“That’s insane,” I said to “Kevin”, a CEO I am working with. “Your investors want you to have weekly meetings with them. Good luck with that.”
“That’s too much?” Kevin said to me. “But the weekly meetings will just be updates, and there will be monthly board meetings.”
I sighed.
Kevin laughed and said, “Too many meetings, I take it?”
“Yep,” I said. “I’m worried you’re going to spend way too much time preparing for your meetings with your investors instead of running the company. It would be great if they would back off.”
“What do you think the right amount of interaction is my investors?”
You need to have regular board meetings, but just not too often.
“I would see if you can scale this (your board meetings) back to six weeks. Ideally, I’d love to see this be once per quarter, but that’s a stretch,” I said.
“Will every six weeks instead of four weeks make a big difference?”
“Hell yes,” I said. Here’s the problem with meeting with your investors too often. It would take me about one week to properly prepare for my board meetings.
“You have to review to presentations of your team. You have to meet with the board members 1:1 before the meetings. And, you have your own presentation to prepare.”
You gain back a lot of your time by reducing the number of interactions with your investors.
I continued on with my reasoning. “All of this takes away from running the company. You gain back about a month of your time by meeting every six weeks instead of every four weeks.”
“That makes sense,” Kevin said to me. “But my investors aren’t going to go for it.”
Build trust with your investors and they will pull back on their need to meet with you.
“Let’s see if you can solve the problem longer term,” I said. “I’ll accept that your investors want to work this way. And, it’s their money, so it’s tough to argue.
