cut a fifth of your meetings... and fix the top of the funnel

wednesday's team call started with charles sharing his main insight of the week.

"i think my main insight nowadays is i probably need to reduce 20% of my time for meetings and i need to spend it in making our top of funnel perfect."

fewer meetings. from a guy whose job runs on meetings.

when your calendar is full, the instinct is to take more. more calls means more deals, right? you squeeze in another slot at 7am, another at 6pm, and you feel productive because you're busy.

but a full calendar is a lagging number. it tells you what the top of the funnel did a month ago. if you stop feeding the top, the calendar keeps looking full for a few weeks... and then it falls off a cliff.

charles saw that before the cliff. so he's giving a fifth of his meeting time back and spending it on the thing that fills the meetings.

the numbers on the call made the case for him.

emiliano had been hitting about forty leads a day. and instead of just enjoying it, he was writing up exactly why, so the rest of us could copy it.

then we compared volume. i was sending around six hundred emails a day. emiliano was sending around four thousand.

that's not a talent gap. that's a plumbing gap. i had mailboxes sitting there dormant that nobody had ever switched on. capacity i was paying for and not using.

and part of his edge was patience. his sending domain was five years old, and the time it had spent warming up got credited as one of the key factors. you can't fake five years. you can only start the clock earlier.

everyone thinks the pipeline problem is a closing problem. better pitch, better deck, better follow up. sometimes it is. a lot of the time the bottom of the funnel is fine and the top is starving.

it's like a restaurant with a great chef and an empty dining room. you don't fix that by sending the chef to cooking school. you fix the sign out front.

so the meeting you don't take this week isn't lost. it's an investment. an hour spent fixing a sequence, switching on a mailbox, cleaning a list, can produce ten better meetings next month. an hour on one more call produces one call.

there was one more idea from that hour i want to share, because it's about people, not plumbing.

i'm bringing on people to run the pre-interviews for the show. the short first conversation before a guest tapes. and the name matters.

"what i'm calling them, by the way, is producers."

not assistants. not sdrs. producers. it's the same work either way. but a producer sounds like someone who shapes the show, and that's what they do. people show up differently for a role that feels like it has status. i have about ten ready to switch on.

we also floated a leaderboard, to turn lead volume into a game. i like it. a number on a wall that everyone can see does more than a memo.

long term, this is what separates founders who scale from founders who burn out. the founder who keeps saying yes to every meeting becomes the bottleneck of their own company. the one who protects time for the top of the funnel builds something that fills the calendar without them.

the system we run for founders is laid out on the gtm page... the mailboxes, the warmup, the invites and the people who make it go.

so open your calendar for next week. which fifth of it would you give back... and what would you build with those hours?