Prepping for Your Board Meeting
If you involve your team, set a solid agenda, make sure everyone understands their role, and prepare answers for the questions you expect, you'll be fine.
Presenting before the board can be stressful, especially for first-time founders. Here are some simple rules to guide you.
Take time to prepare as a team
You have a solid management team — whether all internal, or augmented w/outsourced advisors like a fractional CFO — use them. It's important that you all prepare together so you can present a united front. You don't want anyone, including yourself, to feel surprised or blindsided.
To get everyone on the same page, be sure to:
Have all materials ready at least three business days in advance. That gives everyone adequate time to review them and correct any errors. Those materials may take days or even weeks to prepare, so make sure all your stakeholders know what's expected of them long before the drop-dead deadline. Your accounting and finance teams, for example, will be most efficient in their prep work — and their reports and forecasts will give you and your board the most accurate, actionable insights possible — if they have longer lead times to prepare.
Create an agenda together and then do a walk-through to be sure each team member knows who will speak to each point. The CEO or CFO doesn't have to be the only one speaking at the meeting. In fact, letting others speak builds confidence in the larger team. You don't want to talk over each other, nor do you want to leave awkward silences because each of you thought someone else was going to answer a particular question.
Anticipate questions from the board. Preparing concise answers and gathering supporting data in advance keeps the meeting productive. But you don't have a crystal ball, and there will be curveballs you didn't prepare for. If you don't know the answer to a question, say so — but promise to follow up later, and then do it. As much as anything else, these meetings are an opportunity for the board to assess your team's competence and credibility.
Improve your materials and your process each time
Conduct a post-mortem after each meeting, when it's still fresh in your minds, to discuss which materials landed well and which can still be improved. For example:
Make your materials easy to read. If you noticed everyone squinting at your presentation, use a larger font next time. And if you found yourself flipping back and forth through the deck out of sequence, be sure to align your slides with the meeting agenda in the future.
Be concise. That applies to both the amount of information on each slide and the number of slides in your deck. Don't jam so much information onto each slide that the presentation becomes an exercise in speed-reading.
Be consistent. Follow the financial reporting cadence agreed upon between the board, CEO and CFO. Also, find a presentation format that works and stick to it, starting with the headings in your table of contents: State of the Business, Financial Update, Strategic Initiative Update — whatever works for you and your board. If you change the format each meeting, your audience will spend valuable time (and brainpower) searching for information instead of listening to what you're saying and giving you valuable advice.
Maximize comprehension with context. Before creating a new presentation, look back at the last one. Assume that board members and investors are doing the same thing. They will judge your performance by comparing where the company is now to where it was at the last meeting. Be prepared to explain changes in numbers if applicable.
Know your numbers. When setting goals for the company, use high-level financials and compare key performance indicators to benchmarks (budget/forecast/industry standard, etc.) You know what the company's most important financial metrics are; being prepared to explain them well will keep the board focused on driving value-added insights back to you. Plus, have the full financial statements ready to pull up and drill into when needed to answer detailed questions. When presenting a forecast update, include a comparison to the previous forecast and identify risk areas as well as growth opportunities.
Once the meeting starts, stick to the agenda
The purpose of creating an agenda is to ensure the meeting stays on track and nothing is accidentally omitted. It's also a simple way to keep all participants aligned on shared goals. This might seem self-evident, but remember: Many board members are involved in multiple businesses and probably haven't kept track of the day-to-day ups and downs of your business as closely as you have. So approach every meeting as an opportunity for a reset.
To make the most of that opportunity, be sure to:
Start with a broad overview of your company's mission. Follow that with a recap of the previous meeting. That establishes a frame of reference and creates the proper context for the current agenda.
Include a follow-up on the status of strategic initiatives for the budgeted year. Let the appropriate team members lead their respective initiative updates. You'll generally only have time to dive deeply into one strategic initiative during each meeting.
Be aware of the time so that you follow your agenda to its conclusion. This might require some diplomacy. If an unanticipated issue threatens to sidetrack the meeting, use the same approach you would for addressing a question that you can't answer readily: Explain that you don't have the data (or the time) available to speak authoritatively on the matter on the spot. Then arrange to follow up later to give the issue the attention it deserves. Or, when appropriate, offer to put the issue on the next subcommittee meeting agenda.
A "new business" segment at the end of each meeting can also be an appropriate mechanism for deferring topics that aren't on the agenda. (If there's no time for that segment, you can suggest one of the options mentioned above.) On a related note, if a board member wants to advise on a management issue that doesn't rise to a board-level decision, arrange to discuss it with them directly after the meeting or schedule a follow-up call.
Own your failures and share credit for successes
Nobody likes excuses. And nobody expects perfection. Your board just wants to know you and your team are capable of learning from your mistakes. Admitting you've made them is the first step to winning the board's confidence. The second step is assessing the problem and identifying the solution. Then it's all about execution.
And don't forget to celebrate your successes. Just be sure to give credit where it's deserved. Your board knows that building a successful company is a team effort. Recognizing the contributions of your team members in front of your board boosts morale and makes you look like the right leader who knows what it takes to win.
