The Saturday Meeting
The term “meeting” can conjure different emotions depending on who you are, what meetings you’ve been in, and what you’ve gotten (or haven’t gotten) out of them. After a couple years operating two stores in Maryland, one a scooter shop in College Park, and the other a motorcycle shop in Salisbury, I saw the need to bring our staff together regularly for team development, communicating policies, and in general just help keep us unified in our mission.
Distance + Technology
The first challenge? Our two stores were 120 miles apart, so a weekly in-person meeting was out of the question. Now if you’re reading this in today’s era, the solution is super common and straightforward: remote team meeting using Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or something similar. The thing is, the start of these meetings predates not only Zoom and Microsoft Teams, but also the general cultural acceptance and use of digital, video/remote meeting systems by staff and companies. We were pioneers of taking two remote groups and meshing them together via technology in a comfortable and competent manner. Luckily, we had recently migrated our team to the Google suite of apps, and google had a video chat function built into their (now defunct) Google Hangouts app (anyone remember how good that 2015-2019ish Hangouts app was??). It was the first time that any of our staff participated in a meeting of this format, and I’d like to think us being an early adopter of this solution gave our staff a leg-up during the events of 2020, both those that were still with us, and those that had moved on to new jobs.
To mitigate the distance challenge using technology, we would usually gather in the waiting room of our two respective stores and plug a laptop into the waiting room TV, which really helped make the meeting feel more authentic. With bigger video, clearer audio, and barely any lag, it was almost like we were all together in the same room. At first, the meetings could be quite awkward! Taking people that had never participated in a video meeting in their life and helping them be comfortable enough to speak and share openly took a couple weeks of practice, but as time went on, everyone got used it, and dare I say looked forward to it. It was fun to “see” the staff on the “other side of the bridge” once a week, catch up on personal stories and progress at work.
For years of operating two stores, we would hold a “service team meeting” and “sales team meeting” remotely via Google Hangouts. This meeting was usually on Tuesday (the “Monday” of our week), and was around 30 minutes in the morning. This meeting set the tone for the week for each team and made sure they understood their goals and objectives for the days to follow.
On Saturday mornings we would hold the “all team meeting” at each store individually, without tying them together with Google Hangouts. That way, the individual team could share their ups and downs related specifically to their location, and bond a bit more.
Inspiration
Coming from a sports and music background, I’d seen the value in meetings early in high school. In lacrosse, we’d always have a chat before and after practice where at the beginning our coaches would share the goals for the day, what we need work on, and what is going well. After practice we’d review the progress from the day, discuss upcoming opponents and what we need to be prepared for with them, and how we’re doing so far in the season. In marching band we’d talk about the results from the previous weekend’s competition, where we need to improve, and how we’re going to achieve effective improvement. We’d also have “sectional” meetings in band where just the drumline (which I was a part of) would meet separately, work on certain sections of the music, or just practice and warm-up for the session ahead.
Meeting Format
Meetings are a balancing act. Too short and you don’t cover everything you need to cover. Too long and people “check out”, stop participating, or stop looking forward to them. I wanted to keep our meetings short but effective. To do that, I created a four-topic format for us to follow every week.
The first two topics were pretty common and are present in many meetings, and the second two were more unique to our team and industry. The topics were as follows:
Share a “positive” from your week
No matter the challenges you faced at work that week, there is always a silver lining somewhere. Maybe you’re a mechanic and you made a breakthrough on that old ATV repair with the wiring issue. Maybe the sales team figured out a new way to process tag & title paperwork that will reduce errors and make the customer happy. Each person would always start with their positive from the week to set the tone in an uplifting manner, and having them speak the positive out loud could have a lasting affect on the rest of the things they’re sharing and frankly the rest of their day.
Share a “challenge” from your week
Notice I didn’t say “negative” ! While it’s just a word, how you verbally describe your difficult moments also affects you mentality (just like with the positives). We would actively remind staff during sharing to think of it as a challenge, not a problem nor negative. Besides helping our team frame their mindset positively, we reminded them also that you can be in the beginning, middle, or end of a challenge, but no matter what, whatever they’re working on has a solution, either through them alone or with the help of their team. The sales team would talk about a unit that isn’t selling well that week, or maybe the affect the rainy weather has had on sales. The parts team would share how delays and backorders on spark plugs have been disrupting services, but they were able to find a different supplier with a warehouse that had them in stock. The mechanics would talk about a carburetor not tuning the way you need it to, or how you were able to figure out that brake issue on the Harley. Sometimes people were still in the middle of their challenge, and some had overcome it and were able to tell the whole tale of going from challenge to triumph.
Share a “tech tip” from the week
This is where we got more specific into the motorcycle industry and shared something that applies only to powersports. Usually this was a deeper “technical” dive into something in your week that stood out and that others could benefit from knowing. Sometimes this was related to your positive or challenge from the week, and sometimes it was completely different. For a mechanic, they might talk about the exact specifics of how they repaired a bike, and a salesperson might discuss or show the changes to our sales software, or maybe an abstract feature they learned about from a bike on the sales floor that isn’t common knowledge. This was the part of the meeting that made our salespeople more technically savvy, and our mechanics more personable and able to communicate technical repair concepts to non-mechanics. Both of these made our team better not only at communicating with customers but also with each other.
Share a Core Value that most applies to your week
In 2016, we came up with a list of Core Values: a set of principals and objectives to guide every decision in our company. The last step of the weekly meeting was for each person to pick one of our eight Core Values and share how it applied to your week, or how you applied it with purpose to your work. The Core Values were as follows:
Create Excellence
Pursue Passion
Keep it Honest, Open and Transparent
Stay Unified
Drive Change
Be Clean, Safe, and Organized
Give Back
Enjoy the Ride
I challenged our staff to try and apply a different value every week, but it was also okay if someone repeated one for a couple of weeks especially when they were working on a longer-term project. This was probably the lightest and easiest part of the meeting, and it was a great way to keep our values and culture fresh in the minds of the staff and help them apply unified principals to their work, customers, and coworkers.
Legacy
While we sold College Scooters to outside owners in 2020 and I’m unsure of the meeting status there, I sold Shore Cycles to a long-term employee in 2024 and he continues to hold the meetings with the team in the same format. Some of my favorite memories from fifteen years of business ownership are from these meetings - seriously! I remember big positive moments, lots of laughs, and also allowing our team to help an employee dealing with a professional or personal challenge. These meetings taught me a few core beliefs about meetings:
Consistency is the most important factor. You can’t expect every team member to be “all-in” with a meeting format right away, so it’s your job as a leader to be the guiding force in these meetings, attend them with an energetic and positive mindset, and make sure you hold them every single week, no matter how busy everyone is. As a leader, your team looks to you for stability, even amongst rough seas, and being consistent with meetings is a great way to encourage a culture of stability.
Sharing experiences, challenges, and general insight is important for every team member, not just managers, and doing so during a meeting allows everyone to have a voice with the team, shape the direction of the company, and offer their knowledge as a platform for others to launch from.
Progress is most easily measured in meetings. You can see who is buying-in to the company culture, and who needs more guidance. You can hear about who had a tough week, and who glided through with ease. All of this leads to a team with greater empathy for their team members, in turn allowing them to better serve their customers. When you need to approach an employee privately, for something good or bad, you have a greater insight into their position since they’ve had a voice in company meetings.