Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, where I document my journey scaling an e-commerce brand and share the systems, strategies, and lessons learned in real-time. This episode introduces a scalable meeting cadence designed to improve business operations, outlining various types of effective meetings including weekly 1:1s, leadership huddles, and quarterly strategic planning sessions. Each meeting type has specific objectives and agendas to foster leadership and team alignment, ensuring your business is always moving forward. 🚀

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley shares his proven seven-meeting operating system for ecommerce teams. Drawing from his experience scaling an eight-figure brand, Josh details how structured weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual meetings drive alignment, accountability, and rapid decision-making. He explains the purpose and agenda of each meeting, emphasizes the importance of preparation and focus, and offers actionable advice for implementing this system to eliminate distractions and accelerate business growth. Listeners gain a clear framework to improve team communication and execution on the path to scaling their own businesses.

Tools, Frameworks, and Concepts
“Traction (Book)”: “00:03:10”
“EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System)”: “00:03:10”
“Ryan Deiss’ Scalable Operating System“: “00:03:10”
“KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)”: “00:19:31”
“Scorecards”: “00:19:31”
“131 Principle“: “00:22:46”
“Profit and Loss Statements”: “00:30:16”
“Balance Sheet”: “00:31:21”
“Ad Spend Performance”: “00:32:29”
“Meeting Cadence Operating System”: “00:36:58”

Meeting Types
“Weekly One-on-One Meetings”: “00:06:52”
“Leadership Huddles”: “00:15:07”
“L10 Leadership Meeting”: “00:17:25”
“Weekly Leadership Meeting”: “00:18:28”
“Monthly All Hands Meeting”: “00:24:47”
“Monthly Financial Review Meeting”: “00:29:01”
“Quarterly Strategic Planning Meeting”: “00:33:37”
“Annual Strategic Planning Meeting”: “00:35:46”

Key Practices and Actions
“Commitment Follow-Ups”: “00:20:31”
“Issue Identification and Resolution”: “00:22:46”
“Team Recognition and Shout-Outs”: “00:28:00”
“Leave a Review”: “00:38:04”
“Share the Episode”: “00:38:04”

Websites and Media
“Ecomm Breakthrough YouTube Channel“: “00:36:58”

Key Takeaway
“Systems and Focus”: “00:38:04”

Chapters:

00:00:00 Introduction & Importance of Meetings
Josh introduces himself, the podcast, and the importance of systems and focused meetings for business growth.

00:02:05 Common Meeting Challenges & The Seven Meeting Cadence Overview
Discusses common meeting problems and introduces the seven meeting operating system for team alignment and accountability.

00:06:52 Weekly One-on-One Meetings
Explains the structure, purpose, and agenda of weekly one-on-one meetings for alignment, KPI review, and coaching.

00:13:51 15-Minute Leadership Huddles
Describes short, twice-weekly leadership huddles for daily alignment, sharing wins, priorities, and resolving roadblocks.

00:17:25 Weekly L10 Leadership Meeting
Details the 90-minute weekly leadership meeting for KPI review, accountability, issue resolution, and cross-departmental alignment.

00:24:47 Monthly All Hands Meeting
Covers the monthly company-wide meeting to reinforce vision, share wins, recognize team members, and align on monthly goals.

00:29:01 Monthly Financial Review
Outlines the monthly financial review meeting to analyze P&L, channel performance, cash flow, and expenses for business health.

00:33:37 Quarterly Strategic Planning
Explains the quarterly planning session to review past goals, set new priorities, and cascade objectives to departments.

00:34:47 Annual Strategic Planning
Describes the annual planning meeting to set company-wide goals, define top priorities, and assign ownership for execution.

00:36:58 Action Steps & Conclusion
Encourages listeners to implement the meeting cadence, share the episode, and remember the importance of systems and focus.

Josh Hadley 00:00:00  Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast. I’m Josh Hadley. I’ve scaled my own ecommerce brand from 0 to 8 figures, and I’m actively building towards nine figures in sales. This podcast is where I document that journey and share the systems, the strategies, and the lessons learned in real time so that you can learn what actually matters and scale your own business. Fun fact do you know that 99% of you are holding meetings the wrong way? Or there’s probably a good portion of you that don’t even hold meetings at all because you see them as unproductive, not worth your time, or you have no idea what to even be talking about in those meetings. Today, I’m going to share with you the seven meeting operating system that I use in my own business, in order to ensure that everybody’s rowing in the same direction, that we’re executing, on the same strategies and tactics in order to scale to over nine figures. First and foremost, who am I? My name is Josh Hadley. I am a man of faith, a father of four, and a husband to a beautiful wife.

Josh Hadley 00:01:01  I’ve been selling into e-commerce space for over ten years. You can see that we’ve been in eight figure brand for quite a while, and we’ve been selling on many sales channels in the multi millions in each of these channels on Amazon, TikTok, Shop and Shopify. And last but not least, host of the Econ Breakthrough podcast, where I’m documenting and sharing my journey with you so that you can implement those same strategies to scale your own business. First and foremost, before we even get into meetings, one of the key takeaways is making sure that you understand the principle that systems and focus, scale and and distractions kill. That’s the first principle that you need to understand. Because if you understand that one principle, this will give you immense clarity for every meeting that you step into systems and focus, scale, distraction kills. All right. So who of you listening can relate to this? Meetings feel like a waste of time. You don’t know what to talk about in meetings. Your team seems disengaged in your meetings.

Josh Hadley 00:02:05  Meetings seem to create more work instead of actually solving problems or the work. Meetings drain your energy. Instead of creating more momentum in your business and you feel like you’re the only one driving those meetings. All right. If you can relate to any of that, today I’m going to be sharing with you the exact system and the strategies to alleviate all of those problems and the pain that you’re feeling. So how would you like to actually have your team treat your meetings like an operating system, where meetings aren’t just about talking, and they’re not just about catching up on how the weekend was? Meetings are all about alignment. Meetings are about where decision velocity scales for your business and where meetings are about actually accountability. All right. I want to introduce you to the scalable meeting cadence. This is the seven meeting cadence that I use as our operating system in order to scale the team as we try to achieve nine figures. So first and foremost, what is it that we do? I’ll walk through each of these.

Josh Hadley 00:03:10  Number one, this happens on a weekly basis. Everyone in the business has a weekly 30 to 45 minute, one on one meeting. and this happens with all of the leaders and their direct reports. So this doesn’t just happen with me and my team members. What it does happen is every single person that is a leader or a manager of other people will sit down for 30 or 45 minutes every Monday. Okay. In order to have a one on one meeting with them. So you may be asking what actually happens in there. We’ll be sharing those next steps. But next what we do is every week we have two kind of like we call them leadership huddles. These are 15 minute leadership huddles where we discuss the priorities for the day and resolve roadblocks fast on a weekly basis. On Wednesdays, we have our L10 leadership meeting, those of you that are familiar with traction. That’s kind of the verbiage that we’re using here, although we don’t follow the iOS framework specifically. we took many of the principles from it.

Josh Hadley 00:04:18  This is where we resolve issues. We align on company goals, and then this is where our team members and leaders report on their results. And then once a month we have a company all hands meeting. This is where all team members join. We share our wins. We provide monthly goals and business priorities for the rest of the team on a monthly basis. We also have a monthly financial review, PNL, snapshot Channel performance inventory and cash position, our ad spend and expenses. Everything is reviewed by the entire leadership team. Okay. And then quarterly, what we do is we have a quarterly strategic planning session with our leaders. This is where we review our annual plan. We adjust our goals and we set targets for the next quarter. And then last but not least, we have our annual strategic planning meeting. This is where we identify and prioritize all of the correct goals and targets for the upcoming year that we are going to be focused on. So let’s dive into each of these, separately, and I’ll kind of share with you exactly how we’re implementing them in our business and give you like, real, clear takeaways and principles that you could go set up as agenda items or action items for your own brand.

Josh Hadley 00:05:35  All right. With as we go into each of these meetings, one of the first things to understand as well is that business strategy is nothing more than prioritizing limited resources in a world full of unlimited opportunities, and that’s why the systems and the focus scale while distractions kill. So again, as we go back to these meetings. The reason why you want to have these meeting cadences is because there are unlimited things that you and your team members can spend their time on every day, every week, every month. And without these frameworks as meetings that establish credibility and accountability for your team, you are going to just begin kind of like getting diluted performance across your team because they’re going to start going off in the wrong directions because there’s so many unlimited opportunities, but there is limited resources. Everybody has the same amount of time in a day, and your job as a leader is to ensure that the rest of your team is executing at their maximum productivity, and you do that by helping them establish their own set of clear goals and action items and tactics that they’re going to execute every single week and every single day.

Josh Hadley 00:06:52  So let’s talk about this. First. Let’s dive into this weekly one on one meeting. So this is the meeting that I talked about that to be honest with you, I think this is one of the most important meetings that we have on a weekly basis. And this is something that happens with every single team member on our team. It can be as somebody, as junior, as an entry level customer service representative, all the way to working with my senior leadership team. This meeting is where you get clear alignment. So let’s discuss what actually happens in here. So number one we review last week’s priorities and progress. So we go through hey let’s talk about how last week went last week you mentioned that hey these would be your three key priorities. And then here were the separate like ad hoc tasks that you wanted to make sure get dragged across the across the finish line. So how did we get how did we do last week? How was the performance? Did anything not get done? And if something didn’t get done, this is the best chance and opportunity for you to actually interact with that team member to understand.

Josh Hadley 00:07:57  Was it because you just got lazy? Or was it because, like, something else urgent came up and we had to resolve that? And then if that’s the case, you can help them understand whether that was the right choice to postpone one of those priorities for the week and try to tackle an urgent issue. Or if you need to have a kind of a performance conversation to say, hey, I noticed that you didn’t get this done. My expectation is that this has to be done this week. We can’t keep postponing this and kicking the can down the road. So that’s number one. Number two, this is where you have the chance to review their KPIs as well. So for every single team members role, you should have at least 3 to 5 specific KPIs or key performance indicators that really measure the leading indicators that they should be working on. These should be something as specific as let’s say I’m managing somebody, that’s my supply chain manager. Well, I want to ensure that 99% of my products are in stock.

Josh Hadley 00:08:59  And so if that’s my my KPI, then that team member needs to report. And if we’re at 95% of the products are in stock, then that means that KPI is off track, right? It shows up as red on the performance tracker. And so that’s one of the key things is like you need to understand what are the core KPIs for every single role, so that every Monday you can review that with them and say, hey, you’re meeting this target, you’re meeting that target. But hey, it looks like we’re slightly off over here. What are you doing this week to ensure that this gets back in the green, to ensure that this KPI is being hit? And again, it’s these KPIs that then should drive the priorities for what they’re working on that week. All right. So they should always be trying to prioritize the KPIs. How do I make them better if something’s falling behind how do I actually correct course and ensure that I begin meeting the minimum qualifications. All right. Next then we’re going to go through the roadblocks and the bottlenecks.

Josh Hadley 00:10:02  What is actually slowing them down. So again, if they’re like, hey, I just wasn’t able to get around to X, Y or Z last week. That’s where you drill in. It’s not like oh yeah. Okay. Well thanks for letting me know. Let’s try to do that this week. You don’t want that to happen. Instead, what you want to be doing is like drilling down and saying, okay, well why was that not completed? Was this like you, you know, bit off more than you could chew last week? You planned too many things or did something else urgent come up? Or like what was the constraint here? Right. And then you want to identify whatever that constraint is. And oftentimes what ends up happening is they begin focusing on the wrong stuff. Oh well, Joe reached out to me and he needed help setting up this thing for customer service. And it’s like that. That’s great. I appreciate that you helped him out. But, like, next time, I need you to make sure that you get your priorities done.

Josh Hadley 00:10:57  That we agreed to at the beginning of the week before you go and assist you or before you tackle this other like important issue. But maybe that wasn’t so urgent. All right. So this is all about just like realigning. Realigning because like, look, in the universe there’s entropy, right? And what that means is like, if everything’s just left alone, like, things just begin to fall apart, they begin to decay. And that’s exactly what happens with your team members if you’re not realigning with them every single week, entropy begins to happen. And what was once a clear priority that was discussed at the beginning of the year? Here we are a month later, whatever time frame it is into the year. And it’s like, oh yeah, I forgot about that. And so this is why you’re just continuing to come back to those priorities. All right. So that’s where step number four in these weekly one on one meetings is like coaching and skill development okay. You want to make sure, like they’re getting better every single week.

Josh Hadley 00:11:56  You’re going to give them feedback for their performance, like, and just be honest with them. This is the best. Like you’ve got 30 and 45 minutes to encourage, inspire and motivate your team. So don’t just see this as like check check check. Like get to know them and inspire them. Remind them about like their role that they play in the team and how important that role is and whether they’re winning or losing in their role. Because if you can just continue to inspire people and coach them and help them see the progress that they’re making. it leads to just improved performance across the board. So much better than if you’re just constantly trying to, like, penalize somebody, right? Or getting after them or telling them that they’re doing something wrong. This is just as much about telling them everything that they’re doing right, as much as it is, of course, correcting them. All right. And then fifth point here, as you go through your one on ones with your team members, you want to have forward alignment.

Josh Hadley 00:12:53  What are your top three priorities that you are going to be focused on this week? I want them documented, and then we’re going to come back and review that document the same time next week. And so that’s the cadence that we follow with our team as they will document. And they come prepared to this one on one meeting with all of their priorities highlighted as either green, yellow or red from last week green meaning it was accomplished. Yellow means it went off track because I was, you know, held up by somebody else or red means yeah, I should have got it done. I just didn’t get it done. Okay, so we review this and that document on a weekly basis with them. And so they come to the meeting prepared with what happened last week and what they’re what they believe are going to be their three priorities this upcoming week. And then in that meeting, there may be things that we adjust on their priority list that they have for the upcoming week, but that’s to be determined in that meeting.

Josh Hadley 00:13:51  But they come prepared as if, hey, if I don’t have any other feedback for you, you already should know your exact priorities for this week. So that is the weekly one on one meeting. This ensures, from the beginning of the week on Monday, that everybody begins rowing in the right direction. All right, so let’s dive into our second meeting out of our seven meeting operating system. Okay. So this is where we have 15 minute leadership huddles. in our brand we do this every Tuesday and Thursday. All right. So what is this 15 minute huddle? What in the world are we actually talking about. This is how we actually kick off the day. All right. So this is one of the first meetings of the day. Maybe some of your team members may have started work maybe an hour before so that they can come prepared, etc., but this is the first meeting of the day. I don’t schedule any other meetings until this meeting happens. Alright, so the purpose of this 15 minute leadership huddle is it provides speed and alignment with all of your leadership team, right? So if you have leaders that are in your business and I would say like maximum, you want a core of like maybe like 4 or 5 team members, that are joining this meeting.

Josh Hadley 00:15:07  Okay. And in this meeting, they then need to be able to take that and distill it to their own team. So you’re providing speed and alignment. Remember distraction kills and, these huddles eliminate that distraction okay. So here’s the agenda that we follow for these 15 minute huddles. Number one, you want to share one win that happened yesterday okay. Number two I want you to share what are your top three priorities for today as you look at the day the beginning of today, what three things need to be true to have been accomplished today in order to say today was a success. All right. And then three, any roadblocks or bottlenecks that they’re facing? What is slowing them down. And then this way I can give them quick feedback. If it’s just a quick answer, like I don’t want to hold them up, if they just need a quick answer direction where they need to go, I want to get them going off on the right foot today, and first thing in the morning. And then lastly, are there any cross team dependencies? So the reason why this is a team meeting is because like, hey, maybe supply chain needs help from the sales team, or maybe the finance team needs help from the sales team, putting together the budget or the forecast.

Josh Hadley 00:16:27  Right. And so they can just they can all coordinate in one time. And what we’ve seen is just like momentum begins to move even faster because it just provides an open forum for 15 minutes. And oftentimes we may even finish early. Maybe it only lasts ten minutes and then we just move on with our days, but it creates immediate alignment. And here’s the secret. One of the things is it forces each of your team members to actively plan their day. So instead of just reactively showing up for the day and be like, oh, I wonder what’s going to happen today? man, I would like to get this done. We’ll see what comes right. This actually like is a discipline saying, hey, what are the three things you need to get done today? And then you’re going to be amazed with how much more work they get done in a week just because, like what originally was going to take them, the week may begin to get done in certain days rather than weeks. All right.

Josh Hadley 00:17:25  So let’s go on to this next meeting. So the third meeting out of our seven meeting operating cadence okay. Is this L10 leadership meeting. This is something that we do every Wednesday. All right. So this is where we solve issues. We reinforce our priorities. We maintain accountability. And this is where we really accelerate the business. All right. So again for those of you who have read the book traction to great book. We took many principles from that. iOS the entrepreneur operating system. We incorporated many of those principles here. We also incorporated many of the principles from, Ryan Deiss Scalable Operating System, and we incorporated them here as well. So really, this is our own hybrid model. And that’s what I would encourage you to do. Every business is unique. And so what works for our brand may not work exactly for your business, but the principles are still going to be the same. So here’s the overall like five kind of like agenda topics that we dive into. By the way this is a 90 minute meeting.

Josh Hadley 00:18:28  Okay. This is one of those meetings that never moves. This meeting happens all of the time. Nobody gets to skip this meeting. Now, if somebody’s on vacation, that’s fine. If somebody’s sick, that’s fine. But even if I am not able to attend because I’m attending a business conference or whatever it is that day, or I’m on vacation with my family. The business still executes this meeting. Okay, this is not a meeting. That’s just like, oh, yeah, we’ll try this if everybody’s available or not busy, it’s like, no, this meeting has to happen. All right. So number one on our agenda is we review the company wide KPIs and scorecards. All right. So this is where we’re going to go back and revisit the three big rocks or the three big priorities that we set out to accomplish at the beginning of the year. We’re going to come back and revisit those. We’re going to go through every team members like individual KPIs, and they’re going to report on them.

Josh Hadley 00:19:31  And again, it’s this sense of accountability. So on Mondays they get a showcase their KPIs in front of me personally. But on Wednesday it’s in front of the leadership team. Okay. And again you only want your your immediate like senior leaders in this meeting. This is not a this is not a company wide meeting. This is only like your serious leaders in the business that are actually, like having other team members report to them. That’s who’s attending this. Okay. So we go through the company wide KPIs and the scorecards that we set out for. This is like the budget in the forecast that we set out to say, hey, we said we wanted to hit X revenue, by the end of this week. where are we at? Are we above are we under target? Okay. Number two, this is where you’re going to go through commitment follow ups. So we go through last week’s action items, from this meeting. And we go through and we say, hey did this get completed.

Josh Hadley 00:20:31  Any pending loose items things that did not get tied up? that’s where we kind of, again, provides more accountability. What things did we assign last week? Did they get accomplished yes or no? All right. Number three, this is where the leaders report their big rocks and their KPIs. Okay, so we talked about the company wide KPIs. Those are tracking towards our annual goals. Again this is where the leaders are going to report their big rocks. So what are their three key priorities that they are focused on. And then did they make measurable progress towards those or not over the past week? And if not, why then that turns into an issue. So that’s why step number four here on our agenda is like now we are actually going to identify what the issues are in the business. Now the issues definitely need to be tied into like the priorities for each of those leaders. Okay. So there should always be there’s let’s. The most important thing is like there’s no perfect business that’s out there.

Josh Hadley 00:21:35  And so understand that there are always going to be dumpster fires burning in your business. You just have to be able to again, as a leader, your judgment becomes king as it relates to identifying which of these dumpster fires are you going to put out and why? Because your leadership team is going to surface issues that are happening. Maybe they are personnel issues on your team. Maybe they are, you know, channel specific issues. Maybe it’s a violation on a certain platform or things like that. But what you want to have them do is we’re going to go through the the issue. And if the leader presents the issue, they need to come to the table with three possible solutions to that issue, and then they need to recommend one solution to that issue. Okay. So that’s where we incorporates the 131 principle right. Identify the one issue or the problem. Then give me three possible solutions and then recommend one of those solutions. And why. So that this meeting doesn’t just turn into like I don’t know what do you think we should do? I don’t know, let me go.

Josh Hadley 00:22:46  Think about it. Let me get back to you. That is not productive in this meeting saying, hey, let me get back to you. Not not what should be happening. So again, this is another one of those meetings where your team members need to show up prepared. This is not just like, oh, I’m just going to show up and see what they’re going to talk about today. They need to be identifying the issues coming with action plans. And then it’s your job and the rest of the team’s job, because they’re all sitting on the same call with you to be able to say, hey, yeah, I, I would also tend to agree with that recommendation, as the solution to that problem. And guess what often happens? One issue is then going to have a downplaying effect to another department, and then it allows you the chance to like, collaborate and say, hey, yeah, that is a good idea. However, it’s going to have a downstream impact over on my department.

Josh Hadley 00:23:41  So I would actually maybe lean towards like implementing something like x, Y or Z. So again, that’s the power of like having your senior leadership team all on one call. This is a 90 minute meeting for you to go deep and identify the issues happening in the business. Have your senior leaders already come prepared with three recommended solutions, and then for you to be able to approve and get, make sure that everybody is moving forward in the same direction because like there’s so many overlaps across departments in every business. All right. And the fifth and final thing that you want to do is you want to confirm alignment and the action items that were agreed upon in that meeting. So if you go through these and again, I’m not wanting surface level reports from my team members. I’m not wanting just surface level level problems or solutions. This is where we dig deep into the business, and this is where you’re able to provide the best, like coaching inspiration, and keep everybody aligned on their priorities and their KPIs in their role and get everybody communicating cross functionally with each other.

Josh Hadley 00:24:47  One of my favorite meetings for sure. All right. Now let’s talk about this fourth meeting in our meeting cadence. Okay. This is the monthly all hands meeting. This is where we unify the team. We reinforce the direction we’re headed. We share wins with the team. We eliminate confusion across the company. So this is the one meeting that happens every month where everybody on our team, okay, even entry level staff, all the way up to the senior leadership team, everybody joins this meeting. So what do we go through in this meeting? This is a 60 minute meeting. And we go through our our mission, our vision and our core values. What we do is we actually have one team member read each of those. And when we get to the core value section, we actually ask every team member to say, hey, how have you seen somebody in the business emulate that core value in the business? So it gets them thinking, and it also gives them a chance to like, shout out some of their team members that they’ve seen, you know, I guess exemplify extreme ownership or integrity or something like that, and then articulate it because just reading the core values pointless.

Josh Hadley 00:25:59  I want people to understand how it actually applies into their work. So again, if your team member, if your team member is like if you created a vision and mission statement five years ago and your team members can’t recite it, or it seems very fuzzy or vague, this is the chance and opportunity to like, continue to reiterate that vision, mission, and core values for the business. then next we’re going to go through wins from the last month. Okay. So we’re going to share. And we just like this is sometimes there’s going to be awkward silence, especially at the beginning. But I turn it over to the team and I say, I would love for all of you guys. Somebody share some wins that happened over the past month, and then you’re going to get people that will begin chiming in. And we do this all remotely. Right. So everybody’s on zoom and they will just begin chiming in with like, oh hey, by the way, this this happened. And we move the needle forward on this project.

Josh Hadley 00:26:57  And hey, we launched this number of products. Like really good things happen. And this is all just about like building momentum so that the rest of the team hears from other people, like, wow, really good things are happening in this business. Here’s one of my the next kind of like agenda item is one of my absolute favorites. And I think this, like really solidifies the culture of any business. But we want people to shout out each other and recognize other team members. So again, it may be crickets at first and maybe some awkward silence, but we wait until people are willing to voice their opinion and say, hey, I want to give a shout out to Jamie because she did an amazing job kind of identifying this new system that we’re using. And it has saved me, like probably ten hours a week now because of, like, what she implemented. I just wanted to say thank you. and then somebody else is going to share. Hey, I was struggling with this. So-and-so pointed me in the right direction.

Josh Hadley 00:28:00  Just wanted to give them a quick shout out, like, and guess what? We run this thing for like ten minutes where it’s just like people shouting out each other, and then it just becomes contagious. This is where people feel valued. This is where people feel loved. This is where people sink their souls into your business, and they are motivated to show up because they feel appreciated. They feel appreciated by their colleagues, and they feel the momentum building in the business because everybody’s helping each other achieve the same goal and vision and mission of the business. And then action item number four that we have here in this all hands meeting is we share our upcoming monthly goals. So again, we go back all the way to our annual planning. We’ve got our quarterly plans. And then this is where we share those like monthly plans okay, what are going to be the priorities. And then each department leader from our senior leadership team is going to share. Hey guys. Here’s the the key priority that we’re working on.

Josh Hadley 00:29:01  And then again it just keeps everybody aligned. And then the last thing that we do is we just open it up for some Q and A’s or just like extra, you know, ancillary updates that we have from the business that we want to share. All right. The next meeting that we have in our meeting, cadence operating system here is the monthly Financial Review meeting. My goodness, if you are not doing this you are driving. You’re like flying the airplane blind, right. And it is extremely challenging for you to continue going in the right direction if you’re not at least taking a look back in that rearview mirror to see what has happened in the past so that it can guide your future decision making. So what you’re going to do is this. This allows you to understand the financial performance of your business. It’s going to allow you to spot early warning signals. Maybe you start making some course corrections and ensure that you have the cash to actually grow the way that you are currently growing. Right now, there have been a number of companies that actually go out of business because their growth is so high and they didn’t plan accordingly, and they end up bankrupting themselves because they plan for this massive growth.

Josh Hadley 00:30:16  And either it does come to fruition and they’re out of cash, or they take on so much debt trying to fund extra, you know, growth that then if growth ever slows, they’ve got too much inventory, they’ve got too much whatever and then they go bankrupt. So that’s why this is becoming like one of the most key fundamental meetings in the business to where I have a really good pulse of like the direction the business is heading and the overall health of the business as well. Okay, so in this meeting we are going to go through our profit and loss statements. Okay. So we’ll review it on the 20th of every month we review the previous month. So for in January 20th I’m going to be reviewing December’s performance. Okay. We’re going to go through channel level performance. So if I’m selling on multiple channels then I’m going to say hey how did Amazon do okay. How did Shopify do how did TikTok shop do tell me what my profit and loss is for each of those channels? Because guess what I’m looking for.

Josh Hadley 00:31:21  I’m looking for like, which is the easiest of these, you know, channels or levers that I can pull to say, oh my goodness, there’s more juice to squeeze here, and I’m going to double my efforts there. So extremely, extremely important to understand, like what’s actually driving your profit and success or maybe the lack thereof. Maybe it’s a channel that’s like, oh, I didn’t know I was losing so much money over here. We’re going to stop that. Okay. Inventory and cash on the balance sheet. The balance sheet is one of the most important financial statements to look at. if you’re not familiar with the balance sheet, I would encourage you to go do a YouTube search and go educate yourself on how to read a balance sheet, because this is where you’re going to identify. Is my cash increasing or are my is my inventory outpacing my cash? And are my accounts payable increasing faster than I even have cash to pay it? Super important like financial statement to look at. I’m then going to look at my ad spend performance for any e-commerce brand or any business in general.

Josh Hadley 00:32:29  Everything starts and revolves around marketing, right? And so you want to make sure that a it’s efficient, but what you want to do is ensure that like every dollar is accounted for in terms of like, hey, if I spend more on Amazon, what does that lead to for future revenue dollars? Okay. This is where a lot like, honestly, marketing expenses are one of your biggest line items for any business. And so having like really clear understanding and KPI that you’re trying to measure its performance is essential. And then the last thing that I want to do is I go through this is I want to look at unnecessary, operating expenses. These are going to be hey, how much? You know, I’m reviewing how much I’m paying team members. But most importantly, where it’s a death by a thousand cuts is software expenses, softwares that you’re not even using anymore. Can you close some of those out? All right. Next we’re going to get into our quarterly strategic planning meeting. This is where you decide what matters and what dies in this quarterly planning meeting.

Josh Hadley 00:33:37  it’s all about focus. you’re going to review last quarter’s goals. Then you’re going to identify the company’s top constraints in the business. Define the company level priorities. Okay. And then department leaders share their upcoming quarterly goals, quarterly and monthly goals as well. So this quarterly planning session, like we do it at the business level to say, hey, where are we going as a business as a whole? And then each department leader, each of my senior leaders will then go and do the same thing and create three specific priorities for their department that they need to accomplish over the next quarter. And then they need to break it down by like each month as well. Hey, for the month of if we’re looking at Q3, hey, for the month of July, these are going to be my goals for the month of August and September. Here’s what I’m going to be working on. And this is what needs to be accomplished for me to do my part. maybe in the supply chain aspect, so that if I do my part in the supply chain aspect, it rolls up to the bigger company wide initiative and bigger priority that we have there.

Josh Hadley 00:34:47  So this isn’t just like me as the leader saying, hey guys, this is where we’re going. No, it’s hey guys, this is where we’re going. Now, I need each of you to distill and take my three priorities for the overall business and document. What are the three priorities for your individual role and department that you need to execute on that can then help achieve the overall company priorities and goals. So super, super important. And again, reviewing the previous month and quarter progress also just provides a sense of accountability. And this is where if you just see people like oh sorry I didn’t get around to it, didn’t get around to it. If that’s like repeating over and over again, this is where it provides that coaching opportunity. All right. Now last but not least, this is a key. This is where it all begins is your annual strategic planning meeting. Annual planning is about deciding the game that you are about to play for the next 12 months. So here’s what you want to do.

Josh Hadley 00:35:46  Create a company wide goal that you as the CEO. Typically this is going to be like very revenue driven in sales channel driven okay. And then you’re going to going to identify what are the top three priorities or levers that you are going to actively focus on to help you achieve that one goal that you have for the business. Then below those three priorities, you’re going to define the five strategies or basically tactics, action items that need to be accomplished in order to achieve one of those priorities. So every priority then has a list of five kind of like strategies of how we’re going to achieve that priority. Okay, we decide the owner for each of these priorities from and then one leader from each of the leadership team or departments owns one of those three priorities, so that we have somebody that actually has their butt on the line, so to speak. annual planning is not a brainstorming session. Everybody comes prepared and me as the CEO. Like I’m preparing them in advance, saying, hey, here’s the company wide goal.

Josh Hadley 00:36:58  Now, before we get to that meeting, I want you to begin preparing. Like, what is it that you need to do in your departments in order to correct processes, ensure that we’re going to be able to achieve this company wide goal. So the CEO sets the direction, the leadership team then builds the route, and everybody else is the people that go and execute that plan. All right. So we went through our seven meeting cadence operating system. so here’s what I my action items for you after listening to this podcast episode is go take a screenshot of this cadence if you just listen to this audibly. go take a look at this episode on YouTube. We publish everything on YouTube, but go take a screenshot of that cadence. Okay. And it goes all the way back, to the beginning of this podcast and then go implement it with your team. And then if you enjoyed this episode, if you would do me the kindness of leaving a review and three, go and share this, episode with an operator who needs it.

Josh Hadley 00:38:04  If you know somebody that’s been challenged with, hey, I’m trying to get my team going in the right direction, I feel like it’s all over the place. Like, please send this to them. that’s probably like the biggest blessing that you could give to somebody. And remember, systems and focus, scale and distraction kills. So good luck with your meetings. Make sure you get everybody rowing in the same direction. And I know that if you implement these seven meeting operating systems, you will create more momentum and clarity in your business and move everybody in the right direction.