The Opportunity Meeting
The Amplified Impact Podcast
July 8th, 2023
In today’s episode, we’re diving into a problem we all face as our businesses grow: the complexity of communication with a team.
When it’s just you, everything stays in your brain…but when you bring others on board, communication streams multiply.
Suddenly…decisions and information need to reach everyone.
Cue the dreaded meetings.
But fear not, my friends. I’ve got a secret weapon for you: the monthly opportunity meeting.
Instead of focusing on problems, we gather with our team, armed with three exciting opportunities each.
This flips the script, allowing us to unleash our best people on the biggest opportunities.
So, learn how to make meetings more effective and start leveraging the power of opportunity.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“We tend to put our best people on the biggest problems rather than putting them on the biggest opportunities.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino [00:00:00]:
What’s up everybody? Welcome back to the pod Today we’re going to talk about one of the problems that we all need to solve for as we’re growing our businesses is assuming that you’re successful and you get to the point where you start hiring people, bringing them onto your team, you’re now going to have to solve for the the complexity that comes from additional communication streams. Because before when it’s just you building your thing, you can hold everything inside your own brain, you are doing everything. You’re wearing all that different hats inside your business. So you don’t really need to communicate with anybody else. As soon as you hire somebody and you bring them in, now you have to start communicating with that other person. But even that’s not so bad because every time you two communicate or have a conversation, it pretty much gets disseminated to the entire business, right? It’s just the two of you doing everything. So that’s pretty manageable. But things start getting really crazy and start spiraling quickly out of control as soon as we introduce a third person into the equation.
Anthony Vicino [00:00:57]:
So for instance, if it’s you, me and Rick, we are the business. Well, before when it was just you and me, whenever we had a problem, you and I just had to talk, get into agreement, get into alignment, figure out who’s going to do what, and then move forward. But now that we have Rick to deal with, we need to bring him into the conversation at times as well, because if we don’t and he’s left out, then things are moving forward and it might affect him downstream. So for instance, now if you and me are walking down the hall and we just happen to have an impromptu conversation about this customer service thing, in the past, you and I could just take that information, could run with it and implement it immediately. But if Rick also needs to be made privy to that information, then we need to also bring Rick into that conversation. And it’s not enough necessarily for me just to leave the conversation with you and go to Rick and say, hey, here’s what I discussed with you, and say, now you’re in the loop. Because now Rick and I are going to have a communication, and that probably needs to get recommunicated back to you as well so that we can move forward in alignment as a team. Right? And that’s just three nodes of communication.
Anthony Vicino [00:02:02]:
Imagine what happens when there’s suddenly a fourth, 5th, 6th, 7th on the team. It starts to spiral really quickly. And this means that we need to start having the dreaded M word meetings. We need to have designated scheduled times for the team to get together, have an agenda to talk through and figure out who’s doing what do we need to discuss, what do we need to get in agreement on what decisions need to be made. Now, I hate meetings. I hate them with a burning passion because they always feel like a waste of time. To me, it always feels like I could just be using that same time to go be creating. And in the beginning, this was very, very difficult for me.
Anthony Vicino [00:02:41]:
It made it very hard for me to be mentally present and checked into meetings. And I kind of resented them because it felt like it was a poor use of my time. As I’ve gained more time and experience building businesses, I’ve come to realize that meetings really are a manager’s way of doing the work. It is our most powerful weapon, and it comes down to how you use those meetings and whether or not they’re going to be effective and ultimately if you’re going to hate your life during them. Now, most meetings are, I think, far too long. I think they’re far too rigid in a lot of cases, far too loosey goosey. There’s no clear agenda about what needs to be covered, what the expectations are. There’s no clear rhythm.
Anthony Vicino [00:03:20]:
So we don’t have very many meetings at Invictus anymore. I try to pack all my meetings onto Mondays. We do a weekly meeting, and that’s where I’m involved. There might be interdepartmental meetings throughout the week, but there might be one on one meetings. I try to pack all the recurring meetings on Mondays and those are going to typically going to include things like one on one meeting with all my direct reports, one on one meeting with the different departments, the L. Ten meeting, which is the leadership meeting, and figuring out what’s the plan for the week, who’s doing what, and all the stuff that might need a little bit of my attention. So I try to front load all that stuff into a single day so that I’m not having to get interrupted throughout the week when I’m trying to go into creation mode or execution mode by having to stop and go into a meeting. Because I find that nothing kills my momentum, my creative energies, more than sitting into a meeting.
Anthony Vicino [00:04:09]:
I try to keep all the meetings really relatively short. But one of the things I discovered that’s been very, very helpful, it’s kind of our secret weapon. I don’t know too many other companies that do this. And it was born from a phrase that I read, I think in Jim Collins book, Good to Great, many, many years ago, he said something to the effect of we tend to put our best people on the biggest problems rather than putting them on the biggest opportunities. And it resonated because we did exactly that at Escape for many years. We were taking the best people, the all star, rock stars on the team, who were just crushing it, and we would say, okay, well, we have this problem over here with this person in this division. This thing’s happening. Go solve for this.
Anthony Vicino [00:04:50]:
And as a result, those people just kind of became firefighters. They’re putting out problems that other people had created and that’s not a good, it’s not always a good use of their time and energy where it could be better spent instead of solving the problem over here, putting them on the opportunities over on this other side. But what are the opportunities? That’s the big question. Where are the opportunities where we could swing at the ball and instead of maybe just getting a base hit, we could actually hit a grand slam? Like, what are those opportunities that it would be more advantageous to put our best people’s time and attention and genius towards rather than having them solve the problems all the time, which can burn them out because nobody likes to solve people’s problems all day. They’d rather be running at the opportunities. So what we introduced was a monthly opportunity meeting because a lot of times meetings, they take the form of just putting out fires and saying here’s everything that’s going wrong here’s. What do we need to do to fix it? Right? Well, the opportunity meeting turns out on its head. Instead of focusing on the problems, we come in and we say everybody on the team needs to come to the table with three opportunities.
Anthony Vicino [00:05:56]:
Three opportunities for growing in their department, individually for the company, whatever. Three opportunities that they see that the company is not currently exploiting. And we take those ideas and we don’t always run at them. Some of them are just they’re great to think about, the great thought exercises to go through the motion of the thought principle, but not always to actually run towards those things. But every now and then you get an opportunity that crops up and you’re like, that is an amazing opportunity that we need to run at immediately. And when you do, that makes it so that there’s quite a lot of buy in on the team. People get excited to bring their opportunities and they get excited when they can then run free unrestrained towards that opportunity. So that’s our secret weapon, opportunity meeting.
Anthony Vicino [00:06:38]:
I recommend you take all these opportunities that come in from everybody and you create like a log, you create a Bible and just review them every year because it might not be timely in the moment for you to run at an opportunity, but you don’t want to lose the thought and the energy that went into it. So I love this meeting though, because I know that people are spending time and energy outside of the meeting, then thinking about how can I improve the company? And I think really instilling that ownership mentality in people like I am a co owner in this business is the way that you grow something really fantastic. You get a lot of buy in and people are really motivated to run hard at the goals. So that’s the opportunity meeting. Give it a shot. If you’re just a one man team right now, put it in your back pocket. Save it for later as the team starts to grow and expand. But if you have a team right now, I highly recommend you start implementing this.
Anthony Vicino [00:07:26]:
We’ve had some really great opportunities spawned from this, so hope this brings you guys some value, as always. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Looking forward to seeing you around these parts again tomorrow. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.
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