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Board Management
How to build, manage, and get the most from your board.
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meetings
although that doesn't change as directed to some extent, but it's more visible and there's more structure. You know, you are really accountable to the external shareholders in all the decisions you make. You're always accountable to shareholders....
is the management team getting involved. Fifteen years ago, it would just be the CEO, the cofounder maybe, and the board. We'll meet for four, five hours, discuss topics, maybe bring in the management team person for one slice, the CFO, and then...
that you're actually making up for. As you get a bit further on, really, it's, you know, starting to get some of that discipline around the overall business and getting some structure around it and getting your just the predictability in the stuff...
And so is that let's move over Brian's QBR to an actual board meeting. And I think it was mostly compliance and for the board, and this board meeting was much more for the management team. I'll tell you one other change that we're working on is we...
Two days of the CEO's time. I get that the there's a lot to do, but she has a big job. See, I would have argued historically. A lot of a board's job is compliance. Right? Yeah. And and a lot of what a board does is make sure you don't back up over a...
Second, you need a voice of the customer on the board. You need somebody who represents customers. So at Square, we got the CEO of Shake Shack Randy Geruti on the board, and he was amazing because the voice of the customer. The other thing I always...
other little area maybe you could give some advice on is, as later investors come in, they typically want to simplify the board. And what they really mean by that is, hey, all the minority shareholders and seed investors, how do we get them off the...
if you have more than one yeah. Well, I mean, technically, I suppose if you have a director, they are the sole director on the board. But once you have more than one director of your company, that's your board of directors, those two people. In The...
in The States to have a CEO and a chairman in the same role. I do think that's not so great. I think it is actually good to have the division of responsibility. So have a great chairman that can kind of work that through and, you know, hopefully...
And in the technology arena, I think the early stages, you really wanna have someone who has some skill of operating the business. And in many cases, you know, you have this discussion about an exec chair, nonexec chair. You know, there is no...
is the opposite of, I think, the game on the field today. The the board of directors shows that that individual is giving you their most precious resource, which is their reputation and their time. Whereas anybody can buy some shares in your company...
And I think there's a lot of guidelines around that now that if you apply it in a not just a mechanical way, but if you apply it in a way of just looking for what are we really trying to achieve here and, you know, therefore, what's the contribution...
That can spot the blind spots that the founders might not necessarily see and be like, hey, guys. This is happening. Yeah. You you really wanna be that that mirror. So It's interesting because in my mind, when I think about public company boards, I...
and I just think is phenomenal, said this on a on a conference call we did the other day. He said, look. CEO should look at the board as a world class set of resources at their disposal. Right? And they should be thinking, how do I take advantage of...
One of the most interesting things about being on boards is that it gives you a much better perspective of what it means to an executive by being on a board. Once a company gets a certain size, I think the CEO needs to try to see if they can join a...
because partly we have them. I mean, there's there's a growing group of people who built businesses over here, but those practitioners are joining the boards. And that shifts the mentality. Right? Because we are on that far part of the risk curve in...
We have really smart board members that work hard to recruit and they're happy and they have contacts. It's not like they're clueless, they're great. I said, I want 50% of the words to be out of the board's mouth and 50% of the words of my ideas...
The one thing just for founders and others, I the and, obviously, HubSpot is a public company. In some ways, it's different. But so many founders like this idea of doing a memo based board meeting. Okay? I'm tired of reading the slides. Read the...
I just none of this is probably already a big upgrade. That's I was quite happy to have a board meeting yesterday. It's they're two days long. We've been doing the same board format for about a hundred years. And it just got a little rote, and...
Hopefully, if they're adults and they've got to experience that they're deeply troubled by those numbers. So, they also have to sit through their own management team meetings and present all those numbers. Yeah. A lot of accountability in that...
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