It’s a defining moment in your entrepreneurial life when you expand from just you and the cat to your first “team”.

Most of us had a j.o.b. before we started on this different, sometimes unpredictable, brilliant path and the differences can feel HUGE.

When you go solo you really are a one (wo)man band.

No IT department, sales team, development, admin or finance. No co-workers to hand anything over to, ask a second opinion or dream up ideas with. Eeek!

(That’s one of the many benefits of working with a mastermind group or wicked business coach. *wink*).

Shake it like a margarita

You know, when your success relies only on you it feels like an emotional margarita being shaken up. To counteract this I simply had to bring this one thing with me from my employment years into my microbiz.

When you do it well it means your team is more focussed, meaningful, and creates a sense that you’re in this together. Masses of shiz gets done. Boom!

I’ve just done it for nearly two and half hours with my team… man, that was good.

Obvs I am talking about team meetings

What DID you think I meant?

Back in the days when I worked in an office, the entire company I worked for would get together for a weekly update. This happened without fail first thing every Monday.

It started when there were only 3 team members, and I wager it still happens today now that they have grown to 60+ employees.

It meant everyone was up to speed with happenings in the company no matter what your position: Business direction, client wins, staff movements, financial and social. Everything was up for discussion.

It bonded and motivated us, and was one of the great habits that made us a super awesome multi award-winning PR agency with high staff retention.

Now it’s a little bit different

Nowadays my team and I work virtually, some I have met, some I haven’t. Some are local, some aren’t.

It would be too easy to rely on email (read here to learn what I think about that) to discuss entire shopping lists of tasks that need to get done.

It would be too easy to never *really* communicate.

Instead we do this

Instead, we have a scheduled update every.single.week (shorter than today’s usually!).

But what do we talk about? What if there’s nothing to say? NEVER HAPPENS!

Firstly we keep a weekly “agenda”. Ours is an ever-expanding GoogleDoc where actions are kept and rolled on to the next week so nothing gets lost or forgotten.

We can refer back and see where we’re at compared to where we want to be and the dates things were completed.

Then we jump on Skype or a conference line and just like any normal meeting we go through our stuff.

Moments like these

It’s like our collection of “water cooler” moments, passing comments over the desk, and structured meetings bundled into one call.

So unless you have done nothing all week and plan to do nothing the following week (NEVER HAPPENS!) there will always be an update.

Occasionally, VERY occasionally life or biz gets in the way and we have to skip a meeting. That’s life. We still communicate, and I can still hand things over (here’s how I know it will go well, every time).

Plus we keep the communication coming between each meeting, much the same as we would if we worked within shouting distance.

But, the very best weeks, the most motivated weeks and the ones where we feel connected, on the same hymn sheet, bonded whatever you want to call it – those weeks come right out of the good meetings.

And THIS is what you need to keep everyone motivated, accountable and your business growing successfully.

How to do it

• Make your meetings a non negotiable every week – put recurring meetings in everyone’s schedules so no one forgets

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• Agree on the best communication platform use and always have a back up (so we use our conference call line but if that fails we know to meet on Skype)

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• Have a shared document for your agenda that you can all view, edit and refer back to (Google Docs is perfect for this)

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• Always have the current week at the top so you don’t waste time scrolling to the bottom of your doc

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• Paste unresolved points into the current week so they don’t get lost or forgotten

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• Include links to relevant resources so that it’s easy for everyone to refer. (Draft blog posts or new tools, for example)

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• Make a note of who is taking responsibility for each point and write notes so that it makes sense next week

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• Stick the time allocated and the agenda – leave the weekend goss for another time! (Unless it’s reallllly good of course)

If you follow these steps you’ll soon start to see more cohesion, more sense of team and more shiz getting done.

Over to you

What about you? If you are a biz of 1+, virtual or in person how do you come together as a team?

If you’re trying to make that leap from solo to +1 and need help with figuring it all out, book yourself a Clear strategy session with me to flesh out how to find your perfect team members and how to manage your workflow once they are on board.

See you there! X