metric was red and it needed discussion, it didn't get debated on the spot — it got dropped onto the issues list to be worked during IDS, so the readout stayed fast. And if a metric came in red multiple weeks in a row, that was an automatic trigger: this isn't noise, it's a problem, and it goes to the issues list to actually be solved. The scorecard surfaces what deserves attention; the issues list is where it gets resolved. Keeping those two steps separate is what makes the meeting move.

Tuesday at 9

Timing is not a small detail. We held the L10 on Tuesdays at 9am, and I think that's close to the perfect slot. Mondays are a trap: everyone's just back from the weekend, inboxes are overflowing, the week isn't planned yet, and there are fires to put out. Tuesday at 9 gives you a clean runway — prep materials can go out Friday or Monday, so people arrive actually prepared rather than seeing the numbers for the first time in the room.

In the room: our leadership team — the CTO, my co-founder, and the VPs of Customer Success/Support, Sales, and Marketing. That meeting also fed our weekly all-hands. Something raised in the L10 — a new policy, an important product-launch update, an issue worth airing — would get carried into the all-hands, which also ran our Yeoman of the Week and a genuinely fun new-hire segment where someone gave a five-slide intro to themselves: where they're from, favorite foods, books, movies, pets, the works. The leadership meeting set the operating agenda; the all-hands carried the parts of it the whole company needed, and kept the culture warm while it did.

Where it earns its keep

The weekly rhythm almost always paid for itself, because monthly is simply too slow for the problems a business actually has.

Here's a concrete one I still remember. Demos Completed started showing up red on the scorecard, week after week. When we dug in during IDS, the cause was specific: prospects wanted a demo more or less instantly, but our sales team's calendars were already packed with pre-booked demos, so we simply had no capacity to take the new ones — and they cooled off while they waited. We solved it right there in the meeting: we wrote a policy and trained members of the customer support and success teams to run demos too, expanding our demo capacity well beyond the sales team. Demos Completed started climbing. That is the entire case for a weekly meeting in one example — a number went red, we found out within days instead of weeks, and we fixed the actual constraint before it cost us a quarter of pipeline.

The hard part isn't the agenda — it's the airtime

If you take one thing from this, take this. The rookie mistake — the one we made for too long — is letting the founders take all the air time. It's the natural default: the owners have the most context, the most conviction, and the most authority, so they talk, and everyone else reports and nods. A meeting run that way is just the founders thinking out loud with an audience.

The real work is building a room where contentious business issues can be put on the table and worked through professionally — where a VP isn't afraid to add a hard issue to the list, even one that implicates an owner's pet project. That doesn't mean every decision is made by consensus; someone still decides. It means every voice gets heard before the decision, and the weekly meeting is the designated place for that problem-solving to happen. Building that muscle takes time and it takes the cadence itself — the repetition of showing up every Tuesday and being asked "what do you think?" until people believe the question is real. It took us a while. But once we had it, every leadership team member was contributing, and the meeting stopped being the founders' show and became the company's. That's when a weekly meeting goes from a calendar event to the thing that actually runs the business.