Today we're gonna be talking about how to have clear,
concise client communication.
This is something that's very, very valuable.
I learned this originally when I was, my very first job,
I was an intern doing video editing in Coca-Cola.
And that's where I met a guy named Lance Campbell,
who was my first boss.
And I did the most boring video edits you've ever done.
So we would sit there and edit like,
just like safety training OSHA videos.
You can't imagine like a worse,
less interesting type of topic to be editing content.
And we'd have like a thousand videos to edit.
So we'd have spreadsheets and all this stuff,
and we're doing these massive projects.
So they would need to like update all these things
with like slightly different narration.
So anyway, it was this really complex project.
And Lance was one of the guys who was just like,
taught me first on how to communicate
very clearly with clients.
Because he had this style that was really great,
talking to these Coca-Cola execs,
and he'd been doing it for decades.
And it was very crisp, and it was very to the point.
And it would just be like, hey, comma, Joe,
you know, saw this, got this, three bullet points, Lance.
Like, it's just very crisp and tight.
And when I was starting out in my agency,
I did everything the wrong way.
I was like, dear client,
I'm so excited to be sharing this moment with you
and this project, and can I just say
how great it is to work with you?
You know, like we would just share way too much information
and the bigger the clients you're gonna be working with,
like the busier they're gonna be.
So this whole process of us working at Enovo and our team,
it works best when there's just the fewest amount of people.
And that works well when we have
the most senior people on the team.
So the way to get the most senior people on team
is don't waste their time.
So if you have a moment, a call,
you have their attention on an email,
like it is just skimmable,
they can get to the point really, really quick.
It's not us like figuring things out
or getting clear.
So when we do communication,
we always wanna basically share just clarity,
like we're exporting clarity
as far as like what we're expecting of them,
what they're expecting of us,
and it should be also just super quick to digest.
And so we're gonna talk through a few ways
that that's gonna look,
and we get really practical.
We're gonna go into like how to run a live meeting.
So doing the live type communication,
how to do async communication through email or Slack,
and some of the best practices there.
And so all of us are kind of learning this on the job,
the team that's here currently.
And so where a lot of this is happening
sort of as we do projects,
but I thought would be good
is like, let's just talk about client communication.
We'll get into some questions and some details.
And then this will kind of create like the playbook
for just the general overview,
how we do communication
and everything else should kind of fit into this.
So the first big thing with communication
and why we even do this
is because for us,
the communication actually builds trust.
If you can clearly communicate things,
sometimes even better than the client
can articulate things.
It just builds a tremendous amount of trust.
We've seen this with Ryan,
when we've dove into the shape of stuff.
Once you can clearly kind of communicate back
the requirements,
once you can clearly communicate the problem
even better than maybe we can on our own project,
it just makes it,
it just builds a ton of trust.
Okay, well, this person gets it.
In fact, I think they understand the problem
better than I do.
And that's kind of where we wanna be.
Every time we send out an email, a text,
we host a call.
So being very clear,
being very open and just honest with people,
all of these clients that we're working with
have really good relationships with me and our team.
And so that's who we're talking to.
We're not talking to some corporate client
that's got a hundred people and their team.
Like these are smaller teams
that we're typically talking with the founder
or the co-founders on the call.
And this is a great time to just be super honest,
super clear upfront
and just build that trust every piece.
They're not just buying code from us.
Like we're not just spitting out code.
They're not just sending us requirements.
We send back projects.
They're actually taking time to invest in their business,
take time and money.
Because yes, clients are giving us money,
but at the other time, clients are giving us time.
And time in a business is actually way more valuable
in some ways than the money.
Because if they're gonna get this new feature
that's gonna help their business,
but it's gonna take two months to build,
they have to not use that feature for two months
until we build it and then they can start to use it.
So they're giving us two months of time
that they didn't, you know, that's gonna cost them.
Now, I think our process is very efficient.
I think it's very crisp.
We can get, you know,
meaningful pieces of work done quickly.
So I think this is a great way to just keep that in mind.
Like when we're asking for time,
either we're asking for them to be on a call with us,
we're asking them to trust us for a few weeks
to go build something.
They're essentially trusting us with the time
and the money to go and build this thing out.
And so just keep in mind that, you know,
trust is, it can be fragile.
It can either be strengthened or eroded
as we go through every phase.
interaction. So it's keeping it just continual, building trust, building trust, building trust.
This does not mean that we tell clients what they want to hear. This is being very clear,
very honest, articulating, being clear about what's the problem, what's actually going on.
We recently had an outage for a client. I'm not gonna mention names or clients,
but we had an outage. And when that happened, the best thing, we can't fix that there's a
problem. And it was something that we caused for whatever reason. And so the best thing we can do
is actually tell them there's a problem before they even find out. So we quickly built up trust
in this way by starting to text, starting to email, hey, by the way, this happened,
letting you know we're on it. And then what we did is just every 20 minutes, we sent them another
text like, hey, we're still working on it, figured out this, working on that. Hey, 20 minutes later,
we're doing this, we're doing this. And we did that for three and a half hours. Now that's not
fun. It rarely happens. Those types of crazy, critical, show-stopping bugs can happen. And we
can get into those moments. But if we can actually use that opportunity to, at the end of that,
actually have more trust in us than less trust, because the worst way that can go is something
bad happens. One, we don't know about it for a while. So we've really burned a bunch of time.
Then they post, hey, by the way, we think this thing's broken. And we're like, okay, we'll go
look at it. And we're like, oh, yeah, no, you're right, it is broken. And then we just start
working on it. That's actually the worst thing we could do, because we haven't confirmed like,
hey, yes, you're right, it is working. Let me go work on this. We're not communicating back to them.
So in our minds, we could be like, oh, I'm going to go fix the problem. That's really the thing
that needs to happen. But we don't communicate that, hey, we are working on the problem.
It's a little bit of acknowledgement of like, hey, you're right, we're on it. That's a great
one-line email that goes a long way for our clients. Like checking in on this dot, dot,
dot send. You could literally buy yourself so much time and so much trust just with that.
Just that they know that they got it. Because in their minds, they're like working, working,
working. I've got this other thing to deal with. This is now a reactive problem that's popped up
into my business. And now they have to go deal with this thing. And so if they're like, cool,
this team's got it, then it's kind of like off their mind and then go do something else, right?
If you don't say anything, if we don't have that immediate acknowledgement,
but just it's like, did they get it? I don't know. Maybe they did get it.
And then the worst thing is if we did get it and we are working on it, and then
they don't know if we've got stuff necessarily. So they know that, hey, if we are working on it,
we're telling them. If we're not, then they need to keep texting or calling or whatever.
So just saying like, the thing here is not to say like, hey, a little bug happened. I'm really
sorry. We're going to fix it real quick. Don't downplay it just to make them happy and get them
to nod their head. Like, okay, cool. It's not a big deal. Actually like, hey, we think we broke
everything. We're going to come back and we're going to fix it. Just be super honest about what
it is. Because these things are going to happen. This happened to, in my opinion, one of the most
senior people, person on our team had this happen, this recent project. And it's going to happen.
And so it's not that mistakes will get made, things will get pushed out, bugs will happen,
but just being able to own it very quickly and let people know that you got it will go a long,
long way. Okay, cool. So that's building trust. It's the first reason why this matters.
Second thing is that communication is really the tip of the spear. So if we have clear
communication, think of it like a kind of a pyramid. If this top part is super sharp and
super clear and concise, it just means that all of that other work has been done. The framing has
been done. The shaping has been done. If we have more than one person communicating on a project,
they're talking to each other and they're getting clear about what has to happen, what the deadlines
are, where are the mistakes, where are the blockages. So when we go and we send a super
concise email or we have a really crisp call, it just helps build that trust because it seems like,
hey, if they're super clear about these things, it means that all this other stuff underneath
is clear. It's really quick to identify when things are not clear in the project.
And I think we're all learning this, diving deeper into shape up, into framing. It's like,
if this doesn't feel super concrete and crisp, because once it is crisp and it's concrete,
it's easy to take that really solid piece of truth and knowledge about the project and just
give it to the client and be like, hey, guess what? Your API doesn't do this or Shopify's API
doesn't do that. We can't make the thing you want happen. It doesn't matter if we have six
weeks or one week, it's not going to happen. So we need to have some trade-offs. How are we going
to work around this thing together? Not just, oh, the client wants this thing. Oh my gosh,
let's run around and hack stuff together until they're happy. If we dig deep enough and we're
like, no, this is right here is a limitation and we've figured that out, we can surface that thing
to the top. And it just shows that when they get that little report, that little communication from
us, that everything else underneath it is sitting there.
So the framing, the shaping, the communication internally in the team is
flowing, is flowing well, and it just shows that we have a handle on it.
It's like, if we tell them like, Hey, we're on time, we're on budget.
That's kind of all they need to know is most for most clients.
Again, they're, they're, they've got so many other projects going on.
This is the only thing we're doing.
So just letting them know, like big picture, we're on time on budget.
And if we can show things like, Hey, yeah, we're, we're, we're 60 hours here.
We've done this, this is where we're at.
They don't care that it's 60 hours or 10 or a hundred.
It's like, it just shows that like, we're tracking it.
Like, as long as we're tracking and we're on it, clients will
give you so much, like trust on that.
So like, it's when you, like, when I was growing up, my parents were like, you
can have as much trust as you can earn.
So you could have a later curfew with when you're a teenager,
if you built up that trust.
And so soon as we broke that trust now, like the rules get worse, right.
Then we get into micromanaging and all that bad stuff.
And so what, what this does is as we build that, we kind of earn that
trust or in that trust, and then they are going to ask less and less about it.
And some of our biggest clients that we've worked with the longest, who have,
who have spent the most with us, most time, most money with us there, they
check on us the least and because they trust us, we're like, they know we got it.
We're on it.
We're running stuff for them.
So that does build up into a lot of momentum.
So first thing was communication built to trust.
Second is that it's kind of the tip of the spear of this, like kind of pyramid
all the different pieces that make up a project.
If that communication at the top is just super clear that that will go a long way.
And then obviously, you know, there's the negative side, bad communication.
It's going to, you know, the cost of having poor communication
is, is really going to hurt us.
It's because this stuff breaks down pretty fast.
Like just think of if you have a relationship and someone does something
that, that makes them lose trust in that person, like if we did like a home
renovation project and we hired potentially the worst contractor in
Atlanta to come work with us and he was, seemed great at the beginning.
And then like a month in, like he would just not show up for a month
and this thing would happen.
Then he was like, cool.
We're going to, you know, all of March, we're going to paint these three rooms.
I was like, we were first time home builders.
Like, I guess it takes three, like a full month to paint three rooms.
Like not three days.
Like it should have been faster.
We were just in there micromanaging and stuff just got like bad fast because
the communication was so poor and just, you know, he would say like, Hey,
we're going to do this by Monday.
And then Monday would come and go and not even a text, not even a message,
not no sign of anything, those were the worst case scenario.
So like I had one, one designer we worked with who helped us do all the
Novo branding was just so good about this.
And he was like, he would have it on his calendar and he would know like, Hey,
I'm going to give you this mock-up on this date and this thing on this date.
And then a few days before that happened or up to a week before deadline, he's
like, he would reach out and be like, Hey Bruce, you know, I said on the
Monday of the 17th, I would be ready with this, I've had to do this or
this thing happened or a sick here.
I'm just letting you know that in a week, it's actually going
to be like three days later.
I was like, I forgot we even had the first deadline, right?
Like, and he's telling me like, Oh, it's going to just a couple of days or
whatever I was like, okay, sure, man.
That's great.
Like, no problem.
And so you don't have to like when, when the communication's good and when you
have this, like you're kind of forward thinking of stuff, like you just, again,
it's building that trust, but it's, it's avoiding all that cost of the poor
communication where it's going to like essentially come back and then it goes
into a downward spiral fast.
Okay.
And then you get micromanaged and then you don't like it.
The client hates it.
And then just sort of like ends.
And then they're like, why did I ever want to build an app?
This is why app developers are the worst.
So it goes down, it goes down fast.
So kind of summary of like the, the reason.
So the, the first section here was just sort of why we, why we do this?
Why, why have good communication?
We just want to be clear, build trust, tip of the spear, and there's avoiding
all the poor communication piece.
And I love this, that, that clients should know like what we're building.
They should know why we're building and how it's going.
So if we can articulate that, Hey, we're building this right now.
Why is we doing this?
Oh, remember we need to have like invoice component that helps you do this.
What great.
That's why we're doing it.
And how's it going?
Well, we're 30% through, we have these two big, you know, blocks
knocked out in the task grid.
We're working on these other two, you know, we have questions about
this right here, very specific.
So that's the thing though, what we're building, why and how it's going.
I think that comes out actually out of a shape up or rework.
So that's that.
So in this next section, I just want to jump into email and then we'll come
back and we'll talk about each of these.
I'd love to get your, all of your thoughts on it and share some
other questions that can help.
But for, for this, we're gonna talk a little bit through email communication
and kind of the async communication here.
And I've also, we've got some tools.
So I'm going to dive into some of the shape up AI stuff that we have.
And so async of course, just means we're doing asynchronously.
This is sort of the way that we work as a team.
We do work asynchronously.
It means.
If you're in the code, we're doing stuff, if there's certain problems
that just need to be solved, you know, that's a great time to use
jumping on a call with someone.
I'd say things like framing, right.
Framing shaping type calls where we're just still unsure.
It's not super clear yet.
That's where we're on a call.
And ideally it's with the client as well.
So this is where kind of the two sides of, we've got email, which
can be asynchronous and we're gonna have live calls as well, which is
going to be where we're doing like framing, shaping, and, and doing
kind of problem solving, so there's these two, two sides to this.
That is very, very clear.
And when I say email, I'm thinking Slack as well.
Email just is better.
Like it's just so much better in so many ways.
I'm like, you know, like this is my old man, like preach here is like email
still the grandfather of all communication.
It's been around forever.
It's going to be around forever.
I think, and Slack is great, but as you guys know, like it gets chaotic fast.
And so the, the beauty of a, an email thread where things are replied and
everything's kind of organized in this one thread, and then we can kind of close
that and start a new thread in an email, loop people in quickly, see context.
It's just, there's a lot of things that are really great about it.
And it creates this a little bit more of like a publication to the client.
So we're saying like, Hey, here's a little update and we publish it.
It creates a log that's there permanently, like emails are kind of
there forever in your, in your inbox and they're in your client's inbox.
So we do that.
Even if we're, even if clients are, I have, we have some clients who don't
ever use email for anything and, and they love text and they'll
just text things back and forth.
We've, we've signed multi-year agreements by texting back and forth
terms of a contract and that client, of course, it's not necessarily
in their email every day.
And so what we do is we still send the update.
Hey, this is the update here.
Boom, boom, boom.
Here's the log.
If they don't see it, that's fine.
But it also creates a log for us.
If we ever have any confusion of, of, Hey, we're doing this, but they're not
responding or we had a meeting, they didn't show up that little, those little
things, it just, again, it's, it's us taking the lead on this and owning sort
of like the, the relationship and, and taking the, and, and it's not that we
want to like, Hey, like when, when this goes wrong and we're like, well, we
told you this two weeks ago, like blah, blah, blah.
It's, it's not so much that it's just more.
Um, cause we, we want to have like a better relationship with clients
where we're like beating them over the head with like that.
We love our clients.
We're working with them.
We're partnering with them.
So we're doing this as if we're there, you know, some of our best friends.
And so we wouldn't do that to a best friend, but we do want to have like the
log.
So if they ever did look up or they saw it, they're like, it just, again, it
kind of puts us in the lead leading role of this, where they're not the ones
like, Hey, what's good.
Like the worst thing is clients checking in.
Hey, what's the status of X?
Like, when can I use that?
When is this thing going to be done?
We, they have, should be having so many updates and it kind of the stream of
communication from us that they don't have to think about that because they got
an update two days ago and we said, Hey, Thursday.
So they don't have to ask us.
And so for this, like the ASIN communication, I say it's like kind of more
of a stream of content, like, Hey, end of day, Tuesday, just let people know, Hey,
we did these three things and make it super concise.
We like to make it skimmable as well.
So if you're doing an email, I'm kind of breaking it up.
Don't, we don't have paragraphs of texts because you can't scan a paragraph,
break text into like bullet points, use things like bolding text when
you need to emphasize stuff.
And if you really don't want them to miss something bold and market in red,
if you want to be really fancy, you can use the Innovo red color, which
I have like saved in my Mac mail.
So you can have it even a branded color, but the essentially just have that as
like, Hey, we can't move forward because of this, or, Hey, we're waiting for
approval on this project before we can start working that type of thing.
You just want to bold in red.
Like they can open the email.
If that's the one line they read and they close it, they got the essence of it.
That's the main thing that's blocking them.
Like we can't work on your thing until you give us an open
AI account to work on.
Right.
That type of thing.
They should just know that this is what is, what we tend to do is like, what's
not actually as helpful is like this one mega updates where now the big update,
like once a week is fine.
That's great.
But what tends to happen is we've done so much work that like now there's 12, 15
bullet points and now people like open it and they're just like, well, that looks
like a lot and they close it right now.
I know they, some clients care about this and they really want to go through the
details of it and they might do that, but it's actually better if we kind of do it
in bite-sized pieces and that's actually easier for them to digest than to send
this massive, like mega update over.
And so shorter updates more often is better than just sort
of one massive update weekly.
And so now one thing you can use one tool here is the, the shape up.
So I'm going to see if I can share this.
There we go.
And so.
So this is the shape up GPT here.
And so you can go here and one of the updates here is to prep a client update.
And so I had, I think we had something from Luchin actually,
I'm just going to pull this in.
Let's see, archived, let me grab this.
And so Luchin did this whole little update.
I'm just going to copy this and paste it and just, so we can just say something
like write a client update email.
And I'm just going to paste all of this from here into this.
And this was just a whole thing.
That's going to go.
Now, one thing that we're doing here is I'm putting a lot of this into practice.
And so what it's done here is it's, it's, it's got a great subject for us.
And then sort of the format here.
So it also knows that it's Veritas and it knows that Chris is in charge of that.
So it said, Hey, comma team.
That's a, just a nice way to start.
Here's an app shop where we stand today.
Boom.
That's the email right there that we want to send.
That's, that's, we don't do a bunch of stuff.
And then at the end, like, Hey, and also, can we meet?
Cause that will get lost.
So what you could say is like, Hey, here's an app show where we stand today.
I'd like to meet next Tuesday at 2 PM.
That's sort of the essence of the email.
Then I always do like an end dash, you know, line or something.
And then you can get into all the cool stuff.
Right now, this is quite elaborate, but what it is doing here, one of the
conditions that this has is to not make it techie.
So what it's doing here is Hey, like while resolving this discovered
additional architectural problems, affecting event handling.
Now it kind of gets into like some specifics here and we
could probably boil this down.
I'm not saying you should copy and paste and send this, but
this is a, this is 80% there.
It's, it's pretty good.
And so I don't even know what this update is, by the way.
I just copied him.
I mean, I mean, I read, I skimmed it, right.
Just like the clients would have skimmed it, but this kind of breaks it into
specifics of, cause they're going to read this and be like, Hey, we're
cleaning up something here.
We've got like a draft of how we think this thing should work.
Here's some, our recommendations.
And then there's some other thing about video or whatever.
So we can kind of clean this up.
We can make it better if we need to.
And I can also say like, make it more concise or here and less techie.
So you could give it very kind of short feedback like that.
Like this feels long.
Cool.
Like tell it to make it shorter.
So this is already just feels lighter weight.
I'm going by like, I'm just opening, kind of just skimming it.
Right.
Like I'm not reading every word here for you, but, but client, this is
how clients are going to open the email.
Cause they're going to open it and just see things like two or three
bullet points feels easy.
I could probably read that.
And then I kind of go through here and of course check what it's saying.
Cause it will just, you know, it's trying to interpret the best it can.
It does have the context of the client and you can say, this is, I don't think
I said that at the beginning, but I think if we said that it may tie it just a
little bit better yet, I'm not sure exactly what it might do.
Yeah.
It said help.
This is just mentioned the client there, but that does give it context
for a bunch of transcripts we've uploaded for this client.
And so if you can tell what the client name, it definitely, definitely helps.
So I use this because what we're doing, like we're moving pretty quickly as
far as how all of our, how like we're evolving as a company, a lot is going
to be helpful if we can load into this GPT, a lot of the knowledge so that
instead of, you know, me, like we can all help train you guys on like how to
write better and the only way you're all going to get good at it is just doing
it for a long, long time and just doing them.
So a couple of ways we can like practice emails, one, drop them in
here, that's like your first tool.
This is like your, obviously your, your infinitely positive assistant
that can help you with everything.
It's going to be this, this shape of AI.
And then other thing you can do is like use team members.
This does not mean like we write the updates and I just send it to Bruce
and be like, can you send this to the client?
No, no, no, no.
Like all of you guys at the developer level are talking directly to the client.
That's, that's how we should do communication.
What you can do is write the update.
And instead of emailing to the client, email it to Bruce or email it to Chris
or email it to someone else, another developer on the team and say like,
what, like, what do you guys think of this?
And that way we can tweak it, change the words.
I can, we can reply back to it.
We can drop it into Notion.
We could comment and edit it in Notion first, whatever.
But the idea is that you're practicing writing it from scratch or using the
GPT to, to, to write it and get it kind of into our language.
So it's already 80, 90% there.
And so my first thing, if I can open it and immediately see, it's not that
it's going to be like, did you run this, the shape of AI, because it's
going to clean up and do a lot of the just simplification of the language.
So those are some ways we can practice and get good at this and kind of getting
like right to the point, one thing I've been telling this shape of GPT is like,
don't use end dashes and don't, don't put like emojis on absolutely everything.
It's like, these are the two things that just shows like, it's getting more and
more obvious that you're leveraging AI for stuff when you've just way over using
the emojis and, and then if you've, if somebody.
in the end dash, if you guys have heard that,
that's like a telling sign that you're like,
because most people don't write with an end dash.
End dash is like those two dashed lines
that become one long line.
That's like a hyphen, but it's like extra long.
And that's like something that ATs or AI agents
use all the time.
And it's like a quick tell that they're using.
So I've told it not to do that, but it does it all the time.
So let me get back to that.
I think that's everything on email.
Kind of on the flip side is like the live stuff.
So this live calls should really be used
for like framing, shaping,
and like solving a specific problem.
What it's not gonna be good for is the feeling of like,
this could have been an email, right?
That's not like, that is a kind of a waste of time.
If we're opening like a list of that email, for example,
and then we're just reading through bullet points
one at a time, that's just a quick way to kind of,
again, lose some of the trust.
It's like, cool, you called this meeting so that like,
you're gonna read this to me.
Like, couldn't you have like put it in an email?
And some of it is not able to do that.
Some of it needs to be, you know,
summarized and articulated.
And that's where like a video could be very useful.
If you have, you know, in those email updates,
you could put a quick video that's two, three minutes,
maybe it gets into details
or some of the nuances of something.
That's where you can use that update.
And if they don't watch it and stuff, that's fine.
This is like, we've shared it with them.
That's how we can communicate.
But one thing that we really want to value the most,
and this is kind of to clients, but also internally,
like if I got on a call and I just read, you know,
all of the bullet points of like,
what's going on with the team and the company,
and this is the thing, tasks that need to be done,
just like a waste of everybody's time,
because it's a very inefficient way for me
to just broadcast 20 things at you.
Cause there's no way that you're gonna be able to like,
talk to each specific thing or have the time to think about.
You may not be in the mindset to be processing
all these different tasks right now.
So that's where I want to like, ideally,
like if you need to do that and you need to get an update,
send that like ahead of the meeting.
So if we're meeting on Tuesday at two,
by like Tuesday morning, an email goes out like,
hey, here's the status of where we stand.
But like, here's kind of what we want to accomplish
on the meeting.
We really need like to figure out,
are we going left or right on this particular thing?
We're, you know, in order to meet our appetite,
in order to meet the schedule, we need to cut X and Y,
or, you know, kind of bringing it back to like,
hey, remember in the framing piece, we said this,
now we've kind of gone down this rabbit hole,
like let's come back.
So using that to sort of help get clarity,
help like solve a problem, make decisions together,
kind of think through the best way forward.
And this should happen the same.
Like if we need to work in like connect as a team,
the best use of our time as a team connecting
is going to be on a live call to do things like framing,
breadboarding, shaping, that stuff.
And I saw Jason Freed tweeted about this,
like a few months back, but he's like,
he said he's at the point where he doesn't think
that shaping can be done asynchronously.
Like it has to be done live with people like that.
I think that's very powerful because you get to kind of
hit things from different angles and quickly whittle down
like what actually has to get done.
So a lot of this also goes very well
if we've really framed the project well,
if we really shaped the project well,
the emails get easier, the calls get easier,
like everything's a lot smoother.
So how we start that project just as hard as we can
with like, here's the frame,
here's the things that, here's the problems that we want,
here's the outcome,
here's the things we're not doing in this project,
using that new template that Ryan gave us,
that's gonna just make all this communication
so much easier as we dive deeper into it.
So getting into the meeting,
basically just first thing is like,
can we delete this meeting?
Can I cancel this meeting?
Would be like the first thing you're like,
no, we really need to do this because we can't,
we're unclear about this and we need to dig in.
And it's less like there's a question.
I think when these sort of group team meetings
where like there's two or three people from the client,
there's two of us and we're all coming together,
that's an even more of a reason to just
be extremely articulate with like,
what are we actually accomplishing here?
Because we're using a lot of different people's time.
If there's a confusion about like
one process in their business,
that's a one-to-one call or email back and forth
that can happen outside of that.
We don't wanna get onto the call
because this is what happens.
Like we talked to someone on the team,
we're like, hey, we just wanted you to clarify this.
The problem is, is that like other people on the call
are listening and watching this communication.
They're like, why are we taking five minutes of this call
to now like deal with that thing?
Why couldn't they just have had an email
or they have a call?
Like, what am I doing here?
This is a waste of time.
And now we've like, we've lost some trust in that.
So it can seem positive, like, hey,
we really wanna know what this is,
how this works in your business,
but other people can interpret that as like,
this is, you've kind of just lost some trust points
because we actually need.
To be making sure we're using everybody's time efficiently in that in that in that call
And so just be aware of those things as well
Like don't bring things into that meeting that could have been an email or could have been a separate one-to-one call
Where we are streaming. Hey, we ran into this problem
But the other thing as well like letting time go by like hey last like if it's Tuesday and hey last Wednesday
We got stuck on this thing. So we just wanted to ask you this question
Things to never say on a call right like it should be hey, it is Wednesday this morning. We had this problem
Can you clarify this for us?
Boom, we're getting because now you've also just seen like if you got a founder on the call
Maybe he has a team member
He's actually now like
Kind of upset with his team member like why didn't you dig into this and get them their information that they need so we can
kind of really like mess and then that person who's kind of our main contact is getting thrown under the bus and
It just makes doesn't go well
So the more we can just bring them into like not trying to cushion the problems is like hey today
We have this problem. We were we were in a meeting and we were confused. Can you clarify this for us?
Great solve that little problem plug it back into like whatever the shaping the breadboarding is, but don't we can like
Inadvertently step into like trying to be useful trying to dig into their company now if there's like very specific
Issues we're like it's directional and we kind of do need the founder and it's like hey
Like they really want, you know
We're sort of framing a big problems in their business and helping them identify like we're bottlenecks in the business
That's a good time to have people in there that lots of different points of view. Hey, why does this hurt the business?
Why does this particular friction right now hurt the business?
Founders gonna have examples team members in there on their side are gonna have examples like that's where you can really get in and flesh
Stuff out. But again, just that one-way stream communication like that's gonna be like a bad meeting
Getting really practical jumping in for the first five minutes just open check personal check-in
You don't have to ask about the weather or the game or like hey, is it cold there in Chicago?
Like, you know that stuff that's like cheesy sales person stuff
but
We actually generally care about our clients like most of I'll say all of the clients not most all of our clients are good
friends of mine at least that I've
Know outside of working with them. And so there's only two things to talk about
So as you guys are talking more to clients, like let's just you know, be a person like
Human like hey, it's you know, just just ask questions
You know and we're kind of just seeing like where people are at if you don't have anything that's like social
You're like, oh, I don't this is like freaking me out to have to be social for a few minutes and feels really awkward
Like just kind of check in on things. Hey, did you guys like you got that email like last week?
Do you guys have any thoughts on that?
Because you're getting them to sort of open up a little bit one
They're changing modes from the other 50 things they were doing today to like this one thing
That's on their list and they're just trying to so you're trying to get them to kind of see where they're at
We're also trying to see like we're kind of take the temperature of the room like hey, this is amazing
Well done guys. You guys are crushing it right now
Like let's let's hear that feedback kind of in those early first few minutes and then kind of pivot it into that
To where we're saying, okay
So today we're gonna be doing this like super clear like hey today successful for you accomplish X together
And then you can also say hey
If is this the right set of Pete like as you can ask the founder if there's a big number of people
To say like hey if this is useful or if we have the right people here to solve this one problem
Great, and you can also do this ahead in an email, but especially in the first few minutes basically give people a
An offer an off-ramp out of the meeting in the first few minutes like hey
We talked that we're actually gonna be talking this if you guys don't need to be here
This is not like your specific area like feel free to drop off and that's a great way to just make sure that hey
Yeah
who's here's like the really the key decision makers of
Who needs to be here because again, it's extremely expensive to have a meeting just on people's time
You know just think like from a founder standpoint
They're paying some of the people if they're paying them as a freelancer hourly if they're paying them salary like there
This is this meeting costs money to happen. It's not just the time is extremely valuable
So just make sure it's super clear front and then start on time and on time
So like what I'd love to do is like if you can start the zoom call a few minutes early
Like on this call that we're doing right now
Like I would turned it on 10 minutes early just so people could kind of hang out
I had all the tech done the lights done. Everything's like ready to go
So when you guys jumped on I was just already just letting people in and we could run it
It's good and go
the other thing is like if there's
Still questions or if there's two of you guys meeting and you're both working with the client
Definitely recommend get jumping on together like 10 minutes early and just hey today. I think we're gonna talk through these
Hey, I did this happen that that happened clarify stuff
That's a much easier way if there is more than one person on a team before you go into a client call
Just that 10-15 minutes
you just come in super sharp like and and you're also in the mindset if we're working on two different projects and then you just
Changed modes helps your brain just like reset a little
little bit and get the context switching down and then just, you know, when that
time comes up, just acknowledge it like, Hey, now I see we're coming up on time.
So I want to make sure I just get that last little thing that you need
done in the last five minutes.
Had to see, we've got four or five minutes left.
Can we make sure we just get this thing decided, or do we need to like extend
this meeting or reschedule for another time, but most clients, if you know, can
just blow through that meeting, but at least acknowledging it and saying, Hey,
we are coming up on time.
I just wanna make sure we get this done in those 30 minutes.
You know, if that's, if it's a 30 minute call, cause if it needed to be a 45
minute call or it needed to be a 90 minute call, that's kind of on us.
Like it's going to be very hard.
We're not going to frame things in 30 minutes.
We're not going to shape anything in 30 minutes.
Like this is an hour and a half minimum to get meaningful work done.
So if we are framing or shaping with a client, like it needs to be a 90 minute
call, I'd rather do a 90 minute call and finish in an hour or schedule an hour
call and finish in 30 minutes.
Right.
So just ask for that time, kind of making sure that we acknowledge that because if
we know, Hey, we can just get an insane amount done in those 30 minutes, people
come back to that call because it was extremely efficient.
We didn't waste their time.
And they may say like, yeah, let's keep going.
I I'm actually flexible.
Let's go another five, 10 minutes.
And then you can go over and that's totally fine.
But again, it's just sort of that, just respect, respecting their time, expecting
our team time as well is great.
And there you go.
So that's, that's pretty much everything on the email side, the live meeting.
We kind of went through the overview stuff, so I'll kind of open
it up to some questions here.
We can do some more examples.
I'd love to just kind of see where you guys are at and what you're thinking on this.