Aug. 31, 2025

🌴244. Why Every Meeting Needs a Min & Max

The player is loading ...

Show Notes

I was driving the other day, catching up on some old Alan Weiss recordings (yep, I upload them into my own private podcast feed so I actually listen to them instead of letting them die in a Dropbox folder).

One simple but powerful Consulting 101 lesson hit me right between the eyes again: define your Min and Max before every conversation.

Alan calls it MinMax — your minimum measure of success and your maximum. It sounds obvious, but most of us don’t do it. We just show up to a meeting thinking it’s win/lose, binary. Either they ask for a quote = win, or they don’t = lose. But there are so many other outcomes that count as success — building rapport, identifying the economic buyer, getting a referral, or just knowing the next step.

Here’s the kicker: without those guardrails, you can’t really steer the conversation. Alan uses the metaphor of a boat in a channel — the tides and winds (aka other people’s agendas) will push you off course unless you’re steering deliberately.

This applies everywhere: prospect calls, stakeholder meetings, even internal conversations. When you set your MinMax, you shift from “that was a waste of time” to “that was a success on the continuum.”

I’ll be sharing this idea in a workshop later this week, but wanted to remind myself (and you!) here first.

✨ In this episode: