Barry Raber is president of Carefree RV Storage, a Portland Entrepreneur of the Year and shares business secrets at realsimplebusiness.org.
It was 2013, and my team and I had just pivoted our thriving real estate business from investing in business parks to self-storage.
We created a seven-page vision document describing the amazing and unique company we imagined. What we visualized ran against the grain of almost all industry standards and practices. Acknowledging our inexperience, we hired an industry veteran to help bring our vision into reality. Enter our first regional property manager, a no-nonsense Jersey girl with a wealth of knowledge.
She took one look at our vision document, insisted our mission was impossible to achieve and uttered the four words we’ll never forget: “You guys are crazy!” Followed quickly by, “You are going to need a lot of meetings if you want any shot of moving this forward.”
And so, the “Move It Forward” (MIF) meeting was born.
Her naysaying words lit a massive fire in our collective bellies to prove we could deliver. We created a new type of meeting, comprising just a fraction of our team’s time, to focus exclusively on improving our company by identifying big-picture priorities and moving them forward each month.
This one monthly meeting has produced clockwork execution for our team and served as jet fuel to ignite a remarkable company. Over the past decade, we have completed countless initiatives. Our Move It Forward meeting remains the company’s staple for executing plans, even to this day.
Hard-code the time.
Whenever I tell entrepreneurs about Move It Forward, they love the idea but say, “Where would we get the time?” Most business owners think they simply cannot afford to spend operating hours focusing on ways to improve. Daily tasks, emails and calls easily consume the workday, with the “urgent” always overtaking the “important.” If you are waiting for “downtime” to improve your business, it will never come.
MIF time must be created and hard-coded into the business calendar. In ours, it stands out as a big green box in Outlook to emphasize its importance.
And it doesn’t have to be a lot of time, either. Our company reserves just three hours once a month on a Wednesday morning, from 9 a.m. to noon, for MIF meetings. That is less than 2% of monthly work hours! If the company needs to accomplish more, we meet twice a month—still only 4% of the work month. It’s a minimal commitment, considering the endless benefits that can follow. Setting aside this time allows you to work on the business rather than in the business.
Agree about what to work on.
Each MIF meeting serves as our company’s monthly check-in to ensure we’re on track to accomplish overarching priorities.
Semi-annually, we leave the office (and its daily demands) to gather as a group to brainstorm a lengthy list of possible goals and initiatives that would improve the company. We then identify which are non-negotiable and must occur immediately while separately selecting ideas that will produce maximum results with minimum effort. The ideas with the most votes are sequenced throughout the year depending on their scale and timing and categorized into the following:
• Goal: A one- or three-year description of what, specifically, you want the company to achieve.
• Initiative: A six-month undertaking that will impact most of the team or customer base once implemented.
• Behind-The-Scenes Action Item: A smaller improvement that is behind the scenes and can be accomplished with less effort, such as a task or project.
For perspective, as a company, we are currently working on six annual goals, a half-dozen six-month initiatives and 16 action items.
Identify the shepherd and leads.
Once the goals, initiatives and action items are determined, a “shepherd,” or caretaker, is required to track the company’s collective progress and maintain momentum. The shepherd sets the monthly MIF agenda. The group also assigns a lead or owner to each objective, and this person becomes 100% responsible for that target’s successful completion.
MIF meetings are organized as follows:
• Two weeks before a scheduled MIF, the shepherd contacts each lead to identify possible agenda topics for discussion or initiatives in need of a work session. Time during the MIF can be used to brainstorm ideas, propose solutions, deliberate on implementation—anything necessary to make progress on designated objectives.
• The lead identifies who on the team should participate and the estimated time needed, being mindful that time is valuable and only those with pertinent input need to participate.
• A week ahead of the meeting, a MIF agenda is drafted and routed to the group for feedback.
• Five days before the meeting, it’s time to finalize the agenda, giving the leads time to prepare.
• At each monthly MIF meeting, the first ten minutes are nicknamed the “Huddle,” where leads give a short update on the status of each item. This is a simple, quick way to motivate and track forward progress in a public forum.
In one dedicated, three-hour meeting a month, time is made to strategically tackle action items and initiatives, moving the company forward in achieving its annual goals.
Make room for the important and turbocharge your company’s future.
The concept of Move It Forward is deceptively simple and amazingly effective. Your company’s leaders will spend half the time in execution meetings versus the popular Traction system.
At its heart, MIF blocks out time to make the company better. In my experience, I would say this practice is the secret sauce to accomplishing any goal set by my company. To date, we have easily produced many times what we otherwise would have had we not challenged ourselves a decade ago after being told our dream was crazy.
Remember: If you invest just 2% of your month, putting the urgent aside and committing to the important, I believe you too will watch your company “Move It Forward”—and witness results that will take your business to the next level.
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