Episode 21: Behind the Scenes of Our Weekly Team Meeting

See the show notes for this Episode here.

This transcript has been automatically generated.

This just makes sure that everyone is always very aware of what we're doing as a brand, as a company together all the time.

I'm Bonnie Christine, and this is where all things, creativity, design, business, and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town, tucked right inside the Smokey Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life. When I first set out to become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer. Fast forward to today, I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want and is wildly profitable. Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast.

In a world where meetings are mundane and never anything anyone looks forward to, I set out about a year ago to create a format for a weekly meeting that would be fun and exciting for our creative team, but also really help us get the momentum that we needed to enter the week and know exactly what we were doing and what we were working on. And so we have gotten into a rhythm of a weekly meeting. We call it our momentum meeting, our Monday Momentum meeting, and we have quite the structure and format to it, and it's one of my favorite parts of our entire week.

So I thought I would just give it to you today. I'm gonna tell you what we do in our weekly team meeting. My hope is that you'll be able to utilize this whether you have a big team or not, even if it's just one person. I think it could be really beneficial to have a format to the way that you meet every single week.

And if you don't have a team, I think you'll still enjoy just dreaming about what your weekly meeting might look like if you do end up hiring someone. So when it was just me and one person, we used to just kind of chat all day every day about what we needed from each other. And when I finally started bringing more people onto the team,

I couldn't believe how desperate we were for a formatted weekly meeting. And so this is where we've landed today. I'm not only gonna to give you an overview of what we do in the meeting and who does what, but I'm also going to actually give you our entire outline that we use every single week so that you can just get up and running with it right away and tweak it as you want.

So that's the free download for today's episode, and you can go download [email protected]. So we've been implementing this momentum meeting format for about a year, and ever since we had about three people on the team, just as a reminder, we have eight today. And so as a review, currently the team sits as me, my integrator, a program manager, a content producer, two customer success people, a virtual assistant, and a lead designer. So this is the only meeting where we come all together once a week and really dive into all things team Bonnie, what we're doing, what we're working on, and who needs what from everyone on the team. So the way that we start our momentum meeting is actually on Friday.

So my virtual assistant sends out a link to the momentum meeting on Friday afternoon, and something about this email I love so much because she always puts a silly GIF in the email. And so it's something about it being Friday or the weekend or a new year. It just is so fun to open. And so what this does is prompt team members to go ahead and start filling in anything that they want to discuss on Monday.

So they have until 11:00 AM on Monday morning to add anything on the agenda for the meeting. And we have it all categorized. I'll tell you how we do that. Our meeting actually doesn't happen until 2:00 PM on Monday because I don't know about you, but I always feel like I need to just kind of get my gears going on Monday. I need to wrap my head around the week and what we're focused on, and that takes me a couple of hours, plus people from the customer success team will have emails from the weekend to dive into. So we let everyone kind of catch their breath on Monday before we come to our team meeting. So it happens every single Monday. The Friday email goes out sometime Friday afternoon. And so we come to basically just a Google Doc.

So this Google Doc is a run on Google Doc. We just copy and paste the framework for the momentum meeting at the top every single week. And that means that we have really a year at a time like we just, we just transitioned to a clean one for 2023. But I have notes from every single meeting that we had in 2022 on one document, which I think is really cool because we can just scroll back and see who referenced what or who said what. So at the very top of our Google Doc, I always keep the same links, like any links that the team just needs easy access to week after week. So I have our team handbook linked. I've got our team directory linked. I have our annual schedule at a glance linked at the top.

And then we also have some forms like our out of office request form, our budget approval form, and a learning and development tracker, which I'm sure I'll share with you more about sometime. And then also the zoom link for our recurring meeting. We always keep that at the very top of our Google Doc. And then right underneath that is where we put the format for the week.

Now, my va, her name is iia, she is also the one who takes notes. She's obviously on the call with us, but she's in charge of filling out the format for the meeting every single week. So she jots down anything that's of importance, any links that are shared, any questions to answers that are shared. And so this formatted meeting actually becomes an incredible resource for us week after week.

Okay, so let's dive into what it actually looks like. The very first thing that we do is my favorite, and it's just a question of the week. I always feel like it takes just a minute for us to get warmed up and really free feeling free and present on the call, but it's also a really intentional way for us to get to know each other.

So with eight of us, this question of the week takes anywhere from 15 to 25 minutes every week. And it's a way for us to just go deep with each other. And I think this is so important in a virtual team setting, because if you think about it, if we were all in an office together, we would be doing this. We would be chatting at our desk or chatting over lunch or chatting, you know, as we were getting up to get something to drink. And we don't get that in a virtual setting. So this is kind of our water cooler chat, if you will. But Lisa, my integrator, is in charge of coming up with the question for every week, and she always gives it to us a little bit early so that we can think about it.

But that's one thing I'm so excited to give you today with the download of the format for our momentum meeting. I'm also giving you all 52 questions that we asked each other last year. And so they're super fun. They range from things like what's a favorite family ritual or routine that you enjoy to what's the small act of kindness? You are sh once shown that you'll never forget to fun things like if you were going to a favorite things party with no budget, what would you take? And so we just get to know each other. So if you want access to all 52 questions that we discussed as a team last year, head on over to get that download. Again, it's at professional creative.com.

I am so excited to share with you a brand new project we've been working on. It's called 60 by 60 because there are 60 incredible artists who have come together to share with you one way that they create income from their artwork in under 60 seconds each, which means that it's 60 minutes of incredible knowledge and wisdom being shared by some insanely talented artists that I know you're going to love. Our hope is that it not only shows you what's possible, but it also encourages you and helps you get clarity on the very next steps you want to take in your own creative endeavor. And it's entirely free. We've also created an interactive directory with all of the artists included so that you can go dive into all of their worlds and get to know them a little bit better. To watch the video, head on over to bonnie christine.com/income. Again, that's bonnie christine.com/income.

You'll be able to watch the 60 by 60 video right away, and we cannot wait to meet you there. So after we do the question of the week and just kind of get loosened up and laughing a little bit and getting to know each other, we go into a value of the week and a teammate of the week.

And so these are things that I take charge of. We have 10 values for the brand and the business, and so we really just rotate through them one after another every single week. So I read the value to keep it top of mind, and then one person kind of raises their hand and just gives us some insight into how they have seen us live out that value during that previous week.

And then I always love to call out a teammate of the week, someone who has gone above and beyond someone who has, you know, just been a star who has delighted us or one of our customers in in some way. And so I just have a little time there at the meeting to call them out and and give them some praise. Then we move into business.

So the very top priority is really an overview from me. This is the team's one chance every week to just get kind of a download from my brain of what's going on, what I'm thinking about, what my priorities are, what our big focus is, all the way down to some nitty gritty things that we need. So it's just called overview, and that's typically from the business owner, the person who's running the call. Next up we go right into announcements and reminders. Typically, this is done by Lisa, my integrator, but it could really be anybody who has an announcement or a reminder that we need to go go over for the week. This is anything from housekeeping stuff like days off or holidays coming up to things like rotating shifts or anything like that.

Then we pass it over to our program manager. So we have something called program overview. And again, this can be done by you or just you and one other person, but it's really an overview of what we're doing in our programs that week. So for us, this looks like the immersion course, the Flourish membership, and any other program that we may have going on, like a conference or something like that. We just go over what is happening in that program, this current week and the included month, and anything that we need to just bring to the surface there. This just makes sure that everyone is always very aware of what we're doing as a brand, as a company together all the time. The next topic is a community update.

So we have a community manager as well as a rotating team of experts and guides. So we have 12 experts and guides who rotate through our community on a monthly basis to help answer questions and connect with students and things like that. So we have a way to stay in touch with our experts and guides throughout the month. We have a channel for them on Slack, so we're always in communication, but we also have this very dedicated community update in our weekly team meeting as well, so we can get feedback on what the community is up to, what are people working on? What are their questions, what are their struggles? What are their wins and successes? Do we have new ideas for the community? Do we have a community initiative, like a weekly question that we wanna ask, or something coming up like feedback week. So this is just all about students and their success and how we can better meet them where they're at. Next on the agenda is special projects. We pretty much always have a special project that we're working on, something that is unique that we're doing just a one-off project.

So this is the opportunity to really dive into that and make sure everyone is caught up to date. We then wanna make sure to go over any upcoming team travel dates, so if anybody is planning to be out, we discuss their time away and make sure that everything that they normally do is gonna be covered by someone else on the team while they're gone.

The next thing on the agenda is our content overview. So this is a mixture of me, our content producer who's working on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram reels and things like that, and our program manager who is really in charge of the podcast production. And so we're really just talking about content from a high level overview. What do we want to be talking about this week?

What are we wanting to be talking about this month? What is the, what is the general messaging that we're sharing and what are we sharing? What are we sharing in podcasts on social media and emails in video format? So it's all about content. Then we wanna make sure to just go over any general housekeeping, any new processes that we have. This is typically done by Lisa, my integrator, because she's all about systems and processes, but it's open to the entire team. So this is a great example of where someone would have written something in ahead on the doc that they wanna go over. The next one is a support team update. So my two customer success people, Kylie and Ashley can write in ahead some things here as well.

So what are the top questions they're getting in the inbox? What are some good things that have been happening? Where are some areas that need some attention? Do they have any like broken links out in the world or questions about the backend of our processes or people that we need to take care of? It's anything that is support email inbox related. That really brings us to the end of our meeting every week we wrap up by reviewing any next actions that we need people to take.

Basically, if there's any question mark around who needs to do what, this is where we wrap it up. We make sure everyone has clarity, we make sure everyone knows what finished is gonna look like, we take any questions that anyone has, and then we always just leave a little bit of room to bounce around new ideas. Are we having thoughts or ideas about something new that we wanna do or just need to talk through anything?

This meeting typically lasts an hour. We try to keep it at an hour just to be super respectful of everyone's time. There are definitely weeks where we go to 90 minutes and sometimes even two hours and also some weeks where we will be wrapped up with certain areas on the team and we'll let people go, you know, work on whatever they need to work on and we'll just keep the key team members that need to stay on to discuss a special project or something like that.

But overall, that is our our process. And so we have it outlined in a simple Google Doc again where we just copy and paste it and keep it refreshed on the same document. I can't tell you how amazing a resource this is and also how fun it is to just scroll and look back over all of the things that we did as a team over the course of a year and what everyone's answers were to these questions.

And so again, if you want our format that you can utilize if you want, or tweak as you see fit, and our 52 questions that we discussed as a team last year, go get today's download. Again, that [email protected]. Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of The Professional Creative Podcast. Work to create the beauty you want to see come alive in the world.

And remember, there's room for you. I'll see you next time.