Why Bill?
Why do you need Bill?
We made Meet Bill because businesses spend an extraordinary amount of time talking about work instead of doing it.
And we know how to get a business owner's attention: put a price on the problem.
So, let’s talk about meetings.
1
Meetings aren’t free.
Every meeting has a cost.
Not just the meeting room. Not just the coffee. Not just the Teams licence.
People.
Take a fairly ordinary 75-person UK business.
If everyone spends around five hours a week in meetings, that’s:
1,625 hours
of employee time. Every month.
217 days
That’s roughly 217 working days.
That’s £643,000 a year* of organisational capacity going into meetings.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Meetings are important. They help people make decisions, solve problems, collaborate and actually run a business.
The question isn’t:
“How do we get rid of meetings?”
It’s:
“Are we getting enough value from the meetings we’re having?”
That’s where Bill comes in.
2
And we’re not making this up.
We wanted to be pretty transparent about where the numbers come from.
Our example uses a few deliberately straightforward assumptions:
- Employees
- 75
- Meetings per employee, per week
- 5 hours
- Weeks per month
- 4.33
- Average "Management" hourly pay in the UK
- £27.50
- Employment-cost allowance
- 20%
- Estimated fully-loaded hourly cost
- £33
| People | Meeting hours / month | Working days | Estimated cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 50 | 1,083 | 144 | £35,700 |
| 75 | 1,624 | 217 | £53,600 |
| 100 | 2,165 | 289 | £71,400 |
3
Remember.
This is just the time and money going into meetings.
It doesn’t tell you whether those meetings were good.
It doesn’t tell you whether the right people were there.
It doesn’t tell you whether a decision was actually made.
And it certainly doesn’t tell you what happened afterwards.
Which is the bit Bill finds interesting.
4
The real problem isn’t meetings.
It’s bad meetings.
A meeting can be completely worth its cost. And plenty are.
A 30-minute conversation that prevents a £100,000 mistake?
Good meeting. Worth every second.
A 60-minute meeting with eight people that ends with “Right, shall we pick this up next week?”
Less good. Considerably.
A meeting that exists because nobody knows who actually owns the decision?
Now we’ve got a problem.
A meeting that could have been an email? Well...
Bill has thoughts.
5
This is why we made Bill.
Bill isn’t here to kill meetings. He’s here to help businesses make better decisions about them.
Before a meeting
- Should this meeting happen?
- Who actually needs to be there?
- What are we trying to achieve?
During the meeting
- Are we actually getting somewhere?
- Is the conversation useful?
- Are we making the decision we came to make?
After the meeting
- What happened?
- Who agreed to do what?
- Was this meeting worth it?
6
So, do you need Bill?
Maybe not.
Honestly.
If your meetings are short, purposeful, well-attended and consistently produce decisions and actions, then crack on. Bill will happily sit this one out.
But if your business has:
- ✕meetings about meetings
- ✕recurring meetings nobody remembers starting
- ✕eight people invited when three are needed
- ✕decisions that somehow never get made
- ✕actions that disappear into the ether
- ✕calendars that look like Tetris
- ✕people saying "I'll give you 30 minutes" when they actually need three emails
...then yes. You might want Bill.
Your meetings are already costing you.
Bill just helps you make sure they’re worth it.
No revolution. No corporate waffle. Just better meetings.
The boring bit: how we calculated this▾
The figures above are illustrative estimates, not claims about the amount any particular business wastes on meetings.
Our calculations assume 75 employees, five meeting hours per employee per week, 4.33 weeks per month, a £27.50 hourly base employment cost and a 20% allowance for employment on-costs, producing an estimated fully-loaded cost of £33 per hour.
The underlying assumptions are informed by ONS earnings and working-hours data, HMRC employer cost rates and research into UK meeting behaviour.
Meetings can create significant value. We therefore describe these figures as meeting capacity and estimated employment cost, rather than “wasted money”.
Sources: ONS ASHE; ONS working-hours data; HMRC employer rates; Calendly State of Meetings.
- 4.33 weeks per month
- £27.50 median hourly pay for managers in the UK
- A 20% employment-cost uplift for employer NI, pension and other on-costs
- A rounded fully loaded cost of £33 per hour
- A 7.5-hour working day
The maths is:
- 75 people × 5 meeting hours × 4.33 weeks = 1,624 meeting hours
- 1,624 hours ÷ 7.5 = 217 working days
- 1,624 hours × £33 = £53,592
For a range of SME sizes, using exactly the same assumptions:
| Organisation size | Meeting hours/month | Equivalent working days | Estimated cost/month |
|---|---|---|---|
| 50 people | 1,083 | 144 days | £35,700 |
| 75 people | 1,624 | 217 days | £53,600 |
| 100 people | 2,165 | 289 days | £71,400 |
I’d describe the £33 figure as an estimated employment cost per hour, rather than saying it is everyone’s salary. It is more commercially honest and closer to the real cost to the business.
Why this is a fair assumption:
- The ONS’s 2025 Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings is the right source for occupation-level pay; its median hourly pay data for managers, directors and senior officials supports using a roughly £27–28 base hourly rate. ONS ASHE occupation data
- UK full-time workers average about 36.5 actual working hours per week, so five weekly meeting hours is around 14% of working time—not an exaggerated “everyone is in meetings all day” assumption. ONS working-hours series
- Calendly’s UK meeting research found 85% of UK workers spend at least three hours a week in meetings; using five hours as an SME planning assumption is reasonable for a business with regular management, operational and client meetings. Calendly State of Meetings
- A 20% uplift is a sensible, conservative shorthand for employment on-costs. Employer National Insurance alone is 15% above the relevant threshold, before employer pension contributions. HMRC employer rates