The 90-Minute Weekly Cadence That Replaces Every Other Meeting in Your Firm
Your leadership team doesn't have a meeting problem — it has a decision problem. Gino Wickman's Level 10 Meeting compresses reporting into 25 minutes and spends the other 60 actually solving things. Here's how to run it in an expertise business.
There are two kinds of leadership meetings. In the first kind, people report. In the second kind, people decide. Almost every service firm I've seen runs the first kind and wonders why nothing changes between Mondays.
A quick illustration of what the reporting version costs. Recently I observed the weekly leadership session at a consultancy with roughly $2 million in annual revenue. Seven people. A ninety-minute calendar block. The format was the classic "updates around the table." Attention died somewhere near minute forty. A topic the group had already exhausted resurfaced around minute seventy. And when someone finally named a genuine problem near the end — a partner who hadn't run a single engagement in three months — the answer was to push it to next week's agenda. Loaded salary cost of that session: around $3,000. Decisions produced: none.
Nobody designed that meeting. It exists because weekly meetings are what companies are supposed to have. The agenda is whatever people remember to say. The output is a shared feeling of being busy.
Gino Wickman, who built the Entrepreneurial Operating System after decades of watching which companies execute and which merely intend to, prescribed something almost offensively simple in response: one weekly meeting, one fixed agenda, every segment on a clock — and a protected sixty-minute block where the team's hardest problems get resolved on the spot rather than admired, deferred, or handed to a working group. He called it the Level 10 Meeting, because the standard is that everyone in the room would score it ten out of ten.
Expertise Businesses Are Where Problems Go to Hide
Why This Cadence Matters More for You Than for a Product Company
Before the agenda, the stakes. A product company gets execution feedback whether it wants it or not: the release ships or slips, the feature works or breaks, usage shows up on a dashboard the same day. The business model itself surfaces problems.
A consultancy, agency, or training business — particularly one delivering through a distributed bench of practitioners or partners — gets no such favor. An inactive partner just looks "quiet" for months. Someone drifting off your methodology won't register until a client escalates. Discounting creeps in one negotiation at a time, and you discover it only when a quarterly review shows average deal size down 30%. In an expertise business, execution failures don't announce themselves. They accumulate silently and present late.
Most founders compensate with trust and hope: trust that the network is delivering to standard, hope that anything serious will surface before it hurts the brand. Admirable instincts. Useless as an operating system.
The Level 10 Meeting exists to put a hard ceiling on how long anything can stay invisible. Run weekly with the right inputs, that ceiling is seven days. A number goes red one Monday; by the next Monday there's an owner and an action against it. A partner goes dark early in March; before mid-March someone has been assigned to have the diagnostic conversation. The meeting doesn't make your week tidier. It makes your problems smaller, by intercepting them young.
The Front 25: Reporting at Sprint Pace
Five Segments, Five Minutes Each, No Discussion Allowed
The agenda is timed to the minute, and the timing is the method. Loosen the clock and the meeting reverts to the around-the-table ritual within a month. Here is the structure, adapted for a firm with a practitioner or partner network:
Wins (5 minutes). One personal or professional piece of good news per person. It looks like a warm-up; it's actually a state change. Everyone arrived from some fire they were fighting, and a round of wins — a renewal, a kid's football goal — resets the room into something collaborative. Then it ends. Five minutes is five minutes.
Numbers (5 minutes). Scan your scorecard of 5-15 weekly metrics and call each one green or red. Crucially, nobody explains anything here. Explanations are problem-solving, and problem-solving has its own hour later. If revenue per active partner has been red three weeks running, it gets dropped onto the issues list. That's the whole transaction.
90-Day Priorities (5 minutes). Same binary treatment for your Rocks. Suppose the quarter's Rock is shipping your first benchmark report and week eight arrives with no draft in existence — that Rock is off track. Say so without defending it, list it as an issue, keep moving.
Field Headlines (5 minutes). What happened out there this week that the leadership team should know? A client postponed their assessment. A partner closed a three-engagement deal. A competitor showed up with a lookalike offer. Headlines means headlines — one sentence each, no analysis.
Commitments Check (5 minutes). Read out last week's to-dos: done or not done. The bar is 90% completion. Chronic performance under 80% isn't evidence of a bad meeting — it's evidence that people are signing up for more than they can actually ship, and the commitments themselves need tightening.
Total elapsed time: 25 minutes for everything a status meeting normally takes ninety to not finish. The point of compressing the reporting isn't efficiency for its own sake. It's to fund the only segment with real return.
The Back 60: Where Issues Go to Die
Identify, Discuss, Solve
Everything the first 25 minutes flagged — the red metric, the stalled Rock, the competitor headline — has been quietly stacking up on the issues list. The remaining hour runs Wickman's IDS protocol against that list: rank the issues by impact, take the biggest one first, and work it to completion.
Working an issue means three things. Identify the actual root cause rather than the symptom that got reported. Discuss it once — properly, candidly, and without reopening it next week. Then solve it, which always ends the same way: a specific action, a named owner, a deadline. Some weeks the team clears seven issues in the hour. Other weeks a single strategic knot eats all sixty minutes. Either outcome is a good meeting; the failure mode is touching ten issues and finishing none. IDS deserves a full article of its own, but that's the skeleton.
The meeting closes with its namesake ritual: everyone scores the session 1 to 10, and you track the running average. Sitting under 8 consistently is diagnostic — almost always it means reporting has crept past its 25 minutes and is eating the solving hour.
The Rules That Stop the Decay
Most L10s Die Within a Month. Here's What Kills Them.
First rule: the meeting is fixed. Same weekday, same hour, same room or link, same agenda, every single week. Wickman treats cancellation as a cultural red flag, not a calendar event. Founders of service firms test this constantly — a client call landed on the slot, half the team is traveling, "honestly nothing urgent came up this week." Each objection assumes the L10 is a response to problems. It isn't. It's the standing mechanism that prevents problems from compounding, which means it matters most precisely in the weeks that feel calm. A heartbeat isn't skipped on uneventful days; uneventful days are what the heartbeat produces.
Begin exactly on time. A 9:00 meeting begins at 9:00, not at 9:03 while a straggler wraps up a call. Every late start quietly renegotiates the real start time for everyone. Punctual starts end that negotiation.
Stop exactly on time. Ninety minutes means ninety, even mid-issue. The unfinished issue tops next week's list. A meeting with a guaranteed end is one people can commit to fully, because it never bleeds into whatever they've scheduled next.
Full presence, closed laptops. Someone triaging their inbox while "listening" isn't in the meeting. If the session can't command everyone's whole attention, the roster is too large for the room.
"Missing one meeting is a signal. Missing two is a culture problem." — Verne Harnish
And the rule nobody warns you about: the format's biggest threat is the founder. You're the one with the big deal that justifies canceling, the issue too important to cut off at ninety minutes, the urge to open IDS by announcing the answer. The cadence survives only if the person at the top submits to it — most of all in the weeks when submitting is inconvenient. Protect the structure and the structure protects the firm.