FP&A Stories - ⏱️ 5 minutes that decide if your meeting works
Hello Reader 👋This week has been quieter than usual, and I've used it well. A bit of time for myself, some longer-term thinking, and prepping for my busy season the same way I'd tell you to prepare a budget: early, deliberately, before the pressure hits. Because budget season is coming, and with it comes something every FP&A leader knows too well. Meetings. Dozens of them, stacked back to back, most starting with good intentions and ending up being inefficient. I know them, you know them, and yet these meetings that could have been a mail still exist. But it's not a fatality and it's fixable, so this week, let's talk about how to run meetings that actually produce something So take a coffee, sit down and read FP&A Stories just like 16k other readers ⏱️ 5 minutes that decide if your meeting worksWhy meetings derailPicture the budget review that was supposed to take thirty minutes. It ran to fifty five. Three people gave updates nobody asked for, one disagreement ate ten minutes with no resolution, and by the end everyone was already thinking about their next call. The next day, someone asks what got decided. Nobody agrees. So a follow-up meeting gets scheduled to sort out the meeting that just happened. You're not imagining it. 53% of employees say their most recent meeting was a waste of time, and 61% say little was accomplished.* Over half of us lose focus before the thirty-minute mark, which means most meetings lose the room before they even reach the decision that justified booking it in the first place.** The problem starts at the conception: a meeting without a clear job to do will always expand to fill the time and drift toward whatever's loudest in the room. *Source: Asana, State of Work Report, 2024 Before the meetingThe fix starts before anyone joins the call. Three things need to be obvious from the invite:
Here's what that looks like in practice, for a real budget season conversation: Topic: Q3 marketing spend reallocation. That's 3 lines. It takes less time to write than the coffee you'll drink while writing it. The impact is real, though. Being this specific means you have to actually know what you want out of the meeting before you send the invite, and half the time we send invites precisely because we haven't figured that out yet. If that's you, the fix is to spend ten minutes with yourself first, before you spend 45 with everyone else. During the meetingOpen by naming the goal out loud, even if it's already in the invite. People forget, skim, or join five minutes late. Thirty seconds of alignment at the start saves you from having half the room solve a different problem than the other half. Then comes the harder part: keeping the conversation on track without shutting it down. Yes, you want to be leave the room open for challenge, questions or even other ideas, but you also want to make sure we arrive at destination. In general, I haven't seen that many meetings in which finance has such power that people feel they cannot deviate from the original topic. So your job will mostly be to make sure we're still on track. Naming the derailment will generally be enough: "That's a real point, let's park it and come back to our goal." Closing it outFive minutes before the end, stop the discussion and ask three things
Say it out loud, and send it in writing before anyone leaves the call (if that's annoying, right after the meeting works too). Just these 3 lines in the chat or a one-line follow-up email. If you turn this into a proper documentation ritual every time, people start treating meetings as bureaucracy rather than decisions, and you'll lose the room's willingness to move fast. The goal is making sure the five people who just spent forty minutes together leave with the same understanding of what happens next. The meeting you should have cancelledNone of this fixes the deeper issue, which is that a good number of meetings on your calendar shouldn't be meetings at all. If the goal is simply to share information, that's an email. If the goal is a decision only two people need to make, that's a five minute call. If the goal is genuinely unclear even to you, that's a sign you need to think first. I know the instinct during budget season is the opposite (we always speak of alignment). But in practice it often means more noise, and the actual decisions get made in the hallway conversation after the meeting anyway. So before you touch that "send" button when organising a meeting, think well if the format is appropriate ;-) Final Thought A meeting invite is a promise. Topic, goal, outcome, that's the promise stated up front. Most calendars break that promise a dozen times a week, and everyone's too polite to say so. Budget season will test this more than any other stretch of the year. Protect your calendar the way you'd protect a forecast. Hit reply and tell me about a meeting you should have cancelled this year but didn't. I read every message and reply to all of them. That's a wrap for this week See you next week! P.S. After 17 years in FP&A, Consulting and Leadership, I’ve coached and trained finance teams across industries, from consulting and manufacturing to tech, media, and global logistics. If you want to sharpen your own storytelling skills or bring this work into your team, here are a 3 ways can work together:
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