Ask any cubicle jockey in the corporate world what they think of meetings. Chances are you won’t get a favorable response. The working world spends TONS of time in meetings. Yet so many meetings result in no meaningful progress for a business.
Business in general, and real estate investing in particular, is a team sport. We need to collaborate with others to achieve success. Meetings are the obvious way to plan, review, brainstorm or just work collaboratively.
Why does everyone hate meetings so much? Probably because many of them are essentially useless. Some of the reasons?
-
No clear agenda
-
Nothing accomplished during the meeting
-
No following up after the meeting to make sure actions are complete
Seems like after so many meetings, we would have eliminated these problems. Not so much. Maybe up until now there hasn’t been the right tool to help?
Meet Your New Meeting Buddy
Now there is a web tool to make your meetings much more effective. Since the major problem with meetings is that nothing gets accomplished – why not call the tool simply ‘Do’ to get things done? That’s just what Do’s creators have done.
Do gives you all the tools to hold very effective meetings. For real estate investors, that can be meetings with:
-
Bird Dogs
-
Contractors
-
Motivated Sellers
-
Potential Investors
-
Your Team
-
Virtual Assistants
-
And lots of other people
Or maybe you can just introduce it at your regular job, and free up more of your time for your side gig of real estate investing?
Sure you already have lots of meetings on your Google, iCal or Outlook calendar. Do can import all these meetings into its software and improve them. Or you can create the meeting directly in Do. You can also import sub-calendars such as birthdays, holidays, etc. into Do.
Setting up a meeting in Do is very much like setting up a meeting in one of the calendar applications. As you invite people, they will receive a push notification on their device saying they have been invited.
You can also make the meeting ‘Open’ or ‘Closed’ for security purposes. Open meetings can be attended by anyone who has the meeting URL. Only the people the organizer invites can see Closed meetings.
Do helps you set up a meeting for success. First thing will be to create an agenda. The meeting organizer creates the agenda, but she is not the only one who can edit it. Everyone who is invited can add agenda items.
You can also upload files to the meeting and create private notes. The files will be sent to all the invitees to help them prepare for the meeting. Private notes are stored in the individual's Do screen. The notes will help you remember to bring up important information at the meeting.
Do is compatible with videoconferencing and screen-sharing apps like Google Hangouts and Go To Meeting. You can add a link to set these up with any meeting. These apps are great ways to work without having to get the team together. They also allow you to record the meeting for review later.
Once you have a meeting set up, you may want to keep the template to use again. Say you are meeting with many investors and/or motivated sellers. A standard template would make your job much easier in preparing for the meeting. Recurring meetings are easy to set up as well.
Do also allows you to store meeting templates to make similar future meetings easy to set up. And they have some standard templates they offer on the website you can download and customize.
There is some extra ‘contextual’ intelligence in the software that will automatically link similar meetings together. That way, you can try different ways to run your meeting and see which way is the most effective.
Great Meeting – Now What?
The magic of Do really comes out when you are done with the meeting. The whole idea of the meeting is to get something done. Do divides the meeting results into two groups:
-
Outcomes – What was accomplished in the meeting. (What has been done.)
-
Follow Ups – What needs to be done.
At the end of the meeting, people can list what has been and what still needs to be accomplished. Then they can assign these tasks either to meeting participants or people who weren’t at the meeting.
For people at the meeting, the tasks are assigned using the ‘@’ symbol plus their name. For people not at the meeting, you’d just input their email address.
The outcomes and follow-ups will then show up in each person’s Do Dashboard. They will also receive push notifications (attendees) or emails (non-attendees) with their new tasks.
Anyone can open their dashboard to see all the follow ups and outcomes they have from all their meetings. Do basically makes a personal ‘To Do” list out of all the actions from your meetings.
Since there are so many productivity apps out there, it only makes sense to link your meeting “To Dos” with all your other ‘To Dos.”
Do integrates with lots of other apps to make your To Do lists a seamless process. Some of the more popular productivity apps that integrate with Do include:
From Zapier, it’s easy to link to project management programs like Trello and Asana or To Do lists like Wunderlist.
Storing information is easy with Do links to OneNote or Google Docs.
Finally, Do has a nice little feature to track your meetings and offer suggestions on how to improve them. They even have graphs to show you things like the lengths of your meetings, the times of day you run them, and other metrics.
It’s worth checking out Do.com. For just $10/user/month, you might never look at meetings the same way again!
Do Say Something
If you’ve tried Do, we definitely want to hear about it in the comments section below.
Analyze Your Time – Are you using your time most effectively? Could you change the way you run your real estate investing business to make it better?
Follow Up on Tasks – Both with yourself and your team. Don’t let important actions go down the memory hole.
Do You Need that Meeting? - Ask yourself the question every time you set one up. Is there a better way to communicate what you need?
Decline Meetings – Just because someone sets one up with you, doesn’t mean you have to go. At least make sure there is an agenda for getting things done when you go.
JP Moses
is a real estate investor in Memphis, TN, with experience ranging from land lording to note buying, rehabbing, and wholesaling. However, wholesaling is the area that he enjoys most and where he bring the most experience and expertise to his students.