What REALLY happens in a MATS team meeting

The Make Art That Sells team are typically spread across three or four countries and at least three time zones, but we meet once a month by Zoom to catch up and plot and plan for the months ahead.

As you can imagine, it’s some pretty high-powered stuff. Shoulder pads up to our ears. We review our profit and loss margins for the last financial quarter and explore our deliverables for the upcoming quarter. We push the envelope and think outside the box. We harvest ideas. We disrupt. We have multiple balls in the air.

Ha. Just kidding.

Actual photo of MATS team planning.

Eighty per cent of the team is British, so by law we have to kick off with some comments on the weather. This causes us problems, because, while we all share a common language, we speak very different units.

“It’s like 30 degrees here,” Lilla might say.

“In Massachussetts?? In WINTER???” is the incredulous response. To a Brit, 30 degrees is a sweltering summer day. Almost (but not quite) too hot for tea.

By now we’re all thoroughly confused, so we move on.

Some of Lilla’s art. Funky shoes and cell phones, because we are high-powered business people.

Becky admires Lilla’s water bottle. Does it hold a pint?

“I think it’s 16 fluid ounces,” Lilla says.

None of us know what that means. British Jennie Googles and we’re excited to learn that, in an unusual turn of events, a British pint is bigger than a US pint.

“Wait, you use pints?” asks Lilla, “I thought you had the metric system?”

It’s very simple, we explain. We buy petrol in litres (but measure fuel efficiency in miles per gallon), milk and beer in pints (unless it’s a bottle of beer, in which case it’s in millilitres) and everything else in ml.

We measure distance in miles unless you’re running, in which case it’s in kilometres, unless you’re running a really long way, in which case it’s miles.

We measure temperature in Celsius unless it sounds more dramatic in Fahrenheit, because having a fever of 100!!! is far more exciting than 37.7.

It’s all perfectly sensible.

Shoulder pads up to our EARS we tell you.

Time to get down to some work. We need some content for upcoming newsletters. What would help our community? What do they need to know? What do we want to share with them?

We could tell them what really happens in a Make Art That Sells team meeting? someone suggests.

Nah, they’ll probably find that incredibly dull, we agree.

How about we ask them to share their success stories instead?

Oh yes, that’s a much better idea!

Please please please send us your success stories! We love to read them, and we love to shout about your brilliant new children’s book/home décor collection/tarot deck/greeting cards/anything else you’ve done! You can send them direct to British Jennie at [email protected] or to the regular inbox at [email protected].