I’m the new lead & newest employee on my (small) agency’s largest account. The weekly in-person status meetings are now running over our usual allocated time by 45-60min. The client will sometimes go off on tangents sometimes relating to the agenda, sometimes not related. What are some things I can say, do, etc to mitigate this sooner than later?

I’ve never experienced this with a client before.

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I would suggest sending an agenda prior to the meeting to help keep everyone aligned. I also will typically say "we typically go over our calendar slot, would your team like me to schedule us for longer times moving forward to make sure we have enough time?".

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Seconding this, we had the same issue and it ended up blowing up our billables in the end and messed with profit margins so we've taken a bit more of a stand on it. Some clients just like to keep you and don't really realize that they aren't your only client!

Providing an agenda and then reminding people how many minutes remain in the meeting is a gentle way of remaining on task. In an EOS environment, those topics that take ideation time are moved aside to be discussed in depth at other times, so applying this principle to anything that arises in a status meeting can help preserve your time, too.

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Probably just a symptom that you need to be spending more time on other meetings with them, setting up feedback calls, etc.

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Agree, consider adding different meetings that aren’t “status” meetings - status is to share what’s moving and how things are going, but big deliverables could have their own additional creative or strategic review meetings, and/or you could try weekly or bi-weekly 1:1 for you and the main client just to chat through other thoughts or feelings they’re having in the week (at least for a short time). Then when tangents arise just try to steer them into the purpose of status vs another meeting already on the calendar

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I hate myself for the jargon but "Hmm that is a great point let's set up some time to discuss offline"

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