Every Friday at 4pm — UK time — the whole CM Beyer team gets on a video call for 30 to 45 minutes. We call it the Friday all-hands, which is slightly ambitious language for a team that fits comfortably on one screen, but the name has stuck. This is what’s in it and why we bother.
The format
The agenda is the same every week and we work through it briskly:
First, each engagement gets a one-minute update. Not a presentation — literally one minute. What’s happening this week, what’s blocking, what does anyone else need to know. This is the operational heart of the meeting. If something needs more discussion, we park it for a follow-up call rather than letting it eat the time.
Second, anyone who’s had a notable conversation with a prospective client or partner shares a quick summary. Not a sales pipeline review — just a heads-up on what’s coming through the door so nobody is blindsided.
Third, anything we need a decision on as a team gets discussed. We try to keep this short. If a decision needs more than 10 minutes, we should have made it before the meeting.
Fourth, anything from any of us that doesn’t fit the above. Sometimes useful, sometimes a tangent, occasionally interesting.
Why we do it
The honest answer is that we tried not having one for the first month, and it didn’t work. With three people working partly remotely across multiple engagements, things slip through. Someone assumes another person knows something. A client mentions something in passing that turns out to be material. A small operational issue compounds into a bigger one. The all-hands catches most of this, most of the time.
There’s also a softer benefit. Consultancy work is structured around clients, which means we spend most of the week thinking about other companies’ problems. Forty-five minutes a week thinking about our own keeps the business itself from drifting.
What we deliberately leave out
We don’t do round-the-table wellbeing check-ins. We don’t share dashboards. We don’t read out KPIs. We don’t celebrate weekly wins. None of these are bad practices in principle; we just don’t have time for them and they aren’t where our friction is.
We also don’t make the meeting mandatory. If you’re with a client, you’re with a client. The notes go in writing afterwards.
The bigger point
Most of the meetings we sat through earlier in our careers were too long, too vague, and too frequent. We’re trying not to recreate that, and the all-hands is a deliberate counterexample: short, structured, run to the clock. If at some point we find ourselves needing more meetings to run the business, we’ll add them. Until then, this one does most of the work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do clients get visibility into how you run internally?
Not into our internal meetings, no. But the disciplines we apply to ourselves are the same ones we apply to client engagements — structured agendas, time-boxed decisions, written follow-ups.
Will this scale as you grow?
Probably not in this exact form. At some point we’ll need different rhythms — maybe a weekly leadership huddle and a fortnightly all-hands. We’ll change it when it stops working.
What happens if a meeting overruns?
We stop at the time it’s supposed to end, even mid-conversation. The remaining items go on next week’s agenda or get resolved over Slack in between.
