Why ‘Old-School’ Meetings CRUSH Zoom Calls EVERY Time… | The Growth Booth #63

Welcome to episode number 63 of The Growth Booth. I am Aidan Booth, and in this episode, we're going to be talking about why I believe old school face-to-face meetings will crush Zoom meetings or virtual calls every single time.

I think there's a special kind of magic that can happen at in-person face-to-face meetings that is pretty hard to replicate with virtual meetings. I'm saying this on the back of just being in a face-to-face meeting with business partners and some of my team in Las Vegas. This is something that we try to do in our business multiple times per year. We normally do it four or five times per year, and we do it so frequently because the payoff and the benefit of doing such is huge. It massively outweighs the costs associated, not just in terms of dollars, but also in terms of time that we put into going to these in-person meetings.

I want to share some thoughts with you about that and why I believe that's the case in this episode here today. If you're someone who's got a business partner and you're not in the same place as your business partner, then I think you should pay close attention to this because I think it's an easy way that you can get a lot better results in your business. If you don't have a business partner, then I think that this is still something that you can think about, because I think you can replicate a lot of what we do in these meetings on your own if you want to as well just by wearing the different hats, as it were, in your business and putting on your CEO hat and locking yourself away for a couple of days to think about the bigger picture and to do strategic planning. This is not only for people who have got business partners.

So, as I mentioned, I've just been to Las Vegas, probably my 10th time, I want to say, in Las Vegas, and it's a place that I've got a lot of fond memories of. I actually even almost sort of temporarily lived in Las Vegas for a period of time, for about six weeks in the Vidara Hotel up behind the Cosmopolitan. That was amazing. This time I was staying in the Cosmopolitan right on the Strip, and that's a beautiful hotel and was just perfect for what we needed. Now, the first thing I'll say is one of the reasons we try to meet in different places and not just in Steve's office, Steve is my business partner, or in my office here in Buenos Aires is because I think it allows you to disconnect from the day-to-day distractions that you have in your life. If you are in the place where you live, you're in a new place. I think that also breeds creativity and it adds a little bit of excitement, enjoyment and fun to the meetings, which I think goes a long way to making them as productive as they can be. Las Vegas especially is, like I say, something that I've got a lot of fond memories around. I'll tell you a tip a little bit later about how if you are traveling to Las Vegas, you can get a huge upgrade in your room. I think you'll be pretty blown away at how I've been able to do this over and over again in Las Vegas. So stick around, keep listening to hear about that.

There are lots of benefits that you get from an in-person meeting. I'm thinking along the lines of more focused engagement, attention to detail. These are things that are pretty hard to replicate with virtual meetings. It's also hard to do a full day, 6 hours let's say, of virtual meetings on a computer, whereas it's quite easy to do that if you're meeting with someone in person. There's a lot of nonverbal communication that happens in every conversation or interaction that you have with someone. And sometimes, this nonverbal communication is pretty important. It's especially the case if you are building a relationship with someone or you don't know someone that well. So I think in instances like that, it's just impossible to beat being in person. I think it's more effective for brainstorming and problem solving. I'll share some reasons why I believe this to be the case shortly. Team building relationships, building rapport, a chance for networking, and just having fun.

These trips that I do to meet with my partners and the money that I invest in this is not insignificant. I mean, just getting me and some of my team to Las Vegas, it would have been in excess of $20,000. But that's something that I am absolutely certain is going to come back to me 10X over, 100X over, potentially an infinite number of times over, because we are able to achieve things in those meetings that we just otherwise wouldn't have been able to achieve in any other way.

So the way that we typically run our meetings, and again, if you're not meeting with someone to talk about this, you could still set aside a day or two for yourself and work through all of this on your own, thinking about your own life and your own business, but the way that we tend to structure our in-person meetings is we typically start in the morning, it might be at about 09:00 AM, and that gives us a little bit of time to get up, maybe get a gym workout in, have breakfast, and then get together and start the day. From 09:00 AM, we'll work through until around lunchtime. Then we'll have lunch together and then we'll come back in and get another few hours done, maybe from 01:00 PM until about 04:00 PM after lunch. Then we'll have some chill out time from about 04:00 PM until 6:30 PM, at which time we'll head out to dinner in a restaurant somewhere or we'll do something like that. So over the course of the day we are together probably 7, 8 hours, 9 hours sometimes, because the time we have where we're not in a formal meeting, where instead we are having lunch with one another, sitting down to have dinner together, this is often where the conversation continues and gets really creative and some of our best ideas come about.

I think one of the reasons why in-person meetings or even just if you're not meeting with someone, sitting down on your own, locking yourself aside in a different place to think about your business, one of the reasons that the magic happens is because you are regularly engaging your brain and thinking about whatever it is that's going on in your business. We'll probably start the day and we'll go through the finances, the P&L statement and the forecast for whatever business that we're diving into. We'll talk about the different marketing activities that we're doing, the ones that are working really well, the ones that are not. We'll try to see if there's any opportunities for us to double down on things that are working well and if there are any gaps that we need to fill. Thinking bigger is a big part of all of this. Getting partner alignment is a big part of it, that long term planning, thinking about and coming back to what is the vision, what is the objective for the next five years, ten years, and so on and so forth. This is a structure that we sort of work through for each of the businesses.

Getting back to what I was mentioning a moment ago, when we sit down and have lunch, we don't just switch off. We might start talking about different things, sharing different things we've got going on in our personal lives, but we keep coming back to what we're working on in the business. Maybe one of us will get a hair brained idea and we'll say, "Hey, imagine if we did something like that. What would that be like?" and we just start thinking, or "Imagine if we did this, what would that be like?" and over the course of several days, the magic of this kind of brainstorming really starts to happen in a big, big way because we are regularly coming back and we're kind of bouncing ideas off one another.

Now, admittedly, that's something that's going to be more difficult to do if you're on your own doing a couple of days of strategic planning. But when you're with a partner, or even if it's not a business partner, a friend who you can talk to about your business, this is the kind of thing that just starts happening, and these are where the ideas and plans come about which make the cost of getting together. I'm just not just talking about the financial costs. I'm talking about the time costs as well of getting together or locking aside time to have these meetings almost insignificant. I'll happily have five of these in person meetings a year because I know how valuable they are to my business, and they have to bring probably $100,000 worth of value, otherwise I'd be losing money on them. I've got absolutely zero doubt that they do that. So we're together for a longer period of time. There's a natural flow of conversations. We can read each other's body language, and we can revisit conversations, not just get our ideas and thoughts across in a 30 minutes window, but we can keep coming back and revisiting things over and over again over the course of a few days. It's very dynamic.

Now, I've shared how I went to Las Vegas. I've shared how I like to get together in a unique place, because I think that really breeds creativity and gets you thinking outside the box. But this is something that can also be done on the cheap. You don't need to travel to some exotic destination. You don't have to go somewhere completely new. So sometimes in Buenos Aires, I do something similar. It doesn't have to be Buenos Aires, it could be anywhere I am in the world, but I'll do what I call a disconnect day, where I completely disconnect from the computer, and I will spend time thinking about different projects that I've got on. You can do that anywhere you are.

I think the key reflection and the key thought that I've got for you about this idea around old school in-person meetings crushing Zoom calls is more about locking aside time to think and work on your business, ideally with a business partner if you have one. Otherwise, it's the kind of thing that you can do by yourself. It doesn't have to be an extravagant place. It's more important that you are blocking aside the daily routine and all the distractions that you may have in your daily routine.

I mentioned earlier that I was going to share with you a tip about how to get some pretty impressive upgrades at hotels in Las Vegas. I'm going to leave you with this here today. Anytime I go to Las Vegas, when I'm doing my check in, I will ask the person who is helping me with my check in if there are any upgrades available, if there are any better rooms available. I'll have maybe like, a $100 bill sitting on the counter while I'm asking this. I will sort of slide this across to them, and the person who's checking me in will not take that $100. If they can't do anything for me, but if they can help me out, and if they can say, "Yes, Mr. Booth, we've got a much better room available, blah, blah," they will actually go ahead and do that. In Las Vegas, the scenario was I got to my hotel at about 08:00 AM in the morning. I couldn't check into my room until about 03:00 PM, and I really wanted to get into my room. I traveled for about 24 hours to get to Las Vegas, and I just needed to get into my room to freshen up so that I could then start my day. I did this check-in trick that I'm sharing with you, and I slid, I think it was $100 on the counter. I said, "Look, I know I'm here a long time before I check in, but I wanted to ask if you could get me into a room." By the way, she had already told me prior to this that my room wasn't going to be available until 03:00 PM. "I wanted to see if there's anything that can be done to get me into a room. Maybe there's a different style of room available that you can help me out with," and then she magically started getting on the phone to people digging into the computer system. As it turned out, for my $100 tip that I gave her, she upgraded me to one of the best rooms in the hotel, and I was able to get into it immediately. She also gave me, this is the most bizarre thing, she gave me a $200 credit for using in the restaurants around the hotel. So that $100 out of pocket tip actually turned into a $100 profit because I got a $200 voucher to use throughout the resort. 

And this is not a one off thing. When I was in Las Vegas another time, when I was actually staying there for six weeks, I was in the Vidara Hotel up behind the Cosmopolitan. I did the same thing this time, though, because I was there for such a long time, I think I may have stood $200 across. In that instance, the guy that was there gave me a daily $20 breakfast voucher. And remember, I was there for six weeks, gave me a daily $20 breakfast voucher, a much bigger room in a better position with better views, and I can't remember what else. Oh, yeah, the premium Wi-Fi. Because oftentimes in these resorts, you'll get the general Wi-Fi, but there's also a chance to get premium Wi-Fi as well. I got the premium Wi-Fi free of charge, which would have been another $10 a day. I can't remember an instance where I've paid and haven't ended up getting significantly more back from it because I think these people, if they can't reciprocate, they don't take your money.

Anyway, if you are traveling to Las Vegas at any time in the future, that might be something you want to use, because I think it's a pretty cool way to get a win-win deal going on at the time of checkout. If there are specific requests that you've got, like I needed to get into a room early, you can use those. Or maybe you want to have a late checkout, and you can always sort of ambiguously, vaguely pass the ball over to the person who's doing the check in and say, "I just wondered if there's anything you can do for me. I'm trying to such and such." In my case, I was trying to get into a room quickly, which she had already told me wasn't available. 

So anyway, that's a little story that I thought I would share with you there to wrap up this episode. And like I've been saying, I think the power of in-person meetings absolutely crushes Zoom calls every single time. Test it out for yourself. If you don't have a business partner, lock aside some time to do a bit of planning and see how you get on with that when you're able to sit down, make time to think about the bigger picture in your business.

That's a wrap for this episode. I will see you in the next episode of The Growth Booth, where we're going to be talking about the gold rush that's happening right now with niche websites. That's going to be an episode that you will not want to miss. I'll see you in the next episode.