Mike Stadnisky’s Post

📝Early stage board meetings📝 I just read Fred Wilson's latest newsletter about board meetings (see in the comments). I love his recommendations on how to conduct a first board meeting effectively. Here’s a summary of his suggestions: - Pre-read distribution: Send a pre-read document 2-3 days before the meeting, covering: 📈 Sales updates, pipeline, and projections 💻 Technology updates and key priorities 🛠️ Manufacturing/product updates and partner progress 📊 Financial updates, including balance sheet, P&L, and cash forecast 👥 People updates, including key hires, performance and departures - Pre-read review: Spend 30-60 minutes discussing the pre-read, assuming everyone has read it. - Strategic discussions: Focus on 1-2 key strategic topics, seeking the board's feedback. - Management team: Include key management team members in the pre-read review and strategic discussions. - Executive sessions: Start and end the meeting with an executive session with just the CEO and the board for setup and feedback. A few more tips/suggestions: ⌛Try to share the pre-reading materials up to a week before. You will give board members more time to read and follow-up with any clarifying questions/requests prior to the board meeting. It will help you drive the most value out of the meeting. 📊 Data is king in board meetings. Use charts and OKRs across all areas. 📋 Discuss action items from the last board meetings and how you are tracking them. 🧠 The strategic discussions are incredibly important. Include the matters, current thinking, and possible next steps in the pre-reading materials. 🏗️ Consider the involvement of non-founding team members in the early days. Things are still moving fast and the founders should still be across most business functions. Adjust your thinking based on the frequency and nature of the discussions as well as the size of the business (e.g., quarterly vs. monthly, deep dive vs. updates). 🤝 Use your lead investor to help you generate the first few reports. You want to avoid spending time on data inconsistencies/assumptions and drive investor/founder alignment. 📅 Set up a recurring meeting in your calendars. You might need to move it, but it’s best to have it locked in advance. Scheduling can be painful.

Day 49: Maximize your board meetings with these best practices! Effective board meetings are crucial for the governance and strategic direction of any organization. Here are best practices to ensure these meetings are productive, engaging, and result-oriented: 1. Preparation is Key: Distribute meeting materials, such as agendas, financial reports, and discussion documents, well in advance. This allows board members time to prepare, ensuring more informed and meaningful contributions. 2. Clear Agenda: Structure the agenda clearly with time allocations for each item. Prioritize critical issues and ensure there is a balance between operational updates and strategic discussions. This helps keep the meeting focused and efficient. 3. Define Objectives: Each agenda item should have a clear objective. Whether it's a decision, a discussion, or an update, knowing the purpose in advance helps participants stay on topic and contributes to more effective outcomes. 4. Encourage Participation: Foster an environment where all board members feel encouraged to contribute. Consider rotating chair responsibilities for different agenda items to involve more members actively. 5. Use Consent Agendas: Approve routine items collectively in a single vote with a consent agenda. This frees up time for more substantial discussion on complex or strategic issues. 6. Limit Distractions: Ensure the meeting space is conducive to focus, free from interruptions, and equipped with the necessary technology. Consider rules about device use during the meeting to keep everyone engaged. 7. Record Decisions and Actions: Keep accurate minutes that reflect decisions made and actions assigned, including deadlines. Distribute these minutes promptly after the meeting to keep all members aligned and accountable. 8. Evaluate Meetings: Regularly assess the effectiveness of board meetings. This can be done through quick surveys or feedback sessions at the end of each meeting to gather insights for continuous improvement. 9. Follow-up on Action Items: Monitor the progress of agreed actions and report back in subsequent meetings. This accountability ensures that decisions lead to results and helps maintain momentum between meetings. Implementing these best practices can transform board meetings from routine administrative sessions into dynamic strategic discussions that drive organizational success. Follow for more tips on optimizing board meetings. PS: Need expert technical copywriting or custom Excel applications? Reach out to streamline your board meeting processes and achieve your organizational goals! #boardmeetings #governance #strategicmeeting #meetingtips #productivity #engagement #organizationalsuccess

Sometimes, in business, we get meetinged to death. It's baffling. We know meetings are a huge waste of time. Consider the numbers: → Most employees spend up to a third of their workweek in meetings (Flowtrace) → The average organization spends 15% of its time in meetings (Flowtrace) → In the US, 11 million meetings are held every day (Flowtrace) And yet, there's plenty of evidence to prove that most meetings probably should be an email. → 52% of employees lose attention in the first 30 minutes of a meeting (Flowtrace) → 96% of professionals have missed meetings (Flowtrace) → 71% of senior managers say meetings are unproductive and inefficient (Harvard Business Review) But meetings persist. And sometimes we simply cannot be at our best when multiple meetings fill our schedule, so we need to actively manage our time. Buffer zones are one strategy. What strategies do you use to manage multiple meetings and ensure you can maintain energy throughout the day? _____________ *You should make video content like this. People watch it. Follow me, Rob Deptford, for content marketing insights. *Want high quality leads on autopilot forever? YouTube does that. I give away my strategy for free on my profile page.

If you’re struggling with a longer agenda, and you don’t want it to be another moaning shop come to Question Club 12:30-13:30, Friday 7th June. This month we’ll be looking at how to use different levels of questions to take your team through a thinking process that will lead to the best decisions and actions. Including how to make space for moans, to get the useful feedback from them... ...and then move on. If you can’t wait till June 7th, look out for the Friday Question tomorrow for a sneak preview. And for a fuller experience, sign up for Question Club, link below. Please note the slightly later start time and shorter session 12:30-13:30 , just one hour for top tips on our topic, time to think up your own questions, and tweaks to make them even better! Question Club is an interactive hour to think through the issues you and your team are facing, the outcomes you want, and how to frame the agenda questions to get you there. Sign up with the link in the comments below. Each month there’ll be content on a particular aspect of framing great agenda questions, and time for you to think through your own agenda in pairs or small groups.  Sessions will be run in a Thinking Environment® - this is a warm and welcoming group, dedicated to giving you time to think and come up with the dynamic questions that will drive the best independent thinking in your meetings and one to ones. Free until September,  Question Club is open to anyone who has worked with me in the past, fans of the Friday Question, and to anyone who has ever struggled with an agenda or just wants more thinking, more engagement, more collaboration in their meetings.  Sign up now and I’ll send you a reminder two weeks in advance. #Questions #GettingThingsDone #Management #Meetings #Agenda #QuestionClub #BetterMeetings #ProjectManagement #PowerfulQuestions #ThinkingEnvironment #agendas

Here's how to take your board meetings to the next level.

Here's how to take your board meetings to the next level.

How expensive vs. efficient are your internal meetings? If you've been following me, you've probably heard me talk a lot about the Level 10 Meeting. What’s a Level 10 Meeting (L10), and why is it a game changer for your business? An L10 is more than just a meeting. It’s a structured, weekly check-in designed to keep your team aligned, accountable, and laser-focused on solving the right issues. Here’s how it works: 👉 You gotta start on time and end on time. No more wasting hours in unproductive meetings. 👉 Review your Scorecard and ensure everyone is hitting their numbers. 👉 Solve real issues. IDS (Identify, Discuss, Solve) the real problems holding your business back. L10s don't just force you to bring your problems out into the open; they help you solve them for good. Teams that run effective Level 10 Meetings consistently rate their meetings a "10" out of 10 for productivity, hence the name! So, if your meetings aren’t moving the needle for your business, it’s time to rethink how you’re running them.

I've just sent my 84th board pack... this is how our Board packs went from dreadful, to decent (or so I think...): In the early days of Togather, board meetings feelt like an imposition. We were winning business all over the place, rapidly growing and through a combination of serious hard work and serious beginner’s luck felt like we knew our industry better than anyone. This meant we weren’t as well prepped for our board meetings as we could’ve been. And this was our major error. The worst was a a day sometime in 2017 when George Simpson was trying to order ten 30-page board packs in five minutes, pages scattered over the floor, after we’d somehow printed all the pages numbers in the wrong order. The board packs were delivered slowly to each member as the meeting carried on. Your board can and should be your confrontational friend, a group that challenges you and from whom you should take advice. The key is they can only do that if they’re properly prepped and up to date with everything the company’s doing, and all of that starts with a good board pack. These are my 5 tips for a great board pack. 🏄♀️ Make them incredibly easy to digest: It’s in your interest for the board to come to meetings fully updated with everything the company is working on and all of its results. Make sure that within the first five pages they can see all the vital information, highlighting particularly important stats and try and make them no longer than 12 pages overall. 🐼 Consistency: Make sure your board are able to compare the performance of this month/period to the previous one easily and make sure you’re reproducing the same stats and updates. If something no longer becomes relevant, make sure you tell the board why, and if there’s a new stat, take the time to highlight why it’s important. If you're reporting on different priorities every month, the board can't understand what actually matters. Bonus - send it every month on the same date. 💆♂️ Get the team to do the work for you: Get the relevant people in the team to put together their department sections as the month progresses. They will most likely do a significantly better job than you and it will save you valuable hours. We also use the same slides for our internal Snr leadership reporting - two birds, one stone. 💅 Avoid vanity, it’s a waste of everyone’s time: There are stats which sound good (I’m looking at you ‘jargon term impressions’) but we all know don’t really mean anything. Avoid these like the plague with board packs as while it can be tempting to try and impress your investors, ultimately good board comms are all about honestly and if you ever feel like you’re pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes you’re only cheating yourself. 🐸 (bonus) - use Pitch for realtime editing. It’s been amazing for us in allowing multiple people to jump in and work on the document at once. Let me know if you’re keen for me to share a redacted version of our board pack and I can put that together!

“Don’t just subtract meetings — redesign them.” In our effort to always be optimizing operations for the teams we serve, our team recently came across the HBR study on meeting design, and was most struck by this insight from a team who did an internal “meeting reset”. “We were surprised by how much time savings … came from changes other than eliminating meetings completely. Only 30% of the time savings came from canceling meetings entirely; the remaining 70% came from volunteers who redesigned the meetings they kept.” Team members who re-designed meetings did things like:  - meeting less frequently (i.e. monthly instead of weekly)  - shortening meetings (i.e. 30 mins instead of an hour)  - having less attendees (i.e. narrowing the stakeholders involved)  - ⭐ replacing time-consuming aspects with asynchronous updates (i.e. getting status updates from PM tools vs. each team member sharing a status update during a meeting) It’s intriguing to think about shifting the structure of meetings rather than just having fewer meetings altogether. Maybe how we meet is as important — or more important — than how often we meet.

What role does keeping meeting minutes have in an organization❓ Well, for an array of reasons, meeting minutes are essential to an organization's performance and operation. It 👉 serves 📌 as an official log of the decisions, talks, and actions taken during sessions.        📌 used in the future to remember discussions, decisions, and agreements. 📌 legal and compliance requirement   📌 communication tool for absentees 👉 ensures 📌 all participants are in agreement on decisions and next steps by detailing meeting outcomes. 📌 find areas for improvement in decision-making procedures, meeting facilitation 📌 follow-up actions 👉 outlines 📌 who is in charge of what and by when 👉 supports 📌 monitoring and tracking of decisions being implemented 👉 offers 📌 a documentation of the hazards that were recognized, evaluated, and addressed 👉 used 📌 as a neutral source of information to clarify the topics and decisions that were discussed and decided 👉 helps       📌 maintain organizational history for new hires or stakeholders to learn 📌 lessen the chance of misinterpretation or misunderstandings 📌 avoid the need for repeated conversations. In broadly, meeting minutes are a crucial instrument for communication, accountability, decision-making, and managerial oversight. They enable the organization operate more effectively, transparently, and clearly. Desirable elements to include in meeting minutes       🔹 date       🔹 location      🔹 type of meeting       🔹 attendees       🔹 absentees       🔹 minutes noted by       🔹 agenda       🔹 points of discussion       🔹 action items with a deadline, responsibility,       🔹 information about the next meeting Agenda ought to contain       🔸 action items of the previous meeting       🔸 pending items of the previous meeting, if any       🔸 new items ✳ However, there isn't an exact standard for maintaining it. Every organization employs its own template.