Keeping It Simple
The fastest, simplest ways to grow your business - no jargon, no fluff. Practical strategies that actually work for SME owners in the USA, New Zealand, and worldwide.
Ask any SME team what's eating their week and "meetings" comes up before anything else. Not because meetings are inherently bad — because most SME meetings have no defined purpose, no decision attached, and no mechanism for ending on time. They're where productive intentions go to be diluted into an hour of updates nobody needed a meeting to hear.
Most meetings are status reports wearing a calendar invite
If the primary content of a meeting is "here's what I did this week," it shouldn't be a meeting — it should be a two-line message in whatever channel your team already uses. Meetings should be reserved for the things that genuinely require multiple people synchronously: a decision that needs input from more than one person, a problem that needs to be worked through in real time, or alignment before something ships. Everything else is status, and status doesn't need a room.
The three questions every recurring meeting has to answer
Before any meeting earns a permanent slot on the calendar, it should be able to answer: what decision or output does this produce, who specifically needs to be in the room for that, and what happens if we don't hold it this week? If a meeting can't answer the first question, cancel it. If half the invite list can't affect the answer to the second, cut them from the invite. If the honest answer to the third is "nothing," that's your evidence it was never load-bearing to begin with.
Systems replace the meetings you actually needed
The goal isn't fewer meetings for its own sake — it's replacing the ones that existed only to keep everyone informed with a system that keeps everyone informed automatically: a weekly KPI dashboard instead of a status meeting, a shared project board instead of a check-in call, a documented process instead of a recurring "how do we do X again" conversation. Implementation, in the Simple-Growth sense, means building the business so information moves without you or your team having to physically gather to move it.
Protect the meetings that are actually working
Cutting meetings indiscriminately is its own trap — some are genuinely where the best decisions in the business get made, usually the ones with a tight agenda, the right five people, and a clear owner walking out with an action. Protect those. The distinction isn't meetings versus no meetings; it's meetings that produce a decision versus meetings that produce a feeling of having communicated.
Most SME owners don't have a time-management problem. They have a business that runs through synchronous conversation instead of through systems — and every meeting that could have been a system is a small tax on everyone's week, paid indefinitely.
Curious how many hours a week your calendar is quietly costing the business? That's one of the first audits we run in the Simple-Growth System™ — get in touch with Kevin D'Ambros-Smith to find out.
Kevin D’Ambros-Smith
Kevin is the founder of Simple-Growth and a business growth coach with experience at DDB, Ogilvy, and Saatchi & Saatchi. He has co-founded 9 companies, coached 200+ business owners one-on-one, and holds a 9.5/10 NPS. Every article on this blog reflects real-world experience - no theory, no fluff.
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