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Board Meeting Frequency
Brad Feld has a blog post up on how often venture backed companies should have board meetings.
It's one of his classic "how to" posts that make Brad's blog a must read.
Here's the summary paragraph in case you don't feel compelled to click thru (you should):
Our experience suggests a private, venture-backed company should have between 8 and 12 meetings a year, with at least half of them face to face. As a company grows and matures, the number of in person meetings will logically decrease, but should never fall below one each quarter, preferably in the first month of the quarter so the performance of the previous quarter can be reviewed while it is still fresh and current.
I think that's solid advice. But I like monthly meetings myself and I hate doing board meetings via phone. The only thing you can do well over the phone is update people. Forget about having a meaningful discussion ovder the phone unless the call is very short and you have a very specific item to discuss.
Comments (1) | Posted September 21, 2006 in Venture Capital and Technology
Comments
i'd argue for quarterly board meetings.
consider:
there are ~21 work days per month. holding a board meeting once per month, then, eats up at least 5% of the managements work time.
that seems like an awful lot to me
(and i say 'at least" because typically management spends another 1/2 or even full day preparing for the board meeting -- creating presentations and reports etc.)
finally, a good ceo will spend a huge amount of his/her time communicating to the directors and investors, essentially in a continuous dialogue, and will make the management team available to investors and directors on demand. and good investors/directors should make themselves available to management on demand.
so much of the need for board meetings should be taken care of that way.
reducing formal board meetings to quarterly reduces management time consumption from 5+% down to 1.7+%. a much better allocation, i think
Posted by: steve | Sep 21, 2006 5:33:52 PM
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