June 9, 2010 Meeting Management tool can save businesses thousands a year

New professional meeting management tool helps team and business-leaders plan, run and review effective meetings and reveal their true cost

9^th June 2010 – 2MuchTalk is a new professional meeting management tool which will help businesses improve meeting efficiency and stem an often-unnoticed financial and productivity drain. The true cost of meetings can be thousands of pounds per year for a small business - and total many millions across the economy. 2MuchTalk is a simple-to-use application that enables team leaders, managers and SME businesses to learn about the true cost of meetings to their business. It is completely free to download for small businesses and individual teams of up to 6 people. A small upgrade cost to 2MuchTalk+ gives access to extended features and allows for larger teams of up to 25.

Driving down costs and increasing efficiency has never been as business-critical as it is today – and that means revealing hidden costs and driving out inefficient behaviours. 2MuchTalk is the first truly accessible and professional tool to help a business or team reveal and understand the true cost of meetings. This visibility gives them the potential to save significant amounts through better meeting management and free up valuable time and resources.

It helps them to plan meetings better, run them more efficiently and review the real cost of an activity which is universal to most businesses and is usually regarded as ‘free.’ It will change the way that businesses manage their meetings by helping them to make the vital shift to planning and thinking about meetings on the basis of COST not TIME.

Calculations show that if as few as five employees earning between £25k and £35k/year get together in a team meeting for just one hour per week, it could effectively cost their employer over £3000 each year. For the same activity, a more senior team earning between £40k and £55k per year might cost the company a whopping £5500 per year.¹ The annual cost of each single person on a UK average salary attending a weekly 1 hour meeting ranges between £579 and £822.² Meetings are a common denominator across the UK’s 1.2 million companies³, and each and every day they are responsible for creating staggering time wastage and loss of productivity – and yet are effectively considered “free” by managers and staff alike.  

2MuchTalk’s features enable businesses and team leaders to capture key meeting costs by:

• Capturing the costs of the meeting room and other services such as catering
• Incorporating the cost of each participant by their actual or estimated annual salary
• Further defining participants by their point of origin, to reflect other costs of attendance, as travel costs, time spent travelling and accommodation can all be noted
• Logging attendees in or out of the meeting individually during the session
• Showing a dynamically updated running total cost either on full screen or in a resizeable window that can be locked in front of your Powerpoint slides, to keep it front of mind throughout the meeting
• Setting automated alerts which sound when budget limit is hit or at a chosen percentage of the planned total cost

It also incorporates a range of additional features designed to make planning meetings easier, including the ability to issue MS Outlook, iCal or email invitations which incorporate the objectives of the meeting as well as the total anticipated meeting cost or budget.  2MuchTalk then allows you to save and review meetings and their costs to help you budget and drive better meeting processes.

Howard Popeck, the architect of the concept and Managing Director of 2MuchTalk Limited says: “I have spent years watching businesses let money cascade out on wasteful, unfocused or badly managed meetings – and even more years advising them on how to address that problem. I thought it was about time more businesses had access to a tool to help them fix this ubiquitous problem. So I set about making it happen.”

2MuchTalk fits a niche that is unfilled by any other piece of software. It is distinctly different from simplistic meeting meters and calculators which address only the surface costs. They miss vital factors such as participant travel time and people arriving and leaving at different times, and do not include meeting review capabilities that can help drive meaningful changes to the meeting process.

As a free tool for small teams 2MuchTalk is a zero outlay, zero running cost and overall win-win opportunity for many businesses, helping them to increase efficiency. A very small upgrade cost unlocks even more efficiency opportunities and opens the tool up for use by larger teams and European or US businesses.

2MuchTalk is available as a free PC software download for meetings of up to six people, which will be sufficient for many small businesses and teams or departments within larger businesses. Larger teams and those requiring greater functionality can choose 2MuchTalk+ and receive several additional features at a cost of just £24, including the ability to set different currencies and export or print meeting data. 2MuchTalk is available to download online from www.2muchtalk.com

ENDS

 ¹The junior weekly team meeting assumes 5 people on salaries of £20k, £25k, £30k, £32.5k, and £35k respectively.  The senior weekly team meeting assumes 5 people on salaries of £40k, £45k, £50k, £52.5k, and £55k respectively. Calculation charts are available to show how these figures were arrived at.

² The Office for National Statistics Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) 2009 states a “mean” average UK earning level of £31,323 for full-time employees or a “median” of £25,123.

³Figures from Office of National Statistics UK Business 2009 report. Total 2.15m UK businesses of which 58% (1.2m) are companies and corporations with the remainder sole traders and partnerships.