How System Six Bookkeeping manage leadership team meetings with Karbon

So often, meetings can seem like nothing more than necessary evils. Just something getting in the way and stopping you from actually getting work done. This can be especially true if you are a team leader in your accounting firm. You frequently feel like you do nothing but jump from meeting to meeting. And if the scheduled ones aren’t bad enough, there are always last-minute ones that pop up as well.

For the past 18 months at System Six, we have been using a meeting cadence that has alleviated most of these pitfalls. We are Karbon users, and this leadership team meeting method leverages Karbon, to help us get alignment around the highest priority tasks that our practice should be focused on.

Now I want to share it with you. This is our method for effective leadership meetings at System Six Bookkeeping. In this video, I explain how we use the agenda, and how that relates to our workflow and tasks in Karbon.

The meeting agenda that we use

We created a team meeting agenda that allows us to work through company updates and issues together, without detracting from the other things we are working on. It keeps us each accountable, and also avoids rabbit trails—working from the meeting agenda ultimately buys us more time.

This meeting agenda is mostly based on EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) and a book called Traction. We added a personal check-in sales scoreboard, client headlines, and team headlines but we give all the credit to the book and EOS model for helping us design this google sheet.

Our meeting structure

Meeting management

We use this agenda for our Monday leadership call. Attendees represent each department of System Six (Sales, Operations, Finance, Culture, Customer Service). One person is designated as the “call leader” and they are responsible for running the meeting and keeping everyone on track. If we don’t designate a leader, we can easily get lost in the weeds. The overarching goal is to bring everyone into the loop on what’s happening, where our progress stands, and what needs to happen next.

Maintain relationships

We always start with the relational connection. For us, this is the first ten minutes. We are a fully remote team, so this is particularly important for us. It allows us to connect on the highs and lows of life outside of work. It enables us to support one another during busy seasons and it also reminds us all that we are people, not just performers.

KPI reviews

Then we move into our scorecard section. This is five minutes of sales updates, landed contracts, goal statuses, leading and lagging indicators, and operational hiccups that led to lost revenue. Doing this each week gets us all on the same page about how our business is functioning in its quantitative elements. This section usually stirs some good conversation topics that we add to our IDS section below.