Board Meetings are always stressful, and justifiably so. You’re sharing the most important updates with your most important stakeholders. Naturally, you feel pressure to craft the perfect narrative on the business’s performance and vision for the future.
The key here is not just to inform but to engage strategically. The board isn’t just a group of overseers; they are partners in your journey, deeply invested in your company’s success and strategy. How you share metrics with them can significantly influence their understanding of the business and trust in your management.
Here are a few principles to remember when considering the working relationship you want to build with your Board.
Sharing metrics with your Board is about striking the right balance: providing enough data to paint a comprehensive picture of the business while not overwhelming with so much detail that your Board has trouble seeing the signal through the noise.
Your goal is to craft a narrative that captures the essence of your business’s performance and trajectory. This narrative should highlight both achievements and challenges without delving too deeply into operational minutiae.
A simple rule of thumb is that if you’re not actively managing the metric, don’t show it. For instance, while operational metrics like marginal CAC are essential, they often stay off the boardroom table unless they spotlight a specific issue or achievement.
Instead, lead with a high-level overview that outlines the current state of the business — what’s working, what isn’t, and the key focus areas moving forward.
We like to review the business from top to bottom. It starts with our acquisition efforts — how efficiently are we converting new customers? We’ll then dive into our revenue numbers and how we’re tracking against annual projections and goals. This segues into a review of operating efficiency and high-level efficiency metrics: LTV:CAC, Magic Number, Burn Multiples, and the like.
This sets the stage for a more detailed review of the product roadmap, go-to-market (GTM) strategies, and tactical discussions about operations, pricing, and staffing needs. Having your executive team lead these sections is good practice to build accountability for results in their respective focus areas.
As a general rule of thumb, nothing should be a surprise in a Board Meeting. That means you should continuously monitor the metrics you present to your Board weekly, if not daily — do not wait for a standing review.
We recommend daily checks on website visits, trial starts, new customers, Net New ARR, and Cash Burn. This will help you develop an intuition about baseline performance, and you’ll have a clear narrative on how each metric historically builds walking into your next Board Meeting.
You’ll also want to go the extra mile to compare absolute performance against the forecast shared with the Board and contextualize how you’re pacing given your business’s unique dynamics. If you’re a sales-led business, ARR contribution might be back-weighted ~50% or more to the last month of the quarter. And if you’re a PLG business, top-of-funnel metrics like website visits and trials might be more vulnerable to seasonality or inflated following a product launch.
We recommend understanding the slope of your forecast build and comparing that to actuals as frequently as possible. If set up correctly in a dashboard, this should take ~5 minutes of your morning.
Once you’ve established a cadence for checking performance, look for outliers and flag them with your team. Don’t go overboard and start fires for the sake of wanting one to put out. Threading this needle correctly can help the business become more proactive and your team earn trust throughout the company.
Despite your best efforts in alerting and monitoring, you will inevitably reach a point where you miss targets. It eventually happens to everyone. How you handle these more delicate moments really matters.
Don’t wait for the Board Meeting. Be proactive and share the news ahead of it. How you share it depends on the size and severity of the news. More serious cases should be dealt with in a conversation, while smaller matters can be handled with a quick email.
I can’t stress enough that the worst place for your Board to learn about bad news is in the Board Meeting. Work with your CEO to get ahead of it. Your Board will feel more informed, and you’ll build trust with them as a result.
Trust is built through consistency. Regularly changing the metrics you report on can lead to confusion and diminish your credibility. It may give the impression that you’re either still trying to understand your business model or, worse, attempting to obscure underperformance. You’ll want to ensure the metrics you present are consistent over time and adjust only when there’s a justified evolution in your business model or market dynamics.
When introducing significant changes or new initiatives, consider them mini-SaaS businesses within your broader operation. This approach helps segment metrics and assess their impact independently from the core business. For instance, if you shift from an inbound to an outbound sales model, analyze this strategy through its lifecycle — from customer acquisition to revenue generation — and assess it separately from your inbound efforts.
At Equals, we adjusted our Board-facing metrics when we added a new sales motion by breaking out performance between our self-serve and sales businesses. This wasn’t about shifting the goalposts but refining our reporting to reflect our business’s evolving nature better. Such changes are welcomed as long as they are clearly communicated and justified.