A guide to productive board meetings
Board meetings might conjure up scenes from classic movies—or Mr. Monopoly—but they’re a lot less mythical in real life. Here are a few tips for running productive board meetings.
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Ah, the board meeting. Depending on your age, this might conjure up images of that scene where they go to the bank in Mary Poppins, or perhaps Frank Sinatra. Or maybe it’s something you dread having to do every quarter, because it feels scary. The good news is: when run well, your board meeting can not only be painless, it can actually be useful.
Here are a few things I do to run productive board meetings at Pilot:
Make sure there are no surprises
The most important rule of board meetings: nothing should be shocking or new to anyone during the board meeting. If you’re anticipating that something in the agenda might concern someone on your board, pull that person aside and review it with them individually several days beforehand.
Separately, send a pre-read. About a week before each board meeting, we send over the full agenda and slides and encourage folks to spend time with it before the meeting. This does two things: everyone shows up with the necessary context to have a discussion about what’s on the agenda, and it keeps the meeting short and efficient.
Keep the agenda clear and consistent
The basic format of our board deck remains the same quarter-over-quarter, so people know what to expect:
CEO update: review the company’s quarterly results for 20 minutes—what’s working, what’s not working, what we’re going to do next, and the health of our various metrics.
Department update: Each department head presents what’s been happening within their teams for 10-20 minutes each (e.g. Sales, Marketing, Finance, Engineering).
Discussion questions: Set aside ~20 minutes to discuss 1-2 specific questions that my co-founders and I want the board’s perspective on. (We share the specific questions and additional context before the meeting.)
Closed session: Admin/housekeeping items like approving previous minutes, approving option grants, new 409(a)s, etc., as well as any sensitive discussion that really has to be restricted to just the board members with no one else in the room.
The board meets for lunch immediately before the meeting—you don’t want your board to be hangry. We typically hold three hours for the meeting itself (1pm-4pm), though we’re typically done by 3pm.
Be thoughtful about what you ask your investors
Many new founders are tempted to use the board meeting as an opportunity to have an open-ended discussion with a group of smart people, and as an opportunity to bounce ideas off the wall. Here’s why you shouldn’t do it, and what you should do instead:
You and your team are deeply familiar with the day-to-day operations of your business. Your investors are not. Without the right framing, your investors just aren’t well-equipped to give you valuable or actionable advice.
There are probably a hundred things going on at your company right now. As the CEO, you need to know how to direct your board’s attention by asking the right questions and providing the right context. Lean into questions that can leverage your investors’ industry knowledge or subject-matter expertise. And per above, share those questions with the board beforehand so that you can get the best answers.
For example: “We’re pursuing a large partnership with Company ABC—what have you seen go wrong in partnerships like these in the past??”
Curate your guest list
Or said another way, make sure to have as few people in the room as possible. Your board members are hopefully all very smart individuals. One of the occasional dangers of smart individuals is that they assume that their competence in Domain X also translates over to Domain Y, and they’re sometimes unafraid to make “helpful suggestions”.
Your executive team is generally in the room with you (because they’re presenting the sections above), so these suggestions can very easily create a bunch of thrash and additional work for you. An offhand comment from your board to your CTO about how Competitor X recently launched Product Feature Y which helped them increase revenue by Z% can inadvertently influence your product roadmap. In the same way that your offhand comment can accidentally steer the ship, anyone in the board meeting can also accidentally steer your company’s direction.
This is doubly painful because the suggestion from the first-year VC associate who just happens to be present at the meeting can have just as much sway as that of the seasoned partner who knows your business intimately. Even if they’re not formally “on the board,” they’re still able to influence the discourse in the room. (If this example sounds just a little too specific… don’t ask how I learned this lesson.)
In short: keep the number of people in the room during your meetings as small as possible. (Relatedly, this is why I’m not a huge fan of formally granting additional “board observer” seats to your investors, if you can avoid it.)
As a busy founder, you might be tempted to view board meetings as “just another thing to get through”. That would be a mistake. Remember, your board is there to be helpful. But if you don’t actively orient your board towards helping you with the things you need help with, then they’ll try to be helpful according to what they think you need… which may or may not be what you want.
The board meeting is one instance where you can have a productive, high-level discussion with your investors as long as you intentionally design your board meetings to be effective. So structure your board meetings in a way that makes it easy for them to know what to expect and how to best help you.