Cadence models and the constraint that should decide yours, three agenda shapes, hot-seat mechanics that stay fair when the same three people always volunteer, a question routine that serves the members who never unmute, and a recording library that makes call fifty worth more than call five. Written to work with any call tool; where a tool decision genuinely changes the plan, it says so.
Cadence is usually chosen from ambition and then quietly abandoned. Choose it instead from the constraint that actually binds — almost always your preparation time, not your calendar.
A weekly call you prepare for properly is a different product from a weekly call you turn up to. Members can tell within a month, and the tell is not the content — it is whether last week’s loose ends were picked up, whether their question was remembered, and whether the hour has a shape. If you can only do that fortnightly, do it fortnightly. A well-run biweekly call beats a thin weekly one, and it is much easier to add a week than to quietly drop one.
Members are doing work between calls and get stuck in ways that are expensive to leave stuck for a fortnight. Weekly builds the habit faster and keeps the group’s shared context warm — at the cost of a preparation load you have to be honest about.
The work between calls takes longer than seven days to produce anything worth discussing, so weekly calls fill with updates rather than decisions. Halves your preparation and usually raises the quality of what arrives.
The second decision, and the one that gets made carelessly. A fixed slot is a habit; a rotating slot is a schedule people have to keep consulting. Rotation is worth its cost only when you genuinely have two populations in incompatible timezones — and even then, two fixed calls usually serve them better than one that moves.
Whichever you choose, publish the dates for the whole quarter at once and put them where members already look. Booking the next call at the end of each one is how a programme ends up with a schedule nobody can see more than seven days into.
The shape is a promise about what the hour is for. Groups tolerate almost any shape; what they do not tolerate is a different one each week, because it makes the call impossible to prepare for.
One taught idea, then two or three members working through their own version of it in public. The default for programmes with a curriculum, and the shape most groups should start with.
Needs — a teaching plan and a hot-seat rotation.
No teaching segment. Questions collected in advance, grouped, and worked through hardest first. Cheap to prepare, excellent for mature groups, and merciless about the quality of your collection routine.
Needs — questions in writing before the call, without fail.
Members bring work in progress and it gets reviewed on a timer — pages, offers, funnels, plans. The most useful shape for craft-based programmes and the hardest to run without slipping the clock.
Needs — work submitted in advance and a visible timer.
Rotate on a published pattern rather than by mood. A month of “teach, teach, review sprint, open questions” is legible: members know which week to bring work to and which week to save a question for. The same four calls in an unannounced order feel improvised even when they are not, and they quietly train people to stop preparing.
One shape per call. A call that tries to teach, review three pieces of work and clear the question queue does all three badly, and the part that gets cut is always the last one — which is always somebody’s only question.
This is the teach-then-hot-seat shape laid out. Adjust the numbers to your group; the thing that matters is that they exist and that they are the same next week.
| When | What happens | Leads |
|---|---|---|
| 0–5 min | Doors open. Arrivals, and one line on what today covers. Start on time regardless of who is missing — the alternative teaches the room that the published start is approximate. | Host |
| 5–10 min | Wins and blockers, one line each, typed in the chat rather than said out loud. Reading them takes two minutes and tells you where the room actually is before you teach into it. | Members |
| 10–30 min | The teaching segment. One idea, taught once, with the example prepared in advance. Twenty minutes is a constraint that improves it. | Host |
| 30–70 min | Hot seats. Two at twenty minutes, or three at thirteen. Named before the call, timed out loud, one action each at the end. | Members |
| 70–85 min | Questions from the form, in the order you grouped them. Hardest first — the easy ones can be answered in writing afterwards, the hard ones cannot. | Both |
| 85–90 min | Close: next call’s date and topic, what you owe the room, and what the room owes itself before then. Then end, even if it is going well. | Host |
The wins-and-blockers minutes look like warm-up and are actually reconnaissance: five minutes of typed one-liners tell you which of your prepared answers the room needs and which it does not. And the closing five minutes look expendable right up until the week when nobody can remember what was agreed, or when the next call arrives with no topic and no preparation behind it.
Ending on time is the rule that holds the rest together. Overrunning reads as generosity and functions as a tax on the members with hard stops — usually the ones with the most demanding jobs and the least ability to say so. If the content genuinely does not fit, the shape is wrong: cut a hot seat, or move the teaching into the library.
Teaching survives being recorded and watched later. Hot seats, questions and the room’s reaction to them do not — they are the only parts of the hour that require everyone to be present at the same time. When time is short, protect the parts that only work live.
This single habit does more for a group call than any change to the content. It serves the quiet members, it lets you prepare real answers, and it stops the hour being allocated by who is fastest to speak.
In every group there are members who will never raise a hand on a live call. Not because they have nothing to ask — because asking in front of twenty peers costs them something it does not cost the confident ones. A form removes that cost entirely, and it does it without anyone having to be coaxed into speaking.
Subject: [Day]'s call — what should we cover? Questions for [Day] close [deadline day] at [time] [timezone]. Add yours here: [form link] Two things make a question useful on a group call: · What you have already tried · What decision you are actually stuck on One line each is plenty. Questions submitted in advance get answered first and get answered properly. The ones that arrive live get whatever time is left.
Send that as a standing message two days before every call, on the same day of the week, forever. The consistency is most of the value: after a month it is a routine, and after a quarter your question queue fills without you asking twice.
A hot seat is one member’s problem worked through in public so twenty people learn from it. It fails when it becomes private consulting with an audience, or when the same three names keep taking it.
[Name], you have got twelve minutes and I am going to keep us to it — not because your problem is small, but because there are two more after you. Here is what you sent: [restate the problem in one sentence]. Before we start: is that still the problem, or has it moved since [day]?
Restating the problem in one sentence before you start does two jobs: the room gets the context without the member re-telling it, and the member gets the chance to say “that is not quite it any more” — which is remarkably often the case two days after they wrote it down.
The test for a good hot seat is not whether the member in the seat was helped. It is whether the other members took something away. Name the general principle out loud as you work — “the reason this is stuck is the same reason a launch stalls at the offer, which is worth noticing if you are anywhere near that” — so the specific case earns its place in a shared hour.
A recurring call generates an asset as a by-product. Most programmes never collect it, because a recording that cannot be found is indistinguishable from one that was never made.
State the recording policy when members join, not fresh each week. Say what is recorded, where it goes, who can watch it, and how long it stays — then the weekly version is a single sentence at the start of the call rather than a negotiation. The exception is a hot seat that touches numbers or named clients: ask in the moment, and cut it from the published version if asked.
After a couple of quarters the pattern becomes obvious: the same handful of recordings get watched repeatedly. Those are not calls any more — they are course modules, onboarding material for new members, and often the strongest evidence you have of what the programme actually delivers. Turning one of them into a standing evergreen session is usually the next move.
Every tool records. The difference shows up when a member who missed Thursday needs the eight minutes about pricing — whether that sits in a folder named by date, or in a library attached to the programme they bought, beside their attendance and the questions they submitted. In Agorix the meeting, the recording, the course library and the purchase sit on one customer record — see how meetings work.
Attendance is a signal, not a target. What you are watching for is not absence — it is the member who has quietly stopped getting value and has not told anybody.
Track consecutive absences rather than a percentage. Someone who attends six of ten calls spread evenly is participating; someone who attended the first six and none since has left the programme in every sense except the billing one. A percentage hides that distinction, which is exactly the distinction you need.
Cross it with the library. A member who never attends live but watches every recording and submits questions is a fully engaged member with a difficult calendar, and messaging them about attendance is both wrong and slightly insulting. A member who has neither attended nor watched in a month is the one worth a message — and the message should assume a reasonable explanation rather than fish for an apology.
[Name] — you have missed the last three calls, and this is not a chase. I want to check the call is still worth your [day]. Three possibilities, and any of them is a fine answer: 1. The time no longer works. 2. The topics have moved past what you needed. 3. You are getting what you need from the recordings. If it is (1), the recordings and the question form both work without you being live — send questions and I will answer them on the call. If it is (2), tell me what you would want instead; that is more useful to me than an apology. [Your name]
Three things make that message work: it says it is not a chase and then behaves as though that were true, it offers three answers so replying is a choice rather than a confession, and it names a way to stay served without attending. Guilt gets you a polite reply and no change. Making it easy to say “the time stopped working” gets you something you can act on.
If three members say the time no longer works, that is a scheduling decision, not three individual conversations. If several say the topics have moved past what they needed, the programme has a segmentation problem your calendar cannot fix — and the answer is usually a second track rather than a broader call, because broadening the call to include everyone is how it stops being useful to anyone.
Recurring calls do not fail suddenly. They degrade, and the degradation is usually structural rather than a matter of effort — which is good news, because structure is fixable in an afternoon.
One question, once a quarter, through the same form the questions come through: what would make this call more useful? Then change one thing and say which answer prompted it. A programme that visibly responds to its own members is a programme people renew — and the answers arrive long before the attendance numbers would have told you the same thing.
Use a fixed run sheet with minutes attached. A working default for ninety minutes: five for arrivals, five for wins and blockers typed into the chat, twenty for a single taught idea, forty for two or three hot seats named in advance, fifteen for questions collected before the call, and five to close with the next date and topic. The value is not in these exact numbers — it is that the shape is the same every week, so members know what they are turning up to and you stop deciding the format on the day. The run sheet above lays it out row by row.
Weekly suits implementation programmes where members are doing work between calls and need frequent unblocking, and it builds the habit faster. Biweekly suits strategic or executive groups where the work between calls takes longer than seven days to produce anything worth discussing, and it halves your preparation load. Choose on the constraint that actually binds you: if you cannot prepare properly every week, a well-run biweekly call beats a thin weekly one, and members can tell the difference within a month.
Sixty minutes for pure question-and-answer formats, ninety when the call carries both teaching and hot seats. Past ninety, attention drops and the members with hard stops start leaving early — which quietly means the people with the most demanding jobs get served least. If the content does not fit, move the teaching into recorded material rather than extending the call. Live time is the scarce resource, and it should be spent on the things that only work live.
Publish a rotation with names against dates. Take requests through the same form as questions rather than by direct message. Require the problem in writing beforehand so the seat starts in the middle rather than the beginning. Cap the time and say the cap out loud. End with one action stated by the member, not by you. And keep a separate queue for members who have never taken a seat, drawn from first when a slot opens. The unfairness in most groups is not deliberate — it is the accumulated result of giving seats to whoever asked most recently.
Yes, with the policy stated when members join rather than asked fresh each week. The recording is what makes the programme work for other timezones and for anyone who misses a week, and across a year it becomes a library that is often worth more than any single call in it. Title recordings by topic rather than by date, add timestamps or a short index, and keep them where members already look for the rest of the programme. A recording nobody can find is an archive, not an asset — the library section covers the difference.
Track consecutive absences rather than an attendance percentage, and send one message at three. Ask whether the time no longer works, whether the topics have moved past what they needed, or whether the recordings are covering it — and make clear that any of those is an acceptable answer. Attendance is not the goal; the outcome they bought is. Some members are genuinely being served by the library, and a guilt-shaped reminder is the fastest way to lose one of them. For a single missed booking rather than a pattern, the no-show follow-up is the shorter message.
The scheduled room, the question form, attendance, the recording library, the course the calls sit beside and the membership that pays for all of it — on one customer record, so “who has stopped showing up and what have they watched instead” is a report rather than three exports. Built for coaches and consultants running group programmes.
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