Running a board meeting that helps you
A practical guide for founders to board meetings that earn their time: the pre-read, the agenda, how to reach decisions, and how often to meet.
Most founders inherit their first board meeting rather than design it. An investor joins, a date goes in the diary, and the founder spends a week building slides that recount the last quarter to people who could have read it in ten minutes. The meeting runs long, nothing gets decided, and everyone leaves a little more tired than they arrived.
It does not need to be like that. Between us we have sat in well over a thousand board meetings, and the good ones share a few habits. None of them are complicated.
Send the pre-read, and mean it
The single most useful change most companies can make is to move the reporting out of the meeting.
Send a written pre-read at least three working days before the meeting. It should cover the numbers, what went well, what did not, and the questions you want the board to help with. Write it in prose where you can. A paragraph forces you to say what a chart only implies.
Then assume it has been read. Do not present it again. If a director has not done the reading, that is their problem to fix, and most will fix it quickly once they notice the meeting does not wait for them.
A good pre-read usually runs to six to ten pages. Longer than that, and you are hiding the important parts.
Build the agenda around decisions
An agenda that lists departments (“Sales”, “Product”, “Finance”) invites a tour. An agenda built around questions invites help.
We suggest an order like this:
- Questions on the pre-read, kept to fifteen minutes.
- One or two strategic topics the founder has chosen, each framed as a question the board can answer.
- Decisions that need a formal board vote, such as option grants, budgets and financing.
- A closed session with the independent and investor directors, then a short one with the founder alone.
The second item is where the value sits. Give it at least half the meeting. Choose topics where the board knows something you do not, or where you want to test a view before committing to it: whether to enter a new country, when to hire a chief financial officer, how to price a new product line.
Make decisions visible
Founders often leave a meeting unsure what was agreed. So do directors. Fix that before anyone stands up.
At the end of each topic, say out loud what was decided, who owns it and by when. Write it down. Send those notes within a day, and open the next pre-read with an update on each one. It sounds bureaucratic. In practice it takes five minutes and saves a great deal of confusion three months later.
If a decision is not written down, it will be remade, usually in a worse meeting.
Be clear, too, about which topics need a decision and which you only want views on. Directors behave differently when they know which is which.
Choose a cadence that fits the stage
There is no right frequency for every company, but there are some reasonable defaults:
- Seed: every two months, with a short written update in the months between.
- Series A and B: quarterly, with a monthly update and the occasional call when something important changes.
- Later stages: quarterly, with committees for audit and pay doing more of the detailed work.
What matters more than frequency is that the meetings are predictable. Set the dates for the year in January. Directors will protect dates they have known about for months, and you will stop spending energy chasing diaries.
An example
When Payfield was preparing for its Series C, its board meetings had become long reviews of a growing set of metrics across forty countries. The founders were spending the better part of two weeks on each one.
They made three changes. They moved every metric into a written pre-read with a one-page summary at the front. They limited each meeting to two strategic questions, chosen by the chief executive. And they began sending decision notes the next morning.
Meetings went from four hours to two. Preparation went from two weeks to three days. The board spent its time on the decisions that shaped the next two years, among them which countries to stop selling into, which is the kind of question a board is for.
What the board owes you
All of this asks something of the founder. It should ask something of the directors too. A good board member reads the pre-read, comes with questions, keeps confidences, and makes themselves available between meetings when it matters. If yours do not, tell them. Most will welcome the feedback, and the rest are worth knowing about.
Lena’s platform team has templates for the pre-read and decision notes, and any company in our portfolio can ask for them.
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