In my two years at Influitive, we have grown incredibly quickly from 5 people to now at almost 40. At times, we have grown quicker than the business practices and processes we had in place and had to adapt solutions quickly sometimes ending in less than ideal results. We implemented enterprise solutions when we were too small and SOHO solutions when we were too large. We have moved fast and broken things; such are the growing pains of a startup.

I believe that proper business practices that achieve a balance of simplicity while allowing for growth are a key factor in the success of any business and I would value it over a proper business plan. I think it’s important to make a lot of mistakes and learn what works and what doesn’t. You must be willing to drop something quickly when it isn’t working and not be afraid to try new things. One thing we have found very helpful and quite enjoyable has been the daily sync-up meeting.

A Daily Synch-up meeting is an opportunity for the entire company to get together once a day and get a progress update on what everyone else is doing. It’s a quick meeting, ideally no more than 9 minutes. Why 9 minutes? No one knows, it’s like the 6 minute workout.

This meeting is heavily inspired from the Agile movement’s stand-up meeting with some changes. For us, it involves a few important stages at which any one is allowed to talk.

• Important company wide news
• Introductions. If anyone is visiting the company or interviewing.
• New sales leads and opportunities
• Blockages. Things that are stopping you from doing their work.
• Insights. Something you’ve learned that might help others.
• Today’s accomplishments. A 3 second statement of what you will accomplish today.
• and my favourite… The department spotlight. A three (3) minute presentation from someone from one department describing something that is of interest to everyone in the company.

Recently, it was my turn from software development to give my presentation. I realized from some questions I’d had from others in the company that outside of dev, no one knew what pair programming really meant and why we were doing it. So I decided that my presentation would be on pair programming. slides here.

It was a very short presentation with some humour (in theory) and not much detail, and that is the point of these presentations, they are a light-hearted, very quick overview of a concept that might be obvious to your department that others might be interested in.

We have found that the sync-up meeting keeps us informed about the rest of the company, the company’s mission, and keeps us feeling like part of the connected whole. It is also a good time to learn what others need and how you can help them succeed.