Board Meeting Preparation Tips?

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I would love someone (or a few people) to give me some “magic wands” here for how they prepare for a board meeting. Friday is my second one for my start up, sweet & charming and I’m still trying to figure it out…but, this is what I’m doing to prepare:

1. Focus Group: We had playgroup today at our house and I was in charge, so I thought I use the time to talk to my friends/moms about princess-related products that I sell for sweet & charming. I demo-ed a lot of products and let the kids play with stuff…even though this was not really in preparation for my board meeting, it did help me. My friends were asking me “where did you get that book? How much is that skirt? etc. “I didn’t see that at your kiosk…” “Do you have Disney dress ups?” NO. It’s time to have a website, I think. It keeps coming up…we’ll discuss it tomorrow.

2. De-stress! After I put my kids in bed I took a long hot bath because even though I have an awesome Board (Joe Franchesci, COO of Naartjie, Jeff Donovan, Donovan Developments, Leslie Smoot, Set Designer/Props for Film, Joe Atkin, Manager of Sorenson Capital, and Karl Larsen, VP of Retail, Roberts), I’m still a bit nervous about it. It helped immensely.

3. We’re using Free Conference Call, so I need to email everyone the phone number for them to call in. The first time we met in person, but that isn’t possible this time, so we are using this option.

4. I’ll create an Agenda and email it to them so they can review it/follow along during our call.

5. Financial Reports. I’m looking over my Quickbooks and compiling all the essential data they want to know about how our holiday kiosk went and holiday events. I’ll email them these figures as well.

6. Evaluation: Since my business is a retail-based one, I’m creating a summary of what inventory did well, what didn’t sell so great, and what price points worked well for us.

7. Marketing efforts summary, reviewing what we did do for marketing and how effective or ineffective it was

8. Goal Setting/Brain-storming, I’m going to present my ideas and ask for their advice; in my case I need to hire a manager, so I’m going to see if they know anyone they can refer to me. I’m also considering launching an ecommerce site soon, so we will discuss the pros/cons of that.

9. I’ll ask someone else to type minutes so I can focus on the discussion.

10. Following the meeting: A Summary of Objectives will be created and I’ll email it to the group

I suppose if my business was more involved there would be much more planning and preparation…but this is what I think is necessary for the start up stage I’m at. What do you think? Am I missing any vital steps??

Share This