Your meetings are a mirror for your company

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Hiring needs aren’t static. One quarter you’re in hiring overdrive; the next you’re vetting only mission‑critical roles. Here’s how founders stay agile:

• Hourly, not hefty retainer. Pay only for the recruiting hours you need.

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Whether it’s one pivotal hire or a full team build, fractional recruiting keeps you lean and nimble. Learn how founders are saving 90% on hiring →

🔗 Jake’s Picks

Must-Read Resources for Founders

🚀 Scaling Startups

• Why scaling a business is the hardest—and most important—stage of growth (Fast Company)

🧠 Founder Self-Development & Mental Health

• Mental health awareness month 2025: How are founders creating workplaces that prioritise wellbeing? (Techround)

📈 Productivity Hacks

• How to block distractions in the workplace through attention management (PCTOnline)

🛠 Tools for Scaling

• OpenAI upgrades the AI model powering its Operator agent (TechCrunch)

💡 Hiring Insights

• The AI hiring pause is officially here (Bloomberg)

👀 ICYMI

• Building team momentum from the little wins (Scale Smarter Newsletter)

🖼️ Structure your meetings to match your growth

Early-stage startup meetings are half catch-up and half therapy.

Things happen so fast and communication is so sporadic at this phase that a real meeting doesn’t really exist.  As scale continues and the company grows larger, however, there’s a bit of catch up that has to be done with meetings to ensure they actually become a valuable use of everyone’s time.

A 10 person team doesn’t need a town hall while a 40 person team doesn’t need a daily stand-up.

At this point the challenge is making meetings better while also making them happen at the right time for where your company is in the growth cycle.

Early stage (1-15 people): Embrace agility, but set light structure

With everything moving quick at this stage, meetings should support momentum, not slow it.

Here’s what works:

• One weekly team standup (30 mins) with three prompts: What are you working on? Blockers? Needs from the team?

• Use Notion or Slack huddles for async decision logging so ideas don’t get lost.

• Avoid daily stand-ups unless you're building something that truly needs it (e.g. daily code pushes).

Growth stage (15-75 people): Establish rhythm and accountability

Once you pass 20+ people, chaos compounds and you need meeting hygiene and predictability.

Tactics to implement:

• Monthly leadership meetings using a “Red/Yellow/Green” format to flag priorities and risks.

• Use Loom updates or Slack check-ins to replace low-value status meetings.

• Designate one “no meeting” day per week to preserve deep work across the company.

Later stage (75+ people): Streamline, systematize, and subtract

Meetings multiply at scale. Without regular pruning, they drain time and clarity.

Key actions:

• Run a quarterly calendar audit to cut unnecessary recurring meetings.

• Set a meeting ROI rule: every meeting must end with either a decision, deliverable, or date (the 3Ds).

• Introduce company-wide office hours from senior leaders to reduce ad hoc 1:1s.

📝 From being in the room to designing the room

As the founder, it’s so easy to get wrapped up into every little meeting, to the point where when you look back on your day and realize you spent so much time in conversations that you didn’t need to be in.

You’re needed in different ways in different stages of your company’s growth cycle - it’s important to realize this and know when and how to react accordingly.

Early stage (1-15 people): Be present, but teach autonomy

In the beginning, you're in everything but you can even start to create some space at this point.

Tactical tips:

• Shadow, then delegate: Sit in on recurring team convos once, then hand them off with your blessing.

• Use a shared doc or Slack thread titled “What I’m thinking about” - it reduces the need for daily check-ins.

• Start a habit of asking: “Do you need a decision, or just feedback?” - this teaches decision-making independence.

Growth stage (15-75 people): Reclaim time through intentional absence

At this point it’s very easy to become the bottleneck and not even realize it - time to pull back a bit more.

Here’s how:

• Block out a structured period of time each week for no-meeting “thinking time” and defend it like your job depends on it (because it does).

• Hand over ownership of 1-2 key meetings per quarter (e.g. marketing sync or eng review) and assign clear leads.

• Standardize internal documents so that an expectation is set with teams on what and how to present information to make meetings more useful and efficient before pulling you in.

Later stage (75+ people): Codify your presence and build rituals

At scale, your calendar needs to reflect strategic leadership, not oversight.

Tactical moves:

• Host a biweekly “State of the Union” with the team to align everyone and keep visibility high.

• Use async founder updates (via video, voice, or memo) to share context and reduce dependence on your presence.

• Schedule skip-level 1:1s quarterly where you meet with employees who don’t directly report to you so you can stay grounded in the org without being in every meeting.

On the surface meetings are just time slots but if you dig a bit deeper you’ll see that they’re mirrors of how your company makes decisions, solves problems, and stays aligned.

As you grow, optimize meetings ruthlessly. The best founders don’t just run great meetings, they build companies that can run without them.

Founder Toolkit: 3 Startup‑Grade Recruiting Tactics You Can Steal

Recruiting playbooks borrowed from high‑growth startups

1. Run “Perfect‑Fit” Pilot. Before ramping up outreach, start by sourcing 5–10 candidates to validate your ideal profile. High‑growth startups swear by this to avoid wasting candidate or team time.

2. Host Feedback Sprints. After each interview round, host a 15‑minute debrief to review ratings and tweak search criteria. Rapid alignment avoids wasted outreach. 

3. Flex‑Up/Flex‑Down Capacity Pods. Treat recruiting like cloud compute - spin up extra hours during sprints, then dial back once your hiring backlog clears. You pay only for what you use. See how it works →

Ready for hands‑on support from recruiters who built the playbooks at high‑growth startups? Get started here →

🎬 TLDR — Your Actions For The Week:

• Scale Your Team → Turn low value meetings into Slack and Loom updates

• Scale Yourself → Set expectations with teams through standardized documents to reduce meetings and repeating messages

Whenever you're ready, here’s how I can help:

💼 Hiring? I built an expert bench of recruiters from companies like Uber, Amazon & Spotify to run the full recruiting process for you. We’re on-demand, can flex up & down, and there are zero commissions or hidden fees—Learn more here.