The Hidden Value of Board Meeting Preparation

It is time. Time to work on the board package, again. The effort feels like an interruption to the team. A disruption to completing the next tasks on our collective to-do list. Some even lament that perhaps in our next company, we could avoid all this work by finding a way to build the company without investors.

Make no mistake. Preparing for a Board of Directors meeting does require a substantial amount of work for the management team of a startup.  However, it is essential work when you have raised outside capital from venture capitalists and angel investors. Sophisticated investors like these know that a critical element of providing good governance for their portfolio companies is an active and attentive Board of Directors. 

Role of a Board of Directors

The role of a Board of Directors is to help a company grow and prosper while representing the appropriate interests of its shareholders and relevant stakeholders. The management leadership team of the company is accountable to the Board and needs to provide regular updates as well as solicit the input of the Board on Board-relevant topics. In an early-stage company, Boards of Directors often meet four to six times per year.

The Hidden Value of Board Preparation

The key to maximizing the value to the startup is to recognize and leverage the hidden value of the process of Board meeting preparation. There is an opportunity that is inherent in the preparation process. It forces a break from solving the tactical problems of the company’s day-to-day activities. It requires cultivating a more strategic perspective and synthesizing the challenges and opportunities facing the startup. Once I discovered that Board meeting preparation amounts to a mini-strategic planning process, I started investing more time. Addressing strategic questions with your leadership team and developing the next phase of your plans is excellent preparation for a Board meeting.

Tips for Board Package Preparation

A few notions are critically important when considering preparing for a Board of Directors meeting:

• Boards of Directors think about startups at a higher level of abstraction than the management team.  They engage with the startup every month or three rather than every day. That necessarily means that the Board is considering only the most essential factors, the big picture, the critical path to success. To effectively engage the Board’s point of view requires the management team to step back and think at that higher level.
  
  
• Including anyone from the management team who will be attending the Board meeting (as well as others, if appropriate) in focused strategic planning working sessions as part of preparing the Board package will ensure that everyone is on the same page to contribute to the discussion in the board room.
  
  
• Maintaining the cadence of the startup’s story for the Board of Directors requires connecting the dots between Board meetings. That means starting the preparation process by revisiting the content of the last Board meeting and, considering what has happened since that meeting, connecting the story to the present and current vision of the future.

While good Board meeting preparation does require an investment of time, it can also help the management team scope out of day-to-day issues and think about the company’s strategic levers in a way that brings the group into focused alignment. This makes the process produce value in and of itself.