Kezia Farnham

Senior Manager

How to run a board meeting: 20 best practices for growing companies

Growing companies face a critical challenge: board meetings can either accelerate funding rounds and strategic decisions or become operational bottlenecks that slow growth.

The NACD 2025 Trends and Priorities Survey found that annual independent director time commitment has increased from less than 250 hours to more than 300 hours over the last decade. With directors increasingly consumed by administrative tasks, they have less capacity to focus on strategic guidance and business growth. This makes professional board meeting management essential for companies preparing for Series A through IPO.

Unlike enterprise boards with dedicated corporate secretaries, growing companies often rely on founders, CFOs, and lean executive teams to orchestrate governance. However, they still need to conduct effective board meetings to maintain investor confidence and scale operations efficiently.

This comprehensive guide provides 20 proven best practices specifically designed for growing companies, including:

• Strategic preparation that accelerates funding decisions
• Robert's Rules of Order for structured governance
• AI-powered technology solutions that eliminate manual preparation
• Post-meeting processes that drive accountability

What makes an effective board meeting?

An effective board meeting drives decision-making, investor confidence, and operational accountability. Board meetings serve as crucial forums for:

• Making funding decisions
• Validating growth strategies
• Demonstrating governance maturity to current and potential investors

While companies should maintain communication between meetings, the boardroom — be it physical or virtual — facilitates the deep discussions and decisions that matter most. These conversations determine whether organizations successfully navigate funding rounds, market expansion, and eventual exit opportunities.

When run according to best practices, board meetings prompt necessary decisions about resource allocation and market opportunities, and provide accountability mechanisms that institutional investors expect to see.

Board meeting roles and responsibilities for growing companies

In growing companies, board meeting roles often differ from traditional enterprise structures due to leaner teams and founder-led governance. They typically consist of:

1. Board Chair (often the founder or lead investor): Sets agenda priorities and guides discussions toward funding and growth decisions. The board chair ensures all voices contribute to planning and maintains focus on scaling challenges rather than operational details.
2. General Counsel (often serving as Corporate Secretary): Collaborates on agenda creation with emphasis on governance compliance and legal matters, manages meeting logistics and board procedures, and ensures materials meet regulatory and governance standards.
3. Committee Chairs (if established): Present updates on specific oversight areas like audit preparation for funding rounds, compensation planning for key hires, and board succession planning for growth phases.
4. CEO/Founder: Provides operational insights focused on growth metrics, market opportunities, and scaling challenges. Presents initiatives requiring board approval and funding. Acts as liaison between board decisions and team implementation.
5. Board Members/Investors: Offer strategic oversight focused on market positioning, competitive analysis, and growth strategy validation. Ask questions about capital deployment, market expansion, and operational scaling. Represent investor interests while supporting management's growth objectives.

How to run board meetings with Robert's Rules of Order

A professional governance structure becomes essential as companies scale and add institutional investors. Robert's Rules of Order is a framework for conducting professional board meetings that institutional investors recognize and respect.

Created in the late 1800s, this framework offers proven guidelines for structured decision-making that prevent growing companies from getting stuck in operational details during board meetings. As companies face increasing pressure to focus on oversight rather than day-to-day operations, these guidelines become essential for maintaining meeting productivity.

The rules themselves are lengthy but generally govern proceedings in the following ways:

• Structure: Provides a clear roadmap for proceeding through agenda items, helping prevent boards from dwelling on operational details that slow growth decisions.
• Fairness: Ensures all board members — including founder, investor, and independent directors — have equal opportunity for input on decisions affecting company direction and funding.
• Order: The rules' mechanisms for managing debates and decision-making prevent disruption, keeping the meeting on track. This is particularly valuable when board discussions involve complex or sensitive decisions.

To achieve these aims, Robert's Rules outline how to conduct a board meeting's most common processes and procedures:

• Quorum: For the meeting to begin, the board must establish a quorum or the minimum number of board members that must be present to certify votes. If the meeting doesn’t meet a quorum, it either doesn’t proceed or becomes a non-voting meeting.
• Motions: A board member may make a motion to trigger a specific action or decision. Another board member then has to second the motion before the board debates and votes on the topic in question. This gives all board members equal opportunity to engage in discussions and decisions and ensures the meeting doesn’t proceed without approval.
• Debate: Robert’s rules also provide for healthy debate between board members. After a motion but before a decision, the board can discuss by following the rules about who speaks when and for how long. Structured debates give all directors ample time to participate, encouraging more viewpoints.
• Voting: After discussion, the topic moves to a vote by voice, show of hands or electronic voting systems, according to the bylaws and available technology infrastructure. How many votes you need, however, depends on your bylaws; some corporations allow for a simple majority, while others require a two-thirds majority.

Critical board meeting procedures for growing companies

Effective meetings require orchestration across three phases, with each stage designed to maximize limited director time and drive essential business decisions.

Pre-meeting procedures

1. Define clear meeting goals focused on growth priorities: Before scheduling, establish specific objectives. What funding decisions need approval? Which market opportunities require board input?

2. Craft comprehensive, investor-ready agendas: Create agendas that demonstrate governance maturity to current and potential investors. Circulate 7-10 days in advance with estimated timeframes, ensuring discussions receive adequate attention and keeping operational updates concise.

3. Leverage AI-powered preparation for professional materials: Growing companies can't afford weeks of manual board book preparation. Features like Diligent's Smart Board Book Builder automatically synthesize financial reports, operational updates, and documents into professional board materials that match institutional investor expectations.

4. Encourage strategic preparation and insight sharing: Distribute materials enabling directors to prepare substantive questions about market strategy, competitive positioning, and growth opportunities rather than basic operational questions that can be addressed through written reports.

5. Provide proper meeting notice per bylaws: Follow governance requirements for meeting notifications, including any investor rights or board observer specifications outlined in funding agreements.

During the meeting procedures

6. Establish quorum for strategic decisions: Document quorum presence before voting on funding requests, strategic initiatives, or key personnel decisions. It ensures decisions remain valid and defensible to stakeholders.

7. Follow structured meeting flow: Standard procedure includes calling the meeting to order, approving previous minutes, reviewing agenda items, addressing investor questions, covering new business, and summarizing action items with clear accountability.

8. Use strategic voting procedures: Follow Robert's Rules for motions on decisions, including funding approvals, market expansion initiatives, and key partnerships. Ensure all votes are properly seconded, debated, and documented.

9. Integrate AI-powered collaboration tools: Use tools with real-time collaboration features for secure document sharing, electronic voting, and comprehensive minute-taking without disrupting meeting flow.

Post-meeting procedures

10. Prepare meeting minutes: Focus documentation on key decisions, growth commitments, and investor-relevant discussions. Distribute drafts to the board chair and investors for review before finalizing the corporate record.

11. Execute strategic follow-through: Compile action items with specific growth-focused assignments and deadlines. Send follow-up communications highlighting responsibilities and implementation timelines to maintain momentum between meetings.

12. Leverage automated risk management: Tools like Diligent's Smart Risk Scanner automatically review meeting materials and decisions for potential legal, regulatory, and reputational concerns specific to growing companies.

20 board meeting best practices for growing companies

Successful board meetings require orchestrating people, processes, and technology to provide boards with information that supports critical growth decisions.

Best practices for fostering engagement and active participation

1. Start and end meetings on time: Respect limited director availability while demonstrating operational discipline that investors expect from portfolio companies.

2. Promote discussion through targeted participation: Go beyond standard presentations. Encourage dialogue about competitive positioning, market opportunities, and scaling challenges using breakout discussions, brainstorming, and scenario planning exercises.

3. Follow growth-focused agendas religiously: While flexibility matters, planned discussions ensure all essential growth topics receive attention. Redirect operational discussions to separate forums, keeping board time focused on decisions affecting the company’s trajectory.

4. Prioritize time allocation: Focus meeting time on funding decisions, market strategy, competitive positioning, and scaling challenges rather than routine operational updates that can be communicated through written reports between meetings.

5. Ensure all voices contribute: Create an inclusive environment where founder, investor, and independent perspectives are heard on decisions. Acknowledge diverse viewpoints while maintaining productive discourse focused on company growth.

6. Delegate tasks leveraging board expertise: Rotate discussion leadership, tapping into board members' specific industry knowledge, market experience, and network connections. Assign initiatives to individual members, fostering ownership and accountability.

7. Build relationships to support growth: Strong board relationships accelerate decision-making and provide critical support during challenging growth phases. Create opportunities for connection before or after meetings to strengthen partnerships.

Best practices for facilitating effective decision-making

8. Define meeting objectives clearly: Communicate primary goals before each meeting — funding decisions, market expansion approval, partnership evaluation. Focus engagement around growth decisions rather than operational updates.

9. Lead with the decision, then show the data: Start each agenda item with what you need from the board, then present supporting information. Instead of a 20-slide competitive analysis, say: "We need to decide whether to enter the enterprise market. Here are the three key factors and what our data shows."

10. Give context that matters for the decision: If you're asking for funding approval, show burn rate and runway. If you're discussing market expansion, include customer acquisition costs in the new market vs. the current markets. Skip metrics that don't directly impact the choice at hand.

11. Ask specific questions to drive discussion: Instead of "What do you think about our growth strategy?", ask "Should we prioritize customer retention over new acquisition given our current churn rate?" Direct questions get better input from busy board members.

12. Vote on anything that costs money or changes direction: Create formal motions for funding decisions, major hires, market expansion, or strategic pivots. This creates clear accountability and gives you documented approval when investors ask questions later.

13. Build consensus with decisive action: While seeking board alignment on strategic direction matters, don't allow discussions to become circular. Use formal motions and votes to advance decisions when consensus isn't immediately achievable.

14. Document decisions comprehensively: Assign dedicated responsibility — often CFO or corporate secretary — for capturing decisions, growth commitments, and action items accurately for future reference and stakeholder communication.

Best practices for board meeting effectiveness

15. Distribute agendas before the meeting: Share agendas 7-10 days before meetings. This allows directors to research market context, competitive developments, and implications rather than learning about decisions during meetings.

16. Seek feedback from board members and participants: After each meeting, gather feedback through surveys, anonymous polls or facilitated discussions. The goal is to identify areas for improvement and ensure the board is meeting the needs of its members and the organization.

17. Follow through with accountability: Assign clear responsibilities and timelines to implement decisions. This creates an accountability paper trail, but board members can encourage each other’s follow-through. Without it, board members may struggle to mobilize on discussions or decisions, turning otherwise impactful meetings into wasted time.

18. Adapt meeting structure based on growth stage: Adjust meeting format, focus, and participation approaches based on company growth phase, market conditions, and priorities.

19. Review board meeting policies and procedures regularly: As your company grows, your board meeting policies need to evolve, too. Add formal voting thresholds for larger financial decisions, establish committee meeting schedules, and create clear communication protocols for new investor board members.

20. Integrate AI-powered insights: Use AI-powered tools like Diligent's SmartPrep to generate discussion questions and competitive insights based on board materials.

How AI technology can transform board meetings

The biggest bottleneck in board meeting management isn't the meeting itself, but everything that happens before and after. Manual board book preparation can consume entire weeks, while post-meeting follow-through often falls through the cracks. AI-powered governance platforms eliminate these operational inefficiencies.

Before meetings: AI-powered preparation

Traditional board preparation consumes hours per meeting cycle — time growing companies can't afford when executive teams should focus on closing deals and scaling operations. Manual processes often result in last-minute scrambles that make companies look unprofessional to investors.

Diligent’s Smart Board Book Builder eliminates preparation bottlenecks by automatically gathering, organizing, and synthesizing company materials into professional board packages that match institutional investor expectations. The AI analyzes financial reports, business documents, and previous meeting materials to create comprehensive board books highlighting critical insights and competitive implications.

Additionally, SmartPrep enhances director preparation by analyzing board materials to generate targeted discussion questions and competitive insights for individual directors.

Rather than directors spending valuable time searching through extensive documentation, AI surfaces key issues and potential implications, enabling more focused meeting discussions.

During meetings: Real-time collaboration

Effective meetings require technology that supports rather than hinders board interaction. Modern governance platforms provide secure, real-time collaboration tools that enable electronic voting, document sharing, and comprehensive minute-taking without disrupting meeting flow.

Digital platforms support hybrid and remote participation through high-quality video conferencing, screen sharing, and real-time document collaboration.

Real-time minute-taking and action item tracking ensure that decisions and assignments are captured accurately during meetings, eliminating the post-meeting rush to reconstruct discussions and commitments from memory.

After meetings: Automated follow-through and risk management

Post-meeting execution often determines whether board decisions translate into organizational action. Best-in-class solutions like Diligent address the common challenge of inadequate follow-through by automating documentation, tracking action items, and ensuring compliance with governance requirements.

Diligent’s Smart Risk Scanner capabilities provide protection by automatically reviewing meeting materials and decisions for potential legal, regulatory, and reputational concerns.

This AI-powered analysis identifies sensitive content, compliance gaps, and governance issues that could create liability, enabling proactive risk management rather than reactive crisis response.

Also, automated action item tracking and board messaging ensure that board decisions are implemented effectively after the meeting.

Transform your board meetings with Diligent Boards

Every growing company faces the challenge of transforming manual board preparation and coordination into professional governance that accelerates funding decisions and demonstrates investment readiness. Traditional approaches create operational bottlenecks, limiting growth and investor confidence.

Diligent Boards provides comprehensive AI-powered solutions addressing every stage of board meeting management. From Smart Board Book Builder preparation through real-time collaboration to automated follow-through, our platform eliminates administrative burden while enhancing focus and decision-making quality that investors expect.

Ready to see how these capabilities can accelerate your growth? Book a demo today.