The 7-Minute Daily Habit That Transformed An Entire Company
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.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Forbes
18 hours ago
- Forbes
Why This Nasdaq Listed CEO Changed His Mind About AI, And What It Took
The climb toward AI maturity begins not with code, but with conviction. Anyone who's survived a stint in tech or graduated from a MBA program has brushed up against the idea of maturity curves. What emerged from the work of Richard L. Nolan and was later formalized by Watts Humphrey in the Capability Maturity Model now outlines a commonly shared intuition about how organizations grow: from chaos to structure, from instinct to optimization. But as anyone with a heartbeat in 2025 can attest, no framework quite captures the urgency that AI has dropped on the world of business. In fact, the ecosystem resembles a pressure cooker more than neatly staged evolution. McKinsey's latest research shows 52% of companies having established a dedicated team to lead AI adoption, and BCG has been hiring aggressively to respond to the boom in AI work. When an industry accelerates this fast, anxiety is sure to follow and a growing number of CEOs aren't asking whether to build with AI. Instead, they're wondering if it's already too late noting how the race to relevance has never been so unforgiving. And yet, not everyone has rushed in. Spenser Skates, CEO of Amplitude, a publicly listed digital analytics platform that serves product and marketing teams in particular, was one of the skeptics. For a long time, he wasn't sure if the AI wave was substance or just another hype cycle dressed up in neural net clothing. In October 2024, all that changed, and we can learn much from his turn from a skeptic to a convert. Even better, we can see the results of his conversion in how Amplitude is now launching a suite of AI agents to automate product management, built directly into its platform. The first lesson is how even amidst all the hype the pivot was never inevitable. Instead, driven by a desire to understand the value of AI for clients, the conversion process carries a lesson every executive should hear. In a sense AI adoption has been the business world's biggest game of chicken where no one wants to be first to crash, but no one can afford to be last to move. For leaders like Spenser Skates, that tension was front and center. 'I was nervous about being too early,' Skates admits. 'The last thing I wanted was to invest heavily in something that didn't deliver value. You can burn trust that way, and it's hard to recover from launching something that hits a negative chord with clients who are looking to you for guidance,' he continues. It's a familiar worry among founders and established CEOs alike. Investing before the market is ready, or before the underlying technology is robust, can lead to zombie features, bloated R&D, and customer disillusionment if not the death of the entire company. This is a threat especially in the realm of SaaS, where credibility with technical users is currency and being deemed vaporware is a mortal sin. Pat Grady, partner at Sequoia, puts it bluntly: 'Bad products have nowhere to hide. If the features aren't useful, people churn, which means whatever AI CEOs invest in, it needs to actually work for the client.' Waiting for others to chart the path can be the safest way to ensure that what you build actually works for the client. However, it can also come at a cost and significant risks involved. In markets moving at AI's pace, the penalty for waiting too long is being outcompeted before you even get to ship your features. Skates was acutely aware of that trade-off. 'We didn't want to be there before the value exceeded the hype, but we also couldn't afford to be late and lose the confidence of our customers,' he says. 'It was about timing something that felt inevitable but still immature. You don't want to drive a bunch of hype with customers before the product is ready to deliver an experience they're going to find valuable. We took the time to do it right before we launched Agents." We've already seen this movie play out far beyond its trailer. In March 2024, Cognition Labs' Devin, the self-operating software engineer, grabbed headlines as a proof-of-concept for what agentic AI could be. In the months since, a wave of agentic AI products followed: prompt-chaining copilots, automated workflows, low-code agents. Many of them, lauded at launch, now look outdated just a year later as enterprise platforms like Salesforce and emerging infrastructure like the MCP (Multi-agent Collaboration Protocol) set new bars for interoperability and performance. Going early may be as bold as it is necessary, but going without a strategy to remain relevant when the market shifts again will get you wiped. 'We don't shy away from bold bets,' says Grady. 'But bold doesn't mean blind. The real unlock comes from timing your move with a thesis about where the value is going to concentrate, and staying nimble enough to adjust when the terrain changes.' This insight reframes the risks of inaction for more than just Sequoia. With AI, the bigger risk is no longer moving too soon but failing to move at all, something which Skates grappled with in his own decision to time the move. The Amplitude leadership team, after the jump to AI The turning point for Amplitude came when its leadership began asking a different question; not can we build something cool with AI, but would it help our customers to win? That reframing may sound deceptively simple, but it reflects one of the most difficult moves a CEO can make: choosing to walk away from today's high-margin core in order to invest in tomorrow's unproven edge. As Clayton Christensen warned in The Innovator's Dilemma, incumbents often fail not because they miss the technology shift, but because they stay too loyal to the models, customers, and performance metrics that made them successful in the first place. Inertia is a powerful drug, but rarely a performance inducing one. In Amplitude's case as with many other companies today, it would have been easy to keep optimizing their current platform, stay focused on power users, and leave generative AI to Sam Altman and Marc Benioff to figure out. What stands out in this turn of the maturity curve is how the future isn't going to reward AI sophistication for the sake of sophistication. Instead, it is going to reward accessibility and client-side value generation. This mindset shift, toward long-term value over short-term certainty, is the same one we've seen behind other historical inflection points. Apple didn't reimagine the phone because consumers were clamoring for a touchscreen device; they saw the latent potential in turning hardware into a lifestyle platform. Amazon didn't build AWS because cloud services were getting investor attention; it was a necessity born from their own scaling bottlenecks delivering unquestionable value. Paradigm shifts of the AI-kind truly begin when companies act not on consensus, but on conviction of where the value of it all is, well before the ROI spreadsheet says yes. For Amplitude, that conviction meant going from hesitation to acceleration. And that acceleration started with an acquisition. James Evans, founder of Command AI and now Head of AI at Amplitude, puts it this way: 'When I joined, I realized Amplitude had the ingredients but not yet the recipe. Together, we built the kitchen.' But even with the right team and the right conviction, building that recipe takes time. 'We weren't going to just slap a chat box on top of analytics and call it innovation,' Evans says. 'The hard part was embedding agents into workflows in a way that actually made people faster, not just feel futuristic.' This is the part of innovation that rarely makes it into investor decks or product launches; the patience needed to pull it all off. Adoption, like invention, is a curve, not a click. Which brings us to the hard part: transformation. Most transformations fail, and according to Planview, 70% of digital transformation efforts underdeliver. Often the challenge stems from what's in the culture instead of the code. 'Real AI transformation takes more than a pilot,' says Razat Gaurav, CEO of Planview. 'It takes sustained investment, clear outcomes, and permission to fail fast. That's what separates the 30% that succeed from the rest.' 'This is particularly true for AI adoption, where the pace at which the industry is developing necessitates a more agile approach to transformation projects, including the ability to reorient them towards entirely new goals midway,' Gaurav continues. The 70% failure rate shouldn't surprise us. If innovation were easy, we'd call it a transaction. True transformation is messy, political, iterative. It demands more than integrating a new feature or acquiring a shiny startup. Instead, it requires rethinking how your company learns, decides, and adapts. This holds true for Amplitude as well, for which acquiring the tech wasn't the hardest part. The real transformation came from within. 'Every company that has been around long enough has technical debt,' says Francois Ajenstat, Amplitude's Chief Product Officer. 'Most also have a cultural debt. You can't bolt on AI and expect magic if you don't also update your culture. We had to rethink how teams collaborated, how we prioritized, how fast we moved. In essence, that's an entire system reboot.' Skates agrees. 'Our purchase of Command AI and our push towards AI was ultimately an act of evolving the company.' It is worth remembering that evolution didn't start with belief; it started with doubt. Amplitude's story shows that skepticism, when rooted in care for the customer and clarity of purpose, is a strength instead of a weakness. Their pivot wasn't driven by hype, but by a conviction that the value was real and the timing was right. And perhaps most crucially, they treated the change not as a campaign, but as a process. A transformation, not a transaction. For other leaders navigating the AI curve, three insights stand out. First, healthy skepticism can be a strategic asset. Skates' early hesitation gave his team the space to build deliberately, not defensively. Second, the decision to go all in came not from pressure, but from purpose, once it became clear that AI would genuinely help users win, the direction followed naturally. And finally, Amplitude's journey reminds us that real change is infrastructural, not theatrical. It took six months of rewiring how decisions were made and how teams collaborated before the agents reached customers' hands. As AI matures, more CEOs will find themselves in that same uncomfortable middle: too aware to ignore it, too uncertain to act. The ones who win won't be the ones who jumped first, they'll be the ones who jumped with intent and a clear view of the value they are bringing.
Forbes
19 hours ago
- Forbes
What's Worth Up To $60 Trillion? Learning To Serve Women Investors
Let's be clear: wealth management is at a tipping point—and if you're not paying attention to women, you're leaving serious money—and growth—on the table. McKinsey's latest report, 'The New Face of Wealth: The Rise of the FemaleInvestor,' reveals a game-changing truth: women now control roughly one-third of retail financial assets in the U.S. and Europe, totaling about $60 trillion. That's not a trend; it's a seismic shift that's only going to accelerate, with women's share expected to hit 40 to 45 percent by 2030. Despite the surge in female-controlled wealth—up 51% since 2018—more than half of these assets aren't being actively managed by financial advisors. That's over $10 trillion in opportunity, largely overlooked. For advisors who can meet women on their terms, the path to growth is wide open. If your practice hasn't made women a strategic priority, now is the time to start. Here's how… $60 Trillion and Rising: The Female Wealth Revolution McKinsey's research attributes women's financial power and growth to a mix of social changes and economic independence. More women are heading households, building businesses, inheriting wealth, and living longer than previous generations. Factors such as declining marriage rates, increased divorce rates, and a growing population of financially autonomous single women contribute to this shift. Additionally, women's educational achievements and access to higher-paying roles continue to rise, enabling greater wealth accumulation irrespective of marital status. Women are shaping their financial futures with a broader view that blends wealth preservation with purpose and legacy. McKinsey's findings reveal growing financial confidence among women—between 2018 and 2023, financial comfort among European women rose from 45% to 67%, driven largely by millennial women. U.S. women under 50 showed a similar boost, from 48% to 61%. This transformation means wealth managers must rethink their approach—not just add women as an afterthought, but redesign strategies to engage, educate, and empower this dynamic client segment from the ground up. Strategy #1: Cultivate Authentic Relationships Beyond Transactions Women seek trusted advisors who listen and provide tailored guidance, not just product pitches. Building genuine, ongoing relationships based on open communication fosters loyalty and creates a foundation for deeper collaboration. Take time to understand what success looks like for each female client—not only in financial terms but also how their wealth supports their life goals and values. This empathetic approach differentiates your service and builds long-term partnerships. As the report emphasizes, women's preferences for advice often differ from men's. For example, 76% of women want at least annual investment advice, with this preference increasing with age. Many women especially value personalized, in-person guidance during major life transitions such as divorce or widowhood. Advisors who build diverse, inclusive teams tend to retain female clients better during these critical moments. Strategy #2: Break the Stereotypes and Personalize Your Approach No two women investors are the same, so it's critical to move away from cookie-cutter solutions. Segment your female clients by their distinct goals, risk appetites, and life stages. For some, growth and entrepreneurship may dominate; for others, wealth protection and legacy planning might be the key focus. Develop customized offerings and communications that resonate with each subgroup. This personal touch signals respect and understanding—qualities women increasingly prioritize in financial relationships. McKinsey's research identifies several female investor archetypes worth considering: - Young, engaged investors – Tech-savvy, cost-conscious, and eager to take an active role in managing their portfolios. - Investment-savvy retirees – Experienced investors seeking high-quality, trustworthy advice. - Pre-retiree guidance seekers – Prefer comprehensive, in-person planning and value relationship-driven service. Tailoring your services and outreach to these varied groups can boost both relevance and long-term loyalty. Strategy #3: Integrate Technology with Human Insight Women investors often value both digital convenience and the human touch. Offering tech-enabled tools for financial tracking and planning can enhance engagement, especially with younger clients who expect digital fluency. However, the report stresses that meaningful conversations and expert guidance remain vital. Balance technology with regular, thoughtful advisor interactions to deliver a holistic client experience. Strategy #4: Empower Through Transparent and Collaborative FinancialEducation Women often value financial advice that emphasizes clarity, empowerment, and collaboration rather than jargon or high-pressure sales tactics. Offering workshops, webinars, or informal sessions on topics like investment strategies, retirement planning, or estate considerations creates an environment where clients feel informed and confident in their decisions. This approach positions you as a trusted partner invested in their financial goals and independence, encouraging earlier and deeper engagement. It also addresses a key insight from McKinsey's latest research—that many women begin working with financial advisors later than men (for example, 35% of U.S. women start after age 45, compared to 28% of men). By providing accessible, ongoing educational opportunities, advisors can foster trust and build meaningful relationships from the start. Strategy #5: Build an Inclusive Team Culture Diversity within your advisory team can enhance your ability to connect authentically with female clients. A team that reflects varied backgrounds and experiences will bring richer perspectives to client conversations and create an environment where women feel understood and valued. Beyond gender, prioritize inclusivity in all dimensions—including age, culture, and expertise—to strengthen your firm's culture and client relationships. While women do not necessarily prefer female advisors exclusively, McKinsey shows that diverse teams—encompassing gender and other underrepresented groups—have been proven to better retain female clients during major life transitions. Recruiting and mentoring diverse talent not only strengthens client engagement but also future-proofs your firm in a changing demographic landscape. The Path Forward The financial landscape is changing, and women investors are at the forefront of this evolution. For wealth managers, embracing this reality is more than smart, it's essential to sustainable growth. The future belongs to those who recognize that serving women investors is not a niche strategy—it's a fundamental business shift with the power to transform
Forbes
2 days ago
- Forbes
Luxury Skincare Costs Too Much. Brandefy Has A Fix For That: Dupes
The beauty industry's glow is starting to fade, according to McKinsey and The Beauty of Fashion's latest 'State of Beauty' report. 'Beauty's era of effortless growth is giving way to a more complex landscape,' it observes, highlighting that while the global beauty market grew 7% annually from 2022 to 2024, reaching $441 billion, growth is projected to slow to between 3% and 5% per year through 2030. Consumers' increased focus on getting the most value for their money is the number one theme shaping the future of the beauty industry, according to 56% of the 100 senior beauty industry executives surveyed. And 54% see an uncertain consumer appetite or restricted spending as the industry's greatest risk. These two challenges are reflected in the dynamic growth in dupes – beauty products formulated to deliver results comparable to high-end brands but at a fraction of the cost. 'Many customers are not price-sensitive as much as they are value-sensitive — though differentiating on value is increasingly difficult in an era of dupes,' the report explains, offering no easy answers for how established industry players can counter dupes' disruptive force. Brandefy's Meg Pryde, a pioneer helping drive dupe culture, is positioned in the catbird seat as the beauty industry recalibrates. Pryde founded Brandefy in 2018 after working for a multi-billion private label manufacturer in the healthcare industry. 'I was appalled that you had different containers, one priced at $80 and another for $10, and they had similar or exactly the same stuff inside. I knew there was a way to use community and technology to help people decide if it was worth it to pay up or buy the generic,' she shared with me. Brandefy founder and CEO Meg Pryde Courtesy of Brandefy Recognizing that the beauty industry was one of the least transparent about product ingredients and performance just as consumers were doing more research to make informed purchase decisions, Pryde became the industry's disrupter-in-chief with the Brandefy app support its user community to share their dupe favorites. The app allows community members to compare brand-name products against the available dupes, rate them by performance, packaging and ingredients. It then assigns the dupes a 'similarity score.' The app contains listings for over a thousand brands and more than 10,000 product reviews. The app has been downloaded over half-a-million times, Pryde tells me. 'Our primary reason for being is to save people time and money figuring out what's the best product for them.' Pryde initially bootstrapped her Brandefy venture by cashing out her retirement account while earning an M.B.A. at the University of Virginia. After running the app for a few years, she realized that skincare was the biggest source of confusion for the community – especially as a virtual arms race was evolving at the clinical, higher-end of the market. A $1.7 million investment round fueled a research-and-development initiative to create a line of Brandefy top-quality skincare dupes for the most requested products. Chemist Judi Steward, who worked for 20 years in R&D with Estée Lauder, as well as with L'Oréal and Chanel, came on board to help put the science into Brandefy's formulas. And Pryde attracted dermatologist partners to ensure the highest quality, safety and performance. Currently, Brandefy offers 11 skincare products, including cleansers, serums, moisturizers and tinted sunscreen. Brandefy guarantees as good or better results at significant savings. 'We call it a national brand 'better,'' she said, adding that the company selects North American manufacturing partners that have special expertise in the specific type of product. For example, Brandefy's best-selling $49 Clinical Vit C + E + Ferulic Defend Serum is 'inspired by' SkinCeuticals C E Ferulic that retails for $182. And its No-Needles Renew Serum with niacinamide, hyaluronic acid and peptide complex sells for $35 as compared to $69 for DRMTLGY Needle-less Serum that inspired it. 'I'm so proud of our product line. I've gotten so many incredible compliments, but the biggest is our recorder rate. It's fantastic,' she shared. Based upon community feedback, Brandefy is expanding into the fragrance category with three signature scents including Number One, inspired by Maison Francis Kurkdjian's Baccarat Rouge 540, that sells for $49 versus $210; Number 2, inspired by Black Opium, for $29 instead of $130; and Number 3, inspired by Le Labo Another 13, for $59 rather than $235. And all three Brandefy Scent Labs offerings come in larger sizes than their comparables. Business of Fashion editor Daniela Morosini acknowledges that 'the beauty space is being overtaken by dupe brands,' and the McKinsey report reinforces it. Since 2023, consumer spending on skincare at the high-end cut way back and spending at the lower-end rose. The share of 1,000+ U.S. consumers surveyed who spent $76 or more on skincare in the past six months dropped from 50% in 2023 to 43% in 2025, while spending at the $35 and under price range increased the most, up from 26% to 37%. Even spending in the moderate $36 to $75 range dropped, from 24% to 20%. Haircare, color cosmetics and to a lesser extent fragrance have seen a similar shift to lower spending. Haircare spending in the $35 and under price range went from 29% in 2023 to 48% in 2025. Color spending went from 26% to 34% and fragrance from 22% to 29%. Overall, interest in dupes is on the rise, with 28% of global consumers saying they have consciously bought dupes and 53% being open to buying them. McKinsey partner Sara Hudson concludes, 'Amplified by inflation and perceptions of products being overpriced, 'dupes' (products that either directly or indirectly imitate premium items at a lower price) will continue to appeal to consumers. 'Dupes' are likely here to stay.' Pryde and her Brandefy community are all in. 'We save our community millions of dollars every year through our app and products.' But she stresses that saving money isn't the only goal. She doesn't want customers to be duped by the high-priced brands. 'Marketers would regularly talk about adding a whisper of an ingredient, at an irrelevantly low level, just to make a marketing claim, like 'includes snow mushrooms.' We deserve better and Brandefy and our community helps them find better,' she concluded. See also:
