The Meeting Manifesto: Why Revenue Leaders Need to Revolutionize How They Gather

How to run great meetings and also not drown in them

So this could go down as one of my most boring posts ever but I think it’s a really important topic so I’m going for it! 😅

Most revenue leaders think about meetings as a necessary evil; something to endure rather than optimize. We book them reflexively, attend them grudgingly, and rarely question their fundamental value. Yet, if you’re like me, you could spend upwards of 1000-1500 hours annually in these gatherings, making them one of our largest time investments.

I think everyone can agree that we have way too many meetings. But why? I think it’s because we don't think deeply enough about why, how, and when we gather. It’s our single biggest use of time and yet we are incredibly laissez faire about how we use and run them.

In Q1, I ran an intensive three-week training program with my management team to revolutionize how we think about meetings, and I wanted to share the framework we've developed with my fellow revenue leaders.

The True Cost of Poor Meeting Culture

Let's start with some sobering math. The average revenue leader spends 20-30 hours weekly in meetings. Even executives who fiercely protect their calendars rarely get below 10-15 hours.

That's 500-1,500 hours annually spent in meetings.

Someone at Shopify created a bot that calculated the combined hourly salary of everyone in a meeting to show the true financial cost. For a leadership gathering with five executives making $200K+ each, you're burning $500+ per hour. At many mature companies, that hourly rate is much much higher. 😬

But the real cost goes beyond time and money. According to a study from Harvard Business School, 71% of senior managers say meetings are unproductive and inefficient, and 65% say meetings keep them from completing their own work.

This becomes a cascading problem in revenue organizations. When leaders model poor meeting behavior, it permeates throughout the organization, creating a culture where everyone's default is to "book a meeting" rather than solve problems efficiently.

The Meeting Manifesto: A New Operating Methodology

After seeing this problem play out across multiple companies, I've developed what I call the Meeting Manifesto, which is a framework for revenue leaders to transform their meeting culture.

Core Principle #1: Meetings Are a Last Resort, Not a First Response

The most productive revenue teams I've worked with treat meetings like a scarce resource. They start with a simple question: "Does this need to be a meeting at all?"

In a study by Atlassian, they found that 31 hours per month are spent in unproductive meetings, with 91% of people admitting to daydreaming and 73% doing other work during meetings.

Meetings should not be the primary vehicle to get things done. Instead of defaulting to meetings, consider these alternatives:

• Asynchronous documentation: Detailed write-ups in Notion or similar tools

• Recorded videos: Quick Loom updates for visual explanations

• Decision documents: Structured templates that outline options and recommendations

• Slack threads: Quick clarifying questions that don't require face time

When approaching problems, first think through the issue, write it out, draft some solutions, and have a proposal that others can react to—rather than immediately booking a meeting.

Key practices:

• No updates in meetings (they should be written or recorded)

• If a meeting is mostly one person talking, it's an update and should have been written. Keep your colleagues honest on it

• Use recurring meetings sparingly and review them every 90 days

• Set recurring meetings to expire after 60-90 days so they need to be deliberately renewed

When we implemented this principle at Owner, our leadership team reduced meetings by 30% immediately. We wiped every recurring meeting off our calendars at the end of the program and started to rebuild our meeting cadence from scratch. (H/T to the Chaos Monkey at Shopify that would blow up everyone’s calendar.)

Core Principle #2: Every Meeting Needs a Clear Type and Purpose