The 7-Minute Daily Habit That Transformed An Entire Company

Forbes

28-04-2025

Seven minutes. One team. Every day. TentCraft's daily huddle keeps connection, clarity, and ... More accountability at the heart of how they work.
When TentCraft CEO Matt Bulloch introduced the idea of a daily huddle in 2014, it wasn't about embracing the latest leadership fad. The custom tent manufacturer in Traverse City, Michigan, was in the throes of rapid growth. The company had expanded to 75 people, but cohesion was slipping. 'I didn't know what 50 of them were doing on any given day,' Bulloch admits. 'And that was a problem.'
His response? A company-wide morning huddle—just seven minutes a day, no slides, speedy updates, no fluff. Over the past eleven years, that deceptively simple habit has evolved into the foundation of TentCraft's high-trust, high-performance culture.
Every weekday at exactly 8:58 a.m.—'cell phone time,' as they call it—the company gathers, either in person or on Zoom. The goal isn't to solve problems, but to surface them. Each department gives a quick snapshot: What are they working on? What's blocking them? What's coming next?
'Awareness is the goal,' says Luke Mason, TentCraft's VP of Sales. 'A comment from one team might flag something for another. It used to happen by chance. Now it's intentional.'
The huddle ends with a tradition called 'Kudos' —a brief personal share, shout-out, or moment of appreciation. 'It reminds us we're working with people, not job titles,' Luke adds. 'That emotional connection fuels everything else.'
The brilliance of TentCraft's daily huddle isn't just in its design—it's in its repetition. It's a leadership habit that anchors the entire organization. And like any great habit, its power is in the compounding.
Research from McKinsey shows that consistent rituals in the workplace build psychological safety and reinforce core values. Harvard Business Review's landmark study, The Progress Principle, found that small daily wins can dramatically increase motivation and performance. TentCraft's daily huddle operationalizes both ideas.
James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, captures this perfectly: 'You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.' TentCraft's huddle is one such system—turning connection, communication, and collaboration into a daily practice rather than abstract values.
TentCraft's huddle isn't static—it's been through over 37 iterations. 'It's a living system,' says Bulloch. 'We tweak the cadence, the flow, the speakers. The format changes as the company grows—but the purpose never does.'
Those changes are rooted in Lean thinking—specifically the PDCA cycle: Plan, Do, Check, Adjust. Here's how the huddle has matured:
One of the less obvious reasons TentCraft's huddle succeeds is how it fits into a broader cadence of communication. According to Bulloch, the daily huddle is just one beat in a drumline of leadership rhythm: daily syncs lead into weekly check-ins, monthly business reviews, and quarterly offsites.
'You can't just throw information at people randomly and expect alignment,' Bulloch says. 'The huddle only works because it's part of a larger cadence. Each meeting serves a distinct purpose—daily for awareness, weekly for tactics, monthly for metrics, quarterly for strategy.'
This rhythm gives the team a shared mental model for what gets addressed when. Daily huddles aren't expected to solve deep problems—that's what the monthly review is for. But they do keep everyone focused, grounded, and prepared.
One early misstep was trying to cover too much. 'We'd go over metrics that only mattered to three people,' Bulloch recalls. Now, every piece of content is curated to impact the full company.
What started with over 20 metrics now highlights only the metrics that matter to everyone. Today's huddles center on four shared indicators: revenue, cost of poor quality, lead time from approval to shipment, and the prior day's shipping and sales. 'Everyone listens because everything matters to them,' Bulloch says. 'We've preserved attention by only presenting what's relevant.'
That's leadership by design: reducing noise to increase signal.
As hybrid and distributed work continue to reshape organizations, intentional alignment rituals like TentCraft's huddle are more valuable than ever. They solve for the modern leadership problems of fragmentation, disengagement, and unclear ownership.
In seven minutes a day, the huddle:
And it costs nothing.
If you're a team lead, manager, or executive wondering how to apply this, start here:
Leadership doesn't always require sweeping reforms. Often, it's about showing up with intention and consistency. TentCraft's daily huddle proves that a small, focused ritual can reshape an entire company.
It builds clarity. It builds trust. It builds culture.
And the real leadership lesson?
When connection, communication, and collaboration become habits—not just values—leadership takes care of itself.