Dan Martell - March 26, 2018


How To Run Your SaaS Board Meeting


Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

191.1595

Word count

1,270

Sentence count

60


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Dan Martell shares the 5 steps to running an incredible board meeting so that you don t feel overwhelmed, nervous, or feel like your board is not productive at all. And be sure to stay to the end where I share with you an exclusive video, an interview, and a fireside chat with Jason Cohen, the co-founder of WP Engine, who just raised $250 million.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Hi, I'm Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur, investor,
00:00:02.300 and creator of SaaS Academy and in this video I'm gonna share
00:00:05.040 with you the five steps to running an incredible board meeting
00:00:08.840 so that you don't have to feel overwhelmed, nervous,
00:00:11.940 or feel like they're not gonna be productive at all.
00:00:13.640 And be sure to stay to the end where I'm gonna share with you
00:00:15.280 an exclusive video, an interview, a fireside chat really,
00:00:19.060 with Jason Cohen, the co-founder of WP Engine.
00:00:22.580 They just raised $250 million.
00:00:25.460 They're at $100 million annual reoccurring revenue
00:00:28.500 after eight years.
00:00:30.100 Trust me, you don't wanna miss that interview.
00:00:45.160 So maybe you've got your first board meeting coming
00:00:47.320 or you've been running them and you just don't feel
00:00:49.000 like they're very productive or efficient.
00:00:50.740 Trust me, I know how you feel.
00:00:52.360 I've been running board meetings now
00:00:53.800 for my past two venture-backed companies,
00:00:56.700 flowtown.com and clarity.fm.
00:00:58.700 I've even had the pleasure of inviting my little baby.
00:01:01.020 He's five now, but when he was little,
00:01:02.760 he actually came to a couple of our early board meetings
00:01:04.980 just to get him used to the environment of business.
00:01:09.080 And one of the things that we're always trying to accomplish
00:01:11.400 is how to be more effective and efficient.
00:01:13.620 And I realized in the first meetings that I had
00:01:15.940 that I was kind of awkward.
00:01:17.200 I didn't really know what the investors expected.
00:01:19.020 I didn't know how to communicate,
00:01:20.780 how to ask for feedback.
00:01:23.120 And what I did is I went on a journey
00:01:24.720 and I discussed this with many of my investors and advisors,
00:01:28.560 guys like Travis Kalanick from Uber
00:01:30.320 who was an early investor in Flowtown,
00:01:32.820 our investors themselves and say,
00:01:34.260 what have you seen work in other boards
00:01:36.060 and did a ton of research online
00:01:37.600 and what I've distilled things down to are these five steps.
00:01:41.700 Step number one, big picture.
00:01:44.080 This step usually takes about 15 minutes
00:01:46.380 and it's really just a CEO update.
00:01:48.880 Let the board know what's new with the business,
00:01:50.920 highlight certain things that you feel they should be aware of
00:01:53.520 and talk about, at a high level, it's not for discussion,
00:01:55.820 some of the challenges you may be facing in the business.
00:01:58.660 It's short, it's sweet, it's to the point.
00:02:00.820 It's to give an overview of the business.
00:02:03.200 Step number two, calibrate.
00:02:05.300 This step usually lasts between 45 minutes and 60 minutes
00:02:08.640 and it's really about a few key areas.
00:02:10.600 Number one is you wanna talk about your metrics.
00:02:12.440 You wanna talk about your KPIs for the business,
00:02:14.400 how you're doing.
00:02:15.840 You wanna talk about your funnel metrics
00:02:17.420 to make sure you understand how you acquire customers,
00:02:19.380 convert them, and deliver the value that you've committed.
00:02:22.420 And then finally, talk about your performance versus plan.
00:02:26.300 Every business should have some kind of forward-looking plan
00:02:28.960 and you wanna inform your board how you're doing
00:02:31.160 based on your current numbers versus, you know,
00:02:33.440 your actuals versus the plan so that they can get everybody
00:02:37.100 set from a financial and a numerical point of view
00:02:39.900 on the performance of the business.
00:02:41.800 Step number three, company building.
00:02:44.640 At a high level, this is things like Orchart.
00:02:47.120 Have you made any new hires, key hires,
00:02:49.020 need to make some hires, you can just put all that in there.
00:02:51.720 You also wanna talk about the roadmap
00:02:53.620 from a product point of view.
00:02:54.860 Let everybody know kind of what you've accomplished so far
00:02:57.260 and what you plan on doing.
00:02:58.360 And then also, if it makes sense,
00:03:00.160 have your leaders from the team update you
00:03:03.960 so that you can present that to the board.
00:03:05.240 So that could be your VP of product,
00:03:06.600 VP of engineering, your VP of sales,
00:03:08.500 just so that the board has an understanding
00:03:10.900 of the performance of each functional unit
00:03:13.980 and kind of their plan as things progress
00:03:16.680 and the company grows.
00:03:17.840 Step number four, working session.
00:03:20.520 So this is usually a 60-minute session broken down into two
00:03:24.260 parts because what you want to do is identify ideally one or
00:03:27.400 two major topics and these topics could be things like
00:03:30.640 business challenges, partnership potentials,
00:03:33.640 opportunities that you might be deciding against and what you
00:03:37.700 want to do is you want to in context present that topic,
00:03:41.080 set a time block for 30 minutes, present the facts,
00:03:43.940 talk to the board, get some feedback,
00:03:45.640 understand their experience, how they've approached those
00:03:48.080 challenges or opportunities, how to evaluate them,
00:03:50.520 and then finally come to a resolution.
00:03:52.180 So ideally, every board meeting,
00:03:53.700 you're gonna look at two of those
00:03:55.260 to keep things on focus and on pace.
00:03:57.700 30 minutes each of the total working sessions
00:03:59.780 about 60 minutes and that'll get you clarity as a leader.
00:04:03.260 Now, here's a key tip is you never wanna go in there
00:04:06.820 with a challenge or a problem
00:04:08.700 and not provide some of your thoughts
00:04:10.360 on how you can resolve it.
00:04:11.360 As a CEO and a leader, your job is to lead the board,
00:04:15.460 not look at them as the oracles of answers
00:04:18.640 to all your biggest challenges.
00:04:20.760 If that happens, especially if you're in a position where
00:04:23.220 you don't own control of the business anymore,
00:04:24.940 they might start thinking to themselves
00:04:26.640 that you're not the right person to lead the business.
00:04:28.720 So be sure when you present these topics
00:04:31.100 that you also present solutions to the challenges
00:04:33.520 or opportunities that you're facing
00:04:35.100 or at least provide an opinion.
00:04:36.600 Step number five, close the session.
00:04:39.480 This is a simple wrap up 15 minutes max
00:04:42.260 and it's all around the business formalities.
00:04:44.080 Maybe you have some decisions to make around stock grants
00:04:48.160 And really, it's just about making sure
00:04:50.120 everybody's commitments.
00:04:51.100 One of my favourite things to do,
00:04:53.540 both investors and board members,
00:04:54.960 is to actually put them to work.
00:04:56.560 I mean, they're there, they're being compensated
00:04:58.580 for being on the board, typically,
00:05:00.700 and you want to make sure that you capture those action items
00:05:03.700 and set some timelines for when they can expect
00:05:05.820 or you can expect a return on that feedback
00:05:08.680 or an answer to your question or an introduction
00:05:10.880 to somebody who can help move those opportunities forward.
00:05:13.860 So be sure you just save all the formalities,
00:05:16.480 the votings, et cetera, plus get commitments
00:05:18.780 and wrap it up in 15 minutes.
00:05:20.820 So quick recap, number one, big picture, 15 minutes,
00:05:24.720 quick highlights and updates.
00:05:26.160 Number two, calibrate.
00:05:28.040 Number three, company building.
00:05:29.700 Four, working sessions.
00:05:31.500 And number five, close out the session.
00:05:34.120 As I mentioned, I wanna share an exclusive
00:05:35.860 fireside chat that I had with Jason Cohen,
00:05:38.080 the co-founder of WP Engine, a WordPress platform.
00:05:41.500 They just cracked 100 million in annual recurring revenue,
00:05:44.700 raised $250 million and I had the privilege of sitting down
00:05:47.800 with him at a boardroom with about a dozen of my coaching
00:05:51.800 clients that are $2 million plus in annual reoccurring revenue,
00:05:55.100 so really scaling and growing, you know,
00:05:57.200 double, tripling every year.
00:05:58.200 And Jason just unpacked some of the uncommon challenges
00:06:03.100 and solutions that I hadn't heard anywhere before around how
00:06:06.600 to prioritize product roadmap or opportunities,
00:06:09.300 how to set culture in your company and really how to scale
00:06:13.100 high-performing SaaS team so click the link below in the
00:06:15.800 description to get access to that conversation and if you
00:06:20.000 like this video be sure to click the like button,
00:06:22.000 subscribe to my channel and share it with a friend.
00:06:25.140 Hope this video finds you incredibly well and I'll see you
00:06:27.280 next video.
00:06:28.720 Yes, I like the video, yes, yes, can you pop in the colors?
00:06:35.860 Did you put it to I?
00:06:37.320 Oh, you're buttoning it?