Thursday May 01, 2025

Episode 16: The Extreme Value of Team Meetings with Sid Graef

In this episode of The Huge Insider Podcast, host Sid Graef shares a powerful and practical guide to running effective team meetings for service-based businesses. With firsthand insight from leading a seven-figure window cleaning company in Montana, Sid breaks down how structured weekly meetings drive alignment, productivity, and team culture. He admits to once avoiding meetings due to perceived cost—only to learn that skipping them cost far more in missed opportunities, confusion, and team disconnection. Sid outlines his company’s proven two-meeting system: the Monday “Money Meeting” that sets the week’s tone with wins, safety reminders, and upsell planning, and the Wednesday “Training Meeting” focused on team culture, soft skills, and leadership development. The episode is packed with real-world tips and frameworks that any business owner can immediately implement. If you’re trying to scale your service business and empower your team, this episode is a must-listen.

Show Notes

Resources (mentioned every episode):

References & Mentions:

Nashville Huge Convention 2025: August 20–22,
Core behaviors discussed for April 2025: Be on time, leave it better for the next person, lift up teammates, take pride in your work

Transcript:

Sid Graef:
Welcome back to The Huge Insider Podcast. Hey, my friend, it's Sid Graef here, and this is The Huge Insider, the show for home service professionals like you who are striving to break the million-dollar revenue mark per year. And if that's you, you're definitely in the right place. If you're already over a million dollars of revenue, you'll get even more out of this show.

We want to help you skip all the BS and get real wisdom from experienced business builders. We've gathered insight directly from seven- and eight-figure business owners—people running companies that are currently doing anywhere from 2 million a year to 40 million a year and more. We're bringing you the best insights all focused on a single topic each month. These are real owners—not armchair philosophers or fake gurus. These are the people quietly building empires behind the scenes. Generally, they're not on social media looking for attention. They're in business, making things happen.

Last month, we focused on hiring A-players. This month, we’re answering the question: what do you do once you hire the right person—once you get that A-player? The topics we’ve covered week by week are onboarding, pay structure, training, and this week—it’s meetings. Weekly meetings. How to manage and handle a meeting that makes your team more productive.

You’re about to hear from me. I know, that’s kind of weird. But I have a seven-figure window cleaning company in Western Montana, and I want to talk with you a little bit about the way we handle and manage meetings to make our company more productive.

Before we dive in, the last thing I want to mention is we have a downloadable action guide for you. It’s available at www.thehugeinsider.com. And with that—let’s get into it.

So, here’s the question: Why are team meetings important? What is especially important about doing team meetings for the home service industry?

I’m going to start by admitting my mistake. For years, I thought team meetings were dumb—that they were an expensive waste of time. People should just know what to do, how to do it. We trained them. You give them the work tickets and let them run.

I only saw team meetings as a cost—ten people in a meeting at $20 an hour for an hour. That’s $200 per meeting. So I avoided them. I rarely held team meetings, honestly, because I thought I was losing money.

But the reality is, avoiding those meetings cost us money. It cost us time. We lost alignment. We lost momentum. We lost opportunities.

Here’s the truth about team meetings: A well-run, structured team meeting is not an expense—it’s an investment. And it will pay you dividends every day and every week in your business. A good team meeting saves time and money.

Let me drop in my personal opinion—most meetings in a corporate structure are probably a waste of time, or at least not efficient. But if you handle a meeting well, regularly, with a schedule, a structure, an agenda, and a clear purpose—it makes you money. It saves you time and money.

Here’s what happens with a great team meeting:
- It aligns everyone around the company objectives.
- It refreshes your team’s energy and focus.
- It gets everyone rowing in the same direction—which multiplies your power.
Here’s our meeting structure. This is how we do it. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right way—but it’s a way that we’ve found very effective. Hopefully, it can benefit you.

We run two core meetings every single week—Monday morning and Wednesday morning. Monday morning, you could call it the “Money Meeting.” It’s 30 minutes long. Wednesday morning is the training meeting—also 30 minutes long. Both of these meetings are concise, consistent, and designed with a clear purpose in mind.

Monday Morning “Money” Meeting
We start at 7:30 a.m. That changes throughout the year—when we get longer days in the summer, we start earlier so people can get in the field earlier. But it’s 30 minutes long.

Purpose:
To set up the week for maximum production, safety, and opportunity.

Structure:
- Start on time. Every time. Even if someone texts they’ll be late—we don’t wait. We reward the people who were on time by starting promptly.
- Share wins around the table. It’s Monday. People might not be morning people. But hearing everyone share a personal or professional win helps generate a positive energy.
- Safety Five. Five minutes of safety reminders—not full training, just a refresher. For example, we might go over water-fed pole usage or ladder safety.
- D.O.S. — Dangers, Opportunities, Strengths.
  - Dangers: Production managers look at all jobs ahead and call out anything tricky. Each tech is responsible for their own jobs, but this is a second layer of prep.
  - Opportunities: Every residential job has upsell, review, and referral potential. We also remind them to ask if we can place a lawn sign. Sometimes we call someone up to practice the script.
  - Strengths: If time allows, we shout out individual strengths or performance highlights from the prior week.
Wednesday “Training” Meeting
Completely different focus. It’s not to review the week—it’s for culture, soft skills, and leadership development.

Purpose:
To reinforce culture, build soft skills, and train the team for excellence.

Structure:
- Start on time.
- Team kudos. But not just from the leader—from the team. They’re encouraged to call out great behavior from their peers.
  - Each month we focus on core behaviors. For example:
    - Be on time
    - Leave it better for the next person
    - Always lift up teammates
    - Take pride in your work
  - Each week, we highlight one behavior and give real examples.
- Soft skills or philosophical training. This could include:
  - Reviewing our three core scripts (initial greeting, upsell, review ask).
  - Role playing how to handle a difficult customer.
  - Planting the seed during the greeting so we can earn the review and referral at the end.
What we’ve found is that these two meetings, especially the Monday meeting, get everyone out of the weekend mindset and focused on goals. It’s powerful when the entire team is aligned and working toward a common weekly target—revenue, reviews, or otherwise.

The Wednesday meeting reinforces our behaviors, builds leadership, and sharpens soft skills. Each tech eventually leads parts of the meeting, which boosts their public speaking and small group leadership ability. It creates peer-to-peer accountability and recognition.

Hidden Benefits of Weekly Meetings:
For the company:
- Maintains alignment
- Removes confusion before it starts
- Builds culture and team unity
- Increases productivity
- Reduces waste and errors
- Accelerates monthly and quarterly goal achievement
For the team:
- Builds pride and belonging
- Develops leadership and speaking skills
- Encourages peer-to-peer praise and accountability
For the owner:
- Moves the company toward running without you
- Empowers team members to lead
- Reveals real leaders—and weaknesses early
- Frees up your energy and time
Just having a meeting isn’t enough. A meeting for the sake of meeting is probably a waste. But when you prepare, structure it, and run it with purpose—it becomes a powerful tool. Just 30 minutes a week can build an aligned, energized, high-performing team. The ROI is hard to measure—but impossible to miss.

So what did you learn about team meetings? More importantly—what are you going to do with it? How can you apply it in your business?

Take action. Don’t just listen to this—or any—podcast and say, “That’s neat.” Apply it so your company improves.

Grab the five-page action guide to help you implement this strategy at www.thehugeinsider.com.

We also have a weekly newsletter you can sign up for at thehugeinsider.com.
We’ve got a Facebook group, and every year we do our big event—The Huge Convention. This year we’re meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, August 20–22, 2025. Get your tickets now at thehugeconvention.com.

And if you’re doing over $1M or close, check out The Huge Mastermind. It’s the fast track to building a Freedom Business—where you go from operator to owner, using the Freedom Operating System.

Thanks again for listening.
If you got value from the show, share it! Post a review, tag us on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok—wherever you’re active. It means the world.

We’ll see you next time on The Huge Insider Podcast.

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