The Only Management Meeting You’ll Ever Need to Save Time and Get Results

Most manager meetings turn into story time, complaint hour, or a total waste of everyone’s energy.

You walk out with nothing but a mental list and a few “we should probably” statements that never happen.

This episode breaks down a dead-simple 30-minute meeting format that forces clarity, accountability, and actual progress.

You’ll get a step-by-step system to cut the noise, spot real issues before they become fires, and hold your team to what matters without micromanaging.

If your weekly meetings feel like déjà vu with no results, this is the fix.

What You’ll Learn
🌟 The one meeting setup that stops chaos in 30 minutes
🌟 Why “let’s circle back” is killing your momentum
🌟 The simple tool that makes follow-through visible and real
🌟 How to fix repeated problems without another long talk
🌟 The real reason your team drops tasks without meaning to
🌟 What to do when meetings become group therapy sessions
🌟 How to make accountability automatic without micromanaging 

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Transcript

Chris Schneider 00:00:00  

Learn the four part agenda. Your managers can't game or derail and master the action item system that kills. We've talked about it, but no one did it. Hello and welcome to the Bar Business Podcast, where we help bar owners increase profits, attract loyal guests, and simplify operations so you can avoid burnout and finally enjoy your life outside of your bar. I'm your host, Chris Schneider, the bar business coach. So today what we're going to do is we're going to break down a 30 minute management meeting, meaning that you can have every week that is short, predictable and impossible to ignore. The basic idea here is that we need to set ourselves up for success. And in order to do that, a lot of times in the bar business, we have to be very efficient with our time. So we should always have a weekly management meeting. But keeping those short, concise and on point can be really difficult. I know when I had my bars, a lot of times my managers, I said or I haven't talked for a couple hours and frankly, we didn't get much done.

Chris Schneider 00:00:58  

There was more just buzzing about what had happened, complaining about customers that had been weird and telling stories. But what we didn't do was actually accomplish anything huge. So what I'm going to give you today is a blueprint for a 30 minute meeting that you can have once a week that will help prevent crises in your bar. Make sure your team is on point. They know what they need to do and make sure your managers are set up for success. But before I give you the blueprint, I want to just briefly talk about why most meetings fail. Because really, what we're talking about today, it's not how to have a productive meeting. It is, but it's about mitigating the failure that most meetings have. And so the number one reason meetings fail, and this is the one that I am most guilty of in a lot of meetings that I've had over the course of my life. And just managing other people is not having an agenda. If you don't have an agenda, there is no outcome. If there is no outcome, you end up just like I said before, telling stories and talking in circles when you don't prioritize your topics.

Chris Schneider 00:02:03  

You can allow loud voices to hijack the meetings, and you can fear into places where you're not actually focusing on what's important. You're focusing on what's interesting or what one of your managers wants to talk about. The other place a lot of people fail is they don't have owner action items, or I should say, owners of action items. So someone needs to do this next week. Well, if somebody needs to do this next week, guess what? Ain't nobody going to do it because unless someone owns every task, those tasks will not get done. And what happens a lot is that you end up having a meeting. You don't produce much. You send an email. The email requires follow up. It doesn't happen next week. You're meeting, and the meeting is about why you didn't respond to the email, about what you met about, and then you end up having emails about meetings and meetings that should have been emails and meetings about meetings. And nobody wants to do that. Let's be really honest here.

Chris Schneider 00:03:00  

So what is the 30 minute meeting framework that I think can really help to supercharge the value of a weekly manager meeting. Well, first, then the first five minutes of your meeting, spend it on reviewing metrics, right? What was your week prior versus your goals? What's your labor cost percentage? Is your food cost percentage in line? What's your rev cash? How are your discounts looking? Is your guest check average going up or going down, all of that sort of metric of review. And quite frankly, if you come prepared to the meeting, that is a five minute thing. You just look at them and you look at how they've changed. And in that process you can say, okay, here are the metrics that we failed on last week. How can we make them better in the next week? And that is the second part of the conversation. So we spend five minutes looking at metrics and spend about ten minutes discussing the metrics, the patterns, what keeps repeating? Do you have quality issues, speed issues, cash issues, inventory issues, people issues? What issues are there that need to be solved? Now, I have talked a lot about lean management and getting into root cause analysis.

Chris Schneider 00:04:06  

And absolutely we want to root cause all those issues. But real root cause analysis, if you remember from listening to those podcasts, take some time. So in ten minutes, we're not going to be able to root cause all our issues. But what we can do is start that process. And really, you know, if there's only one metric that we're worried about based upon the metric of you focusing on that one metric and actually root cause it out. So root causing, again, the main thing there is we're going to ask why until we don't have anything more to ask why about. Right. Why were my discounts 7% last week. Well, because this one table we comped and it was a $500 table. Why did we comp a $500 table? Well, they got bad service. Why did they get bad service? Right. And you just keep asking why until you get to that root cause, and then you solve that root cause and hopefully the chain of events that comes after it does not repeat.

Chris Schneider 00:05:03  

So use your metrics in the first five minutes. Review those. Look at where you are. Then spend ten minutes determining the root cause of a metric or two that you want to focus on for the next week. Figure out the cause of it and then figure out a countermeasure to eliminate that cause. So now we're only 15 minutes in the meeting. What do we do with the second 15 minutes? Well, spend ten minutes. So a minute 15 to 25 planning the upcoming week. Look as events, promos, weather, staffing, risks, deliveries, vendor gaps, anything that is coming up in the week just kind of walk through the week, figure out where you might have some problems, figure out what's going to be easy, what's not, and then anywhere where you can foresee a problem, try to come up with a way to avoid that from being a problem. And then with the last five minutes of the meeting, it's accountability check in. So we're going to look at what we talked about last week and say, hey did we get this stuff done? Are the action items done by the time they were supposed to be done? If we have a project that's going to last 2 or 3 weeks and we're in week one.

Chris Schneider 00:06:06  

Well, how is our progress today? Right. We want to go back and look at the outcomes of prior meetings and see where we are. Are we on track to get those done or not? And essentially we want to bucket everything as either read yeah, we're on point or I'm sorry. Green. Yes, we're on point or red. No we're not. And anything that's read figure out what action items need to be done. Figure out how to turn that from red to green before the next meeting. And that's that simple, folks. 30 minutes. You're gonna review your metrics, analyze anything that was negative that happened. Make a plan to solve it. Look at your upcoming week. What's going on? What do we know is going to happen? What orders do we have? What parties do we have? What events do we have? All of that good stuff. And then finally check in on the accountability items from the prior week's meeting. And quite frankly, if you keep this on a stop walk, which, you know, I generally say I hate keeping things on a stopwatch, but this is something I would keep on a stopwatch because you want to make these meetings move quick.

Chris Schneider 00:07:12  

And is it going to seem really quick and rush the first time you do it? Yes. Well, it seems quick and rush the second time you do it. Yeah, but guess what? After a couple of weeks you're going to hit a rhythm. And these meetings are going to get really, really, really easy. Now before I let you go today, there's one other thing that I would add to this whole framework, which is because we're assigning tasks because we have these accountability standards, we need an accountability system in order to measure this, track it, and make sure that we are getting everything included that should be included. So how do we do this? Well, you want one tracker. It needs to be visible to all your managers. It can be digital. It can be a physical thing in the office. Right? I don't really care. But you need somewhere where everyone can turn to as a source of truth, to understand what they're accountable for and where they are in the process.

Chris Schneider 00:08:02  

A lot of times if you're looking into like lean management or you're familiar with manufacturing or tech. You might have heard of a Kanban board that is a way to do this that that's what I like as Kanban boards. But a Kanban board essentially is just saying, hey, not started, started in progress. Complete, right? It's just a stages. And heck, you can do it with a whiteboard with some lines on it and post-it notes. I've done that before. It's an old school way to do it, but it works just fine. Or you can do it through all sorts of tech that can handle these sorts of progress tracking boards, along with that accountability, presentation that you have, that however you're putting together this list and showing your managers who's accountable for what by when, you also need to make sure that there's a consequence when you miss. Right. So think about things like, okay, if somebody misses a deadline once and there's a good reason okay, no big deal. But if they miss the deadline every week, you need to start having coaching and training that's going to that manager.

Chris Schneider 00:08:59  

You need to potentially look at tightening their scope. And eventually you could even look if it becomes a really common regular problem at a roll fit conversation, but you can't have an efficient management meeting and an efficient management system where you identify and solve problems if people are not accountable for the solutions. So make sure you have that piece in place. So again real quick. The meeting framework before I let you go. Five minutes. Review your metrics. Minutes five through 15. Talk about the patterns you see in the metrics. Root cause anything that's bad. Minutes 15 through 25. Look at the week ahead. Look at what's going on. And then 25 through 30. Hold people accountable to what they were responsible for after the meeting last week.

Chris Schneider 00:09:50  

That about wraps it up for today. If you enjoyed today's insights, make sure you like, subscribe and leave a review. If you are ready to take your bar to the next level, schedule a strategy session with me by clicking the link in the show notes below.

Chris Schneider 00:10:02  Until next time, have a great day and we will talk again later.