How We Ran Lead Cookie's 90-Minute Weekly Team Meeting

In October 2019, Lead Cookie, the LinkedIn prospecting service I founded and later sold, had roughly 26 team members and was running more than 70 live accounts. All of us worked remotely. Other founders often asked me how we managed a team that size.

Managing it all is a much bigger question, but one practical piece is easy to share: the weekly meeting. Once a week, for 90 minutes, the whole team reviewed the numbers, the quarterly targets, every customer account, billing and time off, then spent half an hour solving problems together. It was often a highlight of our week.

This page keeps the agenda as we ran it, with the minutes each part was given and why it was there. It compares the agenda with the EOS meeting it borrowed from and says what carries over today. It is for a leader of a remote or growing team deciding what the weekly meeting should cover and who should be in it.

Where the agenda came from

None of it was my invention. I borrowed ideas from others and put them together.

The biggest influence was Traction (opens in a new tab) by Gino Wickman, the book behind the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). In 2019 I recommended it to anyone with a team of at least three people; below that, I said, it was not quite relevant. I still recommended it in 2023, when I wrote that I use EOS.

The second was Chet Holmes' The Ultimate Sales Machine (opens in a new tab), first published in 2007. That is where our Workshop came from. Chet Holmes International (opens in a new tab) describes the book's method as spending an hour a week on each area of the business you want to improve. The rest we added because it felt natural and made for a good culture.

The agenda lived in a simple Google Doc that we opened and walked through each week, with links to anything else we needed. It was not a perfect formula, but it was perfect for us.

The agenda at a glance

The ranges add up to between 60 and 85 minutes, inside a 90-minute slot. Nine of the twelve items were given four minutes or less. Most of the time went to three blocks: weekend updates, the customer review and the Workshop.

How each part worked

Weekend updates

We went around the whole team, all 26 people, and everyone gave a quick weekend update in two or three sentences. Sometimes someone ran longer, or an update turned into a fun conversation. Nothing about it was tactical. It let us bond, laugh together and get a sense of each other's personalities, which matters when nobody shares an office. It could take up to 15 minutes, and that was fine because the rest moved quickly.

Metrics and quarterly targets

Next we pulled up the metrics dashboard, a simple Google Sheet we updated every week, and walked through the company's KPIs. I was open with the whole team about these numbers, and team members consistently mentioned how much they valued that transparency: it showed them the financial health of the business.

Then the owner of each quarterly target, or Rock in EOS terms, gave an update on progress or the lack of it. Saying it out loud in front of the team every week created accountability and kept the targets front of mind.

Product and operations updates

These two were often skipped. Product development covered new product lines, ideas or tests underway; when things were stable, we moved on. The operations update was simply where we told the team about personnel changes: a new hire, or someone moving to a different role.

Customer review

This was the other big working block, alongside the Workshop. For 10 to 15 minutes we walked through our entire list of customer accounts. The manager of each account gave a one- or two-sentence update unless something was wrong. Strategists and account managers used it to sync on anything they needed from each other.

It also served as our weekly customer health check. This was where someone would say "This account is not doing well", "I'm concerned with the responses we are getting here" or "Our client has 5 leads that have been sitting for a week they haven't responded to." Raising it in the meeting meant the team could step in and fix a problem before it turned into a client complaint.

Invoicing and renewals

Our operations director then pulled up the invoicing system and went through the accounts up for renewal in the next two weeks. The questions were simple. A client mentioned they only wanted to run three months: can strategy check in? A six-month prepayment is ending: can sales or strategy confirm how they want to be billed? Is this client staying or leaving? A few minutes of talking replaced countless chat messages back and forth.

Time off

We kept a log of upcoming time off on the agenda itself, and used these minutes to make sure each person's work was covered while they were away.

Workshop

Workshop was the fun part of the meeting. For a long time we held two separate 60-minute calls, a standup and a workshop. Eventually we combined them into one 90-minute call and found it far more time-effective.

The idea is simple: a time and a place for the team to discuss problems together. We kept a running Trello board of problems and ideas for improvement, and anyone could add to it. When someone came to me during the week with a burning problem or idea, my answer was "Bring it to workshop." That kept those conversations in one weekly slot instead of a week of interruptions and firefighting.

One person facilitated: for a long time it was me, and I later handed it to our operations director. The facilitator pulled up a card, got clarity from whoever raised it, heard how others had dealt with it, asked for solutions and turned the notes into action steps. Often the output was simply that people now knew how to do something they didn't before. Other times it was a new process or script, or one person owning a fix. I wrote about it in more detail in The weekly company habit that transformed our business.

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Jake’s historical account, summarized from this article. These results describe his experience and are not a performance forecast.

The team did not wait for me, either. In a February 2019 conversation with my mentor Alex McClafferty, I described weeks when I wasn't in the workshop and the team still created new processes and systems without me. And when I put a card on the board myself, the team often shot it down.

Jokes and marble races

One of our company values was to have fun and stay positive. So each week a few people took turns sharing a joke or a 60-second funny video, kept PG to PG-13, with a general tendency toward puns. Our operations director also had the idea of watching marble races together, which is roughly horse racing for marbles. We eventually ran our own marble race series, and it became a weekly highlight.

Work/life balance scores

To finish, everyone rated their work/life balance from 1 to 10. "Life > Work" was one of our core values, and we wanted everyone to have a reasonable workload, never overworked to the point of a poor quality of life. We took the scores seriously: if someone gave a 7 or below on a consistent basis, we looked hard at how to fix their role or workload.

How it compares with EOS's Level 10 Meeting

EOS has its own weekly meeting. EOS Worldwide describes the Level 10 Meeting (opens in a new tab) as "the weekly, 90-minute leadership team meeting" in EOS, with a seven-part agenda that stays the same every week. Several of our items map onto it directly.

The biggest difference is who is in the room. EOS puts its 90-minute meeting with the leadership team, "typically five to seven people, always fewer than ten", and runs shorter versions of 30 to 60 minutes for departments. It also says the agenda is fixed and should never change. Our meeting was a whole-team meeting of about 26 people with culture items added, so the round of updates took longer and the problem-solving block was half the length of EOS's.

Neither is wrong. They do different jobs. The Level 10 Meeting is built to settle a leadership team's issues. Ours was built to keep a fully remote team connected and aligned while giving it a place to fix problems together.

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The approach described in this article, shown as a visual guide.

What still holds, and what has changed

What holds

A fixed weekly slot, a set order and short updates from the person who owns each number or account. Showing the whole team the numbers. One place where problems go, so they stop interrupting the week. A regular, honest check on whether people's workload is sustainable. And a meeting people look forward to: on many occasions I laughed so hard in ours that tears came to my eyes.

Account updates need definitions

The customer review relied on each account manager raising a concern. In December 2023, writing about preparing a business for growth, I described the weekly management meetings in the business I was growing then. They walked through accounts against defined measures: did we deliver the agreed scope to every client this month, and what is each client's health status? We used green, yellow and red statuses with quantified definitions. Red, for example, meant a client complaint, a mistake on the account, a missed scope or another problem. As I put it then, if you just ask people how it's going, they will always say great. A short verbal update is still useful, but it works better against a definition everyone shares.

Decide which meeting you are running

At 26 people, the round of weekend updates alone could take up to 15 minutes. EOS keeps its 90-minute agenda to a leadership team of fewer than ten. If whole-team updates leave too little time to work through problems, consider separating the two jobs: a leadership meeting that works through the numbers and the issues, and a whole-team meeting that keeps the connection, the shared numbers and the problem board. Which one needs 90 minutes depends on what you most need the meeting to do.

Swap the parts that were ours

Marble races, puns and "Life > Work" came from our team and our values. Keep the idea of a ritual that belongs to your team, not our specific rituals. The same goes for the tools: we used a Google Doc for the agenda and Trello for the workshop board, and by February 2019 I had built the workshop board for a new Lead Cookie service in Asana, because it made it much easier to assign tasks as outputs of the discussion. Any shared document and task board will do.

The numbers are history

The team size, account count and minutes come from October 2019, when Lead Cookie was a remote team of about 26 people. They show what the agenda was built for. They are not a benchmark for your meeting.

If you sat in on your own weekly meeting as a visitor, which part would you expect people to look forward to?