Field Guide
Thank you! You are now subscribed.
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
Back to top

Managing a Series A Board Meeting

Learning to lead the board is part of becoming a world-class CEO and founder. Hopefully, my perspective as an investor is helpful to other entrepreneurs at early stage startups who are learning to manage investors and boards for the first time. I think in some ways it applies to seed stage entrepreneurs too, who may not have official boards, but do meet with the investors on some regular cadence.


Timing: At the Series A stage, you should have the board meetings every 6–8 weeks. Duration ~2–3 hours (not more).


Purpose: Don’t think of the board meetings as a time when you and the team are meant to present your “progress report.” The board meetings are for the CEO and the executive team. It is the occasional opportunity to step back and think about the strategy of the company and its main functional areas. The goals are to ask:


  • Are we doing the right things? 
  • How is our progress against our plans? 
  • Is this still the right plan? 


These meetings are an opportunity to get feedback from the board — who in theory should be people you value input from and trust. If you don’t do this step back every 6–8 weeks, I guarantee you won't do it enough because the day to day will consume you. In a market that is moving fast, these check-ins are critical.


Style note: The board is always evaluating the CEO to see how it can help. You must lead your board the way you lead your team. If you aren’t leading your board, people will wonder if you are doing the CEO job well. The board meetings are not SALES meetings to the board. This is time to candidly discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly. You have an experienced board which means you will NOT scare them with anything. You are all in the boat together and the only way they can help is if they know what is working and what isn’t. Intellectual honesty and transparency about the facts of reality greatly improve your chances of success.


Board meeting agenda: The CEO should start with highlights and lowlights. In 10 minutes, give the board the update on how the company is doing in all areas. In the CEO’s own words — 


  • How is the company doing? 
  • How is the market? 
  • What are the top 1–2 things on your mind that are keeping you up at night?


If the board meeting were to end after 10 minutes, the board would have the 80/20 on the situation.


Next there should be overviews of the critical 4–5 areas.


Goals: For each critical functional area, there should be stated current quarter and annual goals that can be measured. At each board meeting, review the goals and recap how you are doing against those goals. What’s working and what isn’t?


Areas to Focus On: The key areas to cover are similar to every Seed stage or Series A funded startup:


1. Team — Show your current org chart and desired org chart. What are the open positions you want to fill immediately? Show your pipeline of candidates. What are the other key hires you need to make in the next 3-6 months? How is morale? Any attrition? (wanted and unwanted).


2. Sales Pipeline — Detail the current customer conversations in progress. What stage are they in? (Establish a qualification label everyone can understand for each stage of the sales process.) Note for each account in progress: What is required to close? What is the use case? Identify that use case which BEST fits your current product offering and be sure you are addressing a “hair on fire!” situation.


3. Product/Engineering — Produce a clear, visual timeline everyone can understand. Include dates that are tied to specific releases and the functionality you expect with each. Constantly ask yourself — Does your engineering/product road map align with the “What is required to close?” for top accounts. Are you prioritizing what your desperate users need?


4. Marketing — Review with the board the marketing “plan” for the company. Any updates on outbound activities? Demand Generation plan and targets (top of the sales funnel pipeline which includes any content strategy, PR, conferences, cold calling). What are your goals in terms of awareness? Quantify them so you at least have something to measure against. Website visits? Articles published? Qualified leads? Distinguish between who is just interested in getting educated about what you do and who has a timeline, project, budget, and authority to buy your product. Marketing is revenue creation. Sales is revenue conversion. So how is your revenue creation engine working?


5. Finance — Walk through your 12 month operating plan including monthly and quarterly targets. The board will review with you how you are doing against the plan. It is less important that the targets are precisely correct. It’s more important that you have measurable goals and can talk together with your board about whether they are right or wrong and how you should adjust.


Download the outline deck for a Series A Board Meeting here.


Focus: Typically it is too much to cover all 5 areas in detail. Instead, the better approach is to give at least an overview for each of the main functional areas of the business (1–2 slides for each area). You want to keep the format generally the same from board meeting to board meeting so everyone can easily track progress. At each board meeting, it is normal for the CEO to want to do a deep dive into one key area and discuss and get feedback on the plan and the metrics. These are NOT brainstorming sessions. These are meant to be the CEO leading the thinking on the plan and talking through the metrics. And then getting feedback on the go forward plan to improve. Do you need additional headcount? Is the current leader of this function not up to the task? Why isn’t the team hitting its targets? etc.


Who talks? Who is present? Over time, the board would expect your VPs who are responsible for each area to present their sections of the board deck. Early stage founders might not have all of those executives, but that’s a great reason to spend time on the org chart and talk through the plan and timing of such hires. As you hire great VPs, you will have more time as the CEO to work on the strategic decisions for the business — which only you can do. There should be an open session where all Directors, Observers, and Executives can participate and a closed session where the board reviews sensitive matters like compensation.


Goals to Accomplish with the Series A Funds:


Team — Get you more “A players” on the engineering team and start to build a Go-To-Market team and engine with an early sales rep. Once you are clear about our desperate user and use case, you can start adding marketing resources.


Product — Understand your highest priority use case — the situation where you can land and delight early customers. Then make sure your engineering road map and timeline are prioritized based on this.


Sales Pipeline — Clarity on which conversations are just conversations and those that are likely sales in the next 90 or 180 days. Life and death difference between “we are excited about what you guys are doing and want to learn more” and “we have to have that ASAP.” If there is one thing startups get wrong, it is having “happy ears” and thinking customers really want to buy, but not qualifying what it will take to actually close a deal. 


Reference Customers — You need early evangelists. The accounts that use your product and want to tell everyone how happy they are about the choice. Aim for 5–10 of these in the next 12 months. It will take iterations with them on product to make sure they are thoroughly delighted with our solution. You simply can’t add aggressively to sales expense (headcount) until you have those 5–10 delighted customers. The worst thing a founder can do is add to sales expense too fast before the product is showing signs from customers that they’ve nailed it.


Lastly, remember that there is no one right style or way to run a board meeting. No one is perfect at it starting out. Running a board meeting really is an art and a muscle you build up over time. But it is part of being a great CEO and critical to learn. Communicating with your board and capturing the key performance indicators for the business in a way that explains what is happening is essential to success.

Written by
John Vrionis
Co-Founder & Managing Partner
Meet
John Vrionis

Startup Glossary

Startup glossary for Founders

Read this next
Back to Top
Scaling Your Organization