A Baseline Agenda for Board Meetings

December 6, 2012

Every quarter, I get calls or emails from my portfolio company CEOs asking me what I’d like to have on the next board meeting agenda. From now on, I’m simply going to refer them to this post.

And in this post, I lean heavily on Bill Conroy’s board meeting agenda template. Bill is an advisor to OpenView and sits on several of our portfolio company boards.

The baseline agenda for board meetings for an expansion-stage technology company should look like this:

1) Market review (Product Management Lead)

  • What has changed from the last meeting?
  • How is the competitive landscape evolving?
  • Why did we win/lose deals?
  • Is our market share growing?
  • What is the market saying about us?

2) Product review (Product Development Lead)

  • How has the product roadmap changed?
  • What is our roadmap progress?
  • How well is the dev team executing?
  • Are we innovating?

3) Sales and marketing review (Sales and Marketing Leads)

  • Do we have sufficient pipeline coverage?
  • Are the customer acquisition and retention economics improving?
  • What is the sales forecast for the quarter (not the CRM forecast)?
  • Are we still staffed to hit the revenue targets?

4) Control book financial review (CFO)

  • What insights do we derive from the financial metrics?
  • How are we progressing against the top five strategic metrics?
  • What are the insights from other metrics?
  • How is our cash position evolving and are we cash secure?

5) State of the union (CEO)

  • What are the CEO top priorities?
  • How are we progressing against the strategic initiatives?
  • What is the state of our employees and customers?
  • What are key hires we need to make?

6) Operations deep dives (functional leaders)

  • Deep dive into one or two non-recurring topics.

7) Board matters (CEO and CFO)

Each agenda item should take no more than 30-45 minutes and involve no more than 3-4 slides.

All board content should be derived from content already developed by the management team to run the business. Don’t create content exclusively for the board.

Send board members all the information they need a week in advance so that they are very well prepared for the board meeting. The board meeting should be used for discussions, debates and decisions. It should not be a forum exclusively for educating the board.

For more on board of director best practices:

The Chief Executive Officer

Firas was previously a venture capitalist at Openview. He has returned to his operational roots and now works as The Chief Executive Officer of Everteam and is also the Founder of <a href="http://nsquaredadvisory.com/">nsquared advisory</a>. Previously, he helped launch a VC fund, start and grow a successful software company and also served time as an obscenely expensive consultant, where he helped multi-billion-dollar companies get their operations back on track.