How to Start a Local Owner Roundtable

Why this matters

The owners of the plumbing shop, the roofing company and the cleaning service down the road are dealing with the same city, the same insurance renewals, the same labor shortage and the same customers. A monthly breakfast where six or eight of them compare how they handle those things is one of the cheapest sources of good ideas a small shop has. It is also a meeting of business owners in one town, some of whom compete in ways they have not thought about, and it can drift. The roundtables that last are the ones that wrote their rules before the first meeting, including the short list of things that are never discussed.

This card is the setup procedure. What a structured peer group is, and why the membership rule matters, are in see related: Peer Groups and Owner Roundtables. The legal line is owned by see related: Antitrust Lines for Associations and Owner Groups. This is not legal advice; Step 2 tells you where to bring a lawyer in.

Step 1: Invite owners who do not compete with each other, then check for the overlaps you missed

Start with six to ten owners of different trades in the same area. Different trades is the first filter, and it is not enough on its own. Look for three kinds of overlap:

• Shared services. Plumbing and HVAC shops both replace water heaters. Lawn care and pest control both treat lawns for insects. Electricians and generator installers both install transfer switches. Handyman shops overlap with half the room.
• Shared labor. Every shop in town hires office staff and customer service reps from the same pool, and several hire general laborers and drivers from it.
• Shared customers in a gatekeeper role. Property managers, builders, and home warranty companies may buy from several members.

You do not need zero overlap; a local group with zero overlap is three people. You need to know where each overlap sits so the ground rules can fence it.

What breaks if you skip it. Two members find out in month five that they bid against each other for the same property management company, after a discussion that went into how each prices those contracts.

Step 2: Write the ground rules before anyone sits down, and have a lawyer read them once

The ground rules are the most important document the group will have. Write them, send them with the invitation, and ask each member to agree in writing. Have an attorney who knows antitrust read them once before the first meeting; a single review is a small cost against the exposure a drifting group creates.

OWNER ROUNDTABLE - GROUND RULES
1. Never discussed, by any members, ever:
   - prices, fees, trip charges, discounts,
     markups, or plans to change any of them
   - wages, pay ranges, raises, benefits
   - hiring or not hiring each other's people
   - which customers, vendors, platforms or
     warranty companies to use or refuse
   - who serves which area or which customers
   - any bid any member is preparing
2. Fair ground: methods, systems, tools,
   hiring process, safety, local government,
   insurance, training, lessons learned.
3. Any member may stop a discussion by
   saying "rule 1". It stops, no debate.
4. What a member shares about their shop
   stays in the room.
5. Minutes are kept and read at the next
   meeting. Nothing is decided as a group
   about how members run their businesses.

The never-discussed list tracks the agreements Section 1 of the Sherman Act (15 U.S.C. 1) treats as illegal on their face between competitors (prices, bids, customer or territory allocation, group boycotts) plus the wage and no-poach agreements federal enforcers treat the same way, and it is deliberately wider than the law: it bans the discussion, not only the agreement, because an agreement can be inferred from a discussion followed by matching conduct.

Why rule 3 is the one that matters most. A list of forbidden topics works only if someone can enforce it in the moment without an argument. "Rule 1" is two words anyone can say, including the newest member, and it ends the topic without anyone accusing anyone of anything.

What breaks if you skip it. Rules written after a problem read as an accusation against whoever caused it, and members leave rather than sign.

Step 3: Use the same agenda every time

A fixed agenda keeps the meeting short and makes drift easier to spot. A 90-minute breakfast that works:

Why the reading every time. It feels like a formality by month three. That is the point: it makes the rule part of how the meeting starts, so nobody has to raise it fresh when a new member joins.

Step 4: Rotate the host and the presenter on a published schedule

Publish a year's schedule: who hosts, who presents, and the topic each presenter has chosen. Topics that work in a mixed-trade group include how you run your hiring process, what your new-hire safety training covers, how you handle a customer review that is unfair, what your insurance renewal looked like and what you did about it, how you set up your service agreements (the structure, not the price), and how you work with the city's permit office.

What breaks if you skip it. The founder hosts and presents for a year, burns out, and the group stops.

Step 5: Keep minutes that say what was discussed

Someone takes minutes: date, attendees, the presentation topic, a line on each member's problem, the commitments, and any time rule 3 was used. Read them at the start of the next meeting and keep them in one place.

Why. Minutes are the group's memory, and they are also its record of what was and was not discussed. A group whose minutes show "presentation: interview process; rule 3 invoked once, topic dropped" has a contemporaneous account of a group that stayed on the right side of the line. Minutes that have gaps, or that nobody keeps, leave each member's recollection as the only account.

If a discussion got past the line before anyone stopped it. Stop it as soon as anyone notices, and record in the minutes that it was stopped. Anyone who wants no part of what was said should say so out loud in the meeting, and the minutes should say that too; quietly continuing to attend while acting in line with what was discussed is the pattern courts read as agreement. Then the facilitator calls the group's attorney before the next meeting, with the minutes, rather than deciding alone whether it mattered. A member who sets off rule 3 at two meetings in a row gets a private conversation, and a third time ends their membership.

Step 6: Review membership and rules once a year

At the anniversary meeting, go through the member list and the overlap check from Step 1 again. Shops add services; a cleaning company that starts doing carpet restoration now overlaps with a water damage member. A new member joins only after the same overlap check, and only after signing the rules.

Worked example

A pest control owner starts a roundtable with seven members: pest control, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, residential cleaning and lawn care. All seven serve the same county.

Step 1 overlap check. Three overlaps turn up:

• HVAC and plumbing both install water heaters.
• Lawn care and pest control both offer lawn insect treatment.
• All seven hire office staff from the same labor pool, and four of them (HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing) also hire helpers who could work for any of the four.

The ground rules already keep prices, pay and hiring off the table for everyone, so the overlaps do not require separate rules. They require the facilitator to know where the risk sits: a water heater pricing question between the HVAC and plumbing owners is a live competitive exchange, not small talk.

Step 2. The pest control owner sends the rules with the invitation and has her business attorney review them. All seven sign before the first breakfast.

Step 4. Twelve meetings a year with seven members means each member presents once in the first seven months, and five of them present a second time in months eight to twelve. The schedule is published in January.

Month six. During the open discussion after the plumbing owner's presentation on his service agreement structure, the lawn care owner asks the room, "So what's everyone charging for an annual plan these days?" The roofing owner says "rule 1". The question is dropped, and the facilitator moves to commitments. The minutes read: "Rule 3 invoked once during discussion of service agreement pricing; topic dropped." At the next meeting, the lawn care owner asks how each member decides how often to review their own prices, which is a method question, and the discussion goes ahead.

What changes the answer. If the group were all one trade, the overlap would be total and the content rules would have to be tighter still: no discussion of anything that touches the local market for that trade, which leaves safety, training, regulation and the members' dealings with government. A single-trade local group is better run through a trade association chapter, which usually already has antitrust counsel and a written policy.

How to verify the group is set up right

• Every current member signed the ground rules, and the newest member signed before their first meeting.
• The minutes for the last three meetings exist and record any use of rule 3.
• The overlap check was rerun within the last year.
• No minutes record anything decided as a group about how members price, pay, hire or choose customers.

References

• See related: Antitrust Lines for Associations and Owner Groups
• See related: Peer Groups and Owner Roundtables
• See related: The Roundtable That Drifted Into Pricing
• Sherman Act, Section 1 (15 U.S.C. 1)