As a Business Mentor & CEO Coach to growing companies I recommend that companies that want ot grow quickly should have Board Of Advisor meetings at least four to six times a year.  Each meeting should be three to four hours in length.  Meetings should cover questions sent out at least a week in advance to board members.

After roughly one hour, effective board meetings should shift into creative discussion, insight gathering and debate around two to three critical areas the company is working on. If the meeting is run properly, it should be less like a presentation and more like a group discussion. Challenge each other in a constructive way in order to gain the best possible insights and a sound consensus.

Reviewing financial statements are also worthwhile at these meetings as board members tend to ask stuff that employees do not.  Reviewing financial statements with your board WILL save and make you money long term.

Lastly, each member should be adding to all topics and not just giving advice from their area of specialty.  Desire everyone’s experiences and questions on all topics being discussed.  If the marketing person only chimes in during marketing discussions then you will miss out.  Encourage people to speak beyond their area of specialty to maximize their perspective.

Even if you have a CEO Coach or Business Mentor like me helping you grow – you absolutely should be building out a proper Advisory Board too.

When I lectured at MIT at the Entrepreneurial Masters Program, I promised the CEOs in the class that we’d start on time.

When I actually delivered on that promise, they were dumbfounded.

If CEOs weren’t present at the start of class, or hadn’t returned to the class after a break, we shut the door and started without them.

A gesture this simple respects people’s time and helps you stay on course.

Try to also ’compress time’ when you are booking meetings.  When you are thinking of booking a meeting if what ever time amount you first think you’ll need to have the meeting in – reduce it by fifty percent and book it for that shorter period of time.  So instead of booking it for one hour, book it and finish it in thirty minutes.

Like so many other obligations, meetings tend to fill the space you give them. By compressing the time of meetings, you increase everyone’s productivity, and implement a highly profitable system of time management.

If I asked everyone reading this blog if you’d ever been in one of those meetings where people say a lot and nothing gets resolved, virtually every hand would go up. If you make decisions for a company, this shouldn’t be the norm.

Getting to a place where your meetings mean something once again is a process, but they will help you build a stronger company and a culture of accountability.

Every successful meeting starts with a clear purpose, and it needs to be stated in one sentence and added to the meeting’s agenda. With every purpose, there is a maximum of three possible outcomes. You must include these possible outcomes with every meeting request so people know why they’re attending and what they’re getting done in the meeting.

“No agenda, no attenda.”
If you don’t have one, you shouldn’t be having a meeting. Create a bulleted list of action items in every invitation to a meeting so that people can figure out what’s going to be covered, and in what order.

Meetings without clear agendas go off track and include people whose time would be better spent getting other important projects completed.