We’ve gotten several comments looking for more mistakes made during annual meetings and lessons learned from those missteps (aside from the alcohol fueled missteps and mistakes). We here at the Engine aren’t afraid to admit our mistakes and we’ve made our share so here are more meeting fails:
Doctor’s meeting, New Orleans. This was around the year 2000 when WiFi access wasn’t ubiquitous like it is today. But at the time, internet access was prominent enough that we simply assumed that we could plug a network cable into a wall jack and get online. Big mistake. I had scheduled a breakout presentation to demo our new online reporting product. And since this was a Saturday presentation, the one guy in the whole hotel who knew what to do was off and unavailable. Quite clearly, doing a demo of an online product doesn’t go well when there is no online component. We muddled through, but I got some poor reviews.
Lesson learned: Test extensively beforehand. See if the resort will let you into the exact room early to do a quick test of everything. And have a backup plan. If something crashes, have something available that doesn’t require you to be online or have power or whatever.
Doctor’s meeting, Scottsdale, AZ. Day 3 of the meeting. We scheduled a late afternoon session with a presentation from a doctor talking about treatment techniques for some complicated cases. The doctor told us he would need 2 hours. That should have been a red flag. Toward the end of the session, 90% of the attendees had left or were asleep (presumably those who left went to their own beds). Both we and the presenter were a bit red-faced.
Lesson learned: From our last post, consider the timing in the schedule and the content and time for any invited presenters. You certainly want to be respectful of the presentation, but your first responsibility to is to attendees.
Doctor’s meeting, Maui – Perfect weather. Beautiful resort and it’s Hawaii. What’s not to like? Well, getting to Hawaii is a bit longer than most other travel, especially for a company like ours where most affiliated practices were based in the southeastern United States. Attendance was tiny and we had almost as many corporate people and vendors as doctors. Great meeting (and fantastic tan), but we did not get in front of the audience to the extent we should have.
Lesson learned: Location and ease of getting to that location are vital. Meetings like this tend to be in-and-out deals so if you add an extra day or two of travel, that can be a deal breaker. The location doesn’t necessarily need to be central to your locations (even though that helps). We did a meeting in San Francisco (with few offices near there) and had excellent attendance because getting in and out of there is relatively easy.
Manager/doctor meeting, Haines City, FL – We’ve discussed this in our book (click here for mega practice building roadmap), but during one presentation, we had the temerity to introduce a new standard uniform for all of our offices. This generated quite the number of emotional reactions both positive and negative. Not only did this leave us having to cancel a large uniform order, but created a negative atmosphere for the rest of the session. Even introducing such mild topics as improving ordering techniques generated negative feedback.
Lesson learned: A big part of any annual meeting is to have people feeling positive and energized when they leave. You want them to take the lessons learned and apply them in their own practices. You don’t need to stay away from any difficult subjects, but with those, there should be some unity and message behind it. At our meetings, we’ve had to address significant lawsuits, a stock price in free fall and any number of insane rumors. Those have to be done in a factual, measured way rather than opening up the floor to an emotional free-for-all.
Manager meeting, New Orleans, LA – This was a 2 day meeting. On the night between day 1 and day 2, we decided to take small groups of attendees to the French Quarter to show off the city. Needless to say, attendance on day 2 was poor to say the least.
Lesson learned: Pretty obvious.
Share your stories with us. Hit us up in the comments or e-mail us.
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