Show. Don’t Tell.

Raise your hand if you’ve been to a sh*tty meeting before.

Thought so 😂

It’s super tempting to fall into the trap of “weekly status updates”, “check-ins”, “quick syncs”, and the like.

Meetings are expensive — they cost time, money, focus, energy, and attention.

But that doesn’t mean they’re not worth it.

There’s a lot out there about how to run effective meetings, but there’s one mantra that I want to focus on here:

Show, Don’t Tell

It’s a simple rule. Whenever we’re discussing a piece of work (landing page, copy, script, creative…you get the idea) — we BRING the work and show it live.

It usually stems from data — when reviewing our scorecard, if we’ve got a metric that’s low, we’ll pull up the related assets and review them to look for ways to improve.

The Truth Will Show Up On Its Own

By walking the team through everything live — the assets, the data behind it, and fielding a few questions, the next right move will almost always show itself.

For instance, on an underperforming email campaign, the trigger for the review was an abysmally low reply rate. Our immediate approach is to “put the copy up on the screenshare!”

3 minutes later, we saw that the intro to the opening email was lacking in personalization — easy fix, results improved the following week, done deal.

Isn’t This Obvious?

It feels obvious, but it’s not — because many times, it would have been a “discussion”

• “I’m gonna try some new strategies to improve reply rate”
• “I’m gonna split test some new copy”
• “I think we need to refresh the list”

By defaulting to reviewing the actual assets first, we got out of the generic and into the specific very quickly.

P.S. — #Trust

Yeah, this only works if you have a team that trusts each other. Trust is the foundation — if people feel like they can’t be vulnerable, they’ll naturally default to self-preservation and steer the conversation away from their own work as the source of the poor metrics.

Culture is the bedrock upon which we build our company — and you’ve gotta build a culture of trust for this to work.

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