As discussed in our article One Simple Trick to Save Time and Money When Planning a Commercial Build-Out, it is critical to schedule cadence meetings for your tenant buildout with your project team. Cadence meetings are regularly scheduled group calls or face to face meetings where a team discusses updates on a project. Early in your tenant build out project a schedule for these cadence meetings should be agreed upon. Here are some tips for running these meetings efficiently and getting the best possible results.

It may seem like a simple recommendation, but if you don’t have all the key stakeholders in the meeting it will not achieve the desired results. A ship without a rudder will never reach its destination, and a meeting without its leaders will fair no better. Prior to sending calendar invites for your cadence meetings consider the entire tenant buildout project and who needs to be involved at each step. You may find that the stakeholders will change from meeting to meeting depending on the phase of the project. In such cases you may actively update the cadence meeting attendees list to remove individuals when not needed, and add others as needed.

Before the cadence meetings begin you should assign someone the task of taking notes. This person should be responsible for logging the meeting minutes in a shared document that can be accessed by the entire project team. The act of taking clear notes will instill accountability among the members of the project team and ensure your tenant buildout project makes progress each week.

If the key players are skipping your cadence meetings they will not be effective. Moreover, some members of the team may skip meetings if they observe others getting away with it. As the organizer of the meeting it is your responsibility to strictly enforce attendance. This may mean publicly calling out team members that skip meetings and calling attention to the importance of being present. An ineffective meeting will waste everyone’s time and delay the tenant buildout process.

The beauty of taking consistent and thorough meeting minutes is that you can easily assign action items to your tenant build out project team. The assignment of action items should be done throughout the meeting and summarized at the close of the meeting. These action items should be logged in the meeting minutes. At the beginning of every tenant buildout cadence meeting the action items from the prior meeting should be reviewed. The cadence meeting organizer should seek an update on the call from each responsible individual. These tasks should include an estimated due date and that date should be revised as the project progresses.

Using these four tips will help you run your tenant buildout cadence meetings like a boss. With these sorts of construction projects it is critical to keep momentum . All parties need to understand the latest project updates and be in constant communication. With these tips you can run efficient meetings and keep your tenant buildout project running smoothly.