The Most Expensive Hour on Your Calendar

Meetings may be one of the least examined expenses in an MSP.

We scrutinize software licenses. We track technician utilization. We look at agreement gross margin, project overruns, and labor costs.

Then we put eight relatively expensive people in a conference room for an hour every week without giving much thought to what that hour actually produces.

That meeting isn't costing you one hour. It's costing you eight.

If it happens every week, that's more than 400 hours a year. And that doesn't include preparation, follow-up, or the time it takes everyone to get back into whatever they were doing before the meeting started.

It better be accomplishing something.

The Person Running the Meeting Usually Likes It More Than Everyone Else

One of the more interesting points in Steven Rogelberg's Harvard Business Review article, *Why Your Meetings Stink and What to Do About It*, is that meeting leaders tend to rate their meetings much more favorably than the people attending them.

That makes sense.

The meeting usually works pretty well for the person running it. Everyone gives their updates. Questions get answered. The leader gets caught up on what is happening across the business and leaves feeling better informed.

Meanwhile, six other people may have just spent an hour listening to information that had very little to do with them.

That problem is particularly easy to create inside an MSP.

MSPs Accumulate Meetings

As MSPs grow, meetings have a tendency to multiply.

There is the service meeting, help desk meeting, projects meeting, sales meeting, pipeline meeting, leadership meeting, security meeting, account management meeting, one-on-ones, company meeting, quarterly planning meeting, and probably a few others unique to your company.

Then communication becomes a problem.

So we add another meeting.

Eventually people spend so much time talking about the work that they have trouble finding uninterrupted time to actually do the work.

That doesn't mean meetings are unnecessary. MSPs are complicated businesses. We manage dozens or hundreds of customers, competing priorities, technical issues, projects, incidents, vendors, and employees. Coordination matters.

The question is whether a meeting exists because it produces something valuable or simply because it has always been on the calendar.

Every Meeting Needs a Job

One of the simplest questions you can ask about any recurring meeting is:

**What would stop happening if we eliminated it?**

If nobody can give you a good answer, you may have found a meeting that shouldn't exist.

Good meetings usually involve things that benefit from having people together: making decisions, solving problems, establishing priorities, reviewing exceptions, resolving conflicts, or holding people accountable.

Reading status updates doesn't require eight people sitting in a room together.

If the primary purpose of your weekly meeting is for six people to tell one person what happened last week, there is probably a more efficient way to accomplish it.

The Round-Robin Update Is Usually a Warning Sign

A lot of meetings fall into the same pattern.

Sales gives an update. Service gives an update. Projects gives an update. Security gives an update. Marketing gives an update.

Everyone patiently waits for their turn while listening to information they could have read in five minutes.

By the time the group reaches something that actually requires discussion, half the meeting is gone.

Routine information should usually be distributed before the meeting. Meeting time should be used for the things that require conversation.

What is off track? Where is someone stuck? What decision needs to be made? What changed since the last meeting? Where do two departments need to coordinate? What requires leadership attention?

Those are reasons to have a meeting.

Put a Price on Your Meetings

Most MSP owners have probably never calculated what their recurring meetings cost.

It is worth doing.

Take the people attending a meeting, estimate their fully burdened hourly cost, multiply that by the length of the meeting, and then multiply it by how often the meeting occurs.

The number can get large quickly.

But payroll isn't even the biggest cost. The larger issue is what those people could have been doing instead.

The employees you put into the most meetings are often your managers, senior engineers, account leaders, and executives. In other words, they are probably some of the people in the company with the greatest ability to solve difficult problems.

Their attention is one of your scarcest resources.

Treat it that way.

Audit the Calendar

I think every MSP should periodically challenge every recurring internal meeting.

Why does it exist? Who actually needs to attend? Could 60 minutes become 30? Could some attendees join only for part of it? Could routine updates be handled another way? Are decisions actually being made? Do people leave knowing what happens next?

And there is one question I particularly like:

**If this meeting disappeared from the calendar tomorrow, would the people attending it fight to get it back?**

If the answer is no, pay attention.

Your MSP probably needs meetings.

It just may not need all the meetings it has.