Care.com’s Sheila Lirio Marcelo on Running Successful Board Meetings

Female Founders Fund
Female Founders Fund
5 min readSep 14, 2018

Board meetings don’t have to be stressful, especially during the early days of a company. At a recent Female Founders Fund breakfast attended by CEOs from BentoBox, Shine Text, The Wonder, Winky Lux, and other F3 portfolio companies, Care.com Founder, Chairwoman and CEO Sheila Lirio Marcelo shared some of her tips for building a strong board of directors, running meetings effectively, and developing the most efficient follow-up practices between meetings.

Building the Best Board

Marcelo likes to keep boards small, with around eight directors. In general, she recommends considering diversity of gender, race, age, and background. When you’re bringing on institutional board members, she suggests assessing the culture of the firms you’re pitching. “It’s as if you’re marrying the partner, but the in-laws are the partnership [between your company and the firm],” Marcelo says. “You want to make sure that you know the family you’re getting into, because partners move around.”

“You only get one term sheet,” she says, but sometimes, the term sheet with the largest investment isn’t the one with the best board member. In that case, she recommends taking the term sheet that comes with the advisor whose expertise you’ll need. “In the early days, try to build a halo set of branded advisors and board members,” she says. “If you’ve got a competitive situation and you can choose, I wouldn’t always go for valuation. If you can get a branded person who’s an expert in your space, that will actually catapult your next round to be a really good one.”

Marcelo has seen some situations where CEOs jump the gun and take the biggest investment, despite getting stuck with a difficult board member. “[That] may mean that you may not end up running the company,” she says. “I always say, think in terms of long-term relationships that aren’t just a short stint for a round.” In the early days of Care.com, her fellow board members had worked with corporations like Burger King and eBay, so she wanted to make sure everything she did as a newly-minted CEO was up to their standards. By the time she needed to scale, her team was already one step ahead because they had been practicing a cadence of professionalism.

The Key Players

Some board members have titles, while others do not. Marcelo is the Chairwoman of her board, so she develops agendas and assesses which executives are going to attend and present at meetings. The Lead Director is an outside director if the CEO is the chairperson, but if that outside director is also the chairperson, they manage everything. A non-chairperson Lead Director provides the CEO with anonymous feedback from the board, manages outside directors if there’s tough feedback that needs to happen, and helps engage in difficult conversations.

Running a Board Meeting

A day or two before board meetings, Marcelo sends out a deck (a PowerPoint) describing the meeting’s agenda. Nowadays, her decks run close to 100 pages, but in the early days, they were about 30 pages. Board meetings generally run 4–6 hours. “My rule of thumb is about 10–15 pages per hour depending on the content,” she says. She starts her meetings with a “closed session” where she calls on board members and asks for comments on the board deck. This serves a few purposes. “One, it ensures that the board members read the deck. Second, it tells me which key issues are on their mind. Third, it signals your openness to feedback.” She suggests thinking about the board as strategic consultants who are consistently available and care deeply about your business.

“After the 30 minutes-to-an-hour of closed session, we go into the meat of the meeting. We summarize the key issues at the very beginning, and then we dive deep into each one.” Based off the board’s feedback on the deck, she decides how much time to spend on each issue, as opposed to having members of her management team deliver canned presentations. “It’s important to set the tone with your management team that they may or may not be invited to the board meeting.” If they are invited, they must know their assigned slides backwards and forwards and be able to discuss them intelligently, instead of just reading them aloud. “The slides are supposed to provide data that are necessary to have a strategic discussion.” The word strategy is key. “Manage [your meetings] so you’re getting strategy advice and not operational advice. In the early stages, you might feel like you need to tell [the board] everything, but then take a step back and decide where to draw the line.” In other words, a board should advise on the qualities to look for in a PR firm, but not help you decide which PR firm to hire.

“Because some board members are on a handful of other boards, going slide by slide is important so you can tell them a story,” Marcelo says.

After the meeting is over, she makes dinner optional, but encourages her directors to attend because the informal setting can be critical to relationship-building.

Preparing the Deck

As CEO, Marcelo makes a point of knowing the key points from every slide in her deck. “It’s been close to 13 years and I still do my board deck, because that allows me to create the storyline.” She sends the entire outline to her management team a few weeks in advance, assigns out sections and themes to different departments, and then edits the deck herself so the storyline ties together. To maximize efficiency, she makes two folders in Box; one with the most updated slides, and another with the drafts. “Each management team member submits their drafts and initials it, and then I know which drafts to drop into the final deck.”

Keeping Everyone in the Loop

After each meeting, the Chief of Staff emails the management team with notes, and the board with takeaways and bullet points for upcoming meetings. In terms of keeping the entire company informed, Marcelo suggests being transparent about everything, except confidential mergers and acquisitions. She sends out monthly dashboards to her entire leadership team with key performance indicators (KPI’s) and notes on new hires. “The last thing you want is surprises at the meeting. If you have monthly KPIs that you’ve identified with the board and you’re updating, there’s not this feeling that the only time you’re getting ahold of them is when there’s a problem.” If there is a problem, she suggests flagging the issue for the next meeting and holding individual calls with specific board members. Her management team follows the same protocol for departmental issues.

“From the beginning, I set the tone that all communication with the board must go through me or copied with me,” she says. “I have no problem with board members having one-on-ones with my management team members as long as I know the content of it, for transparency’s sake.”

At the end of the day, working effectively with a board hinges on building productive relationships. “Whether your company works or not, how you handle these relationships is going to matter for your next company, not just your next round,” Marcelo says. “Your reputation is a very big deal beyond just outcomes, so it’s making sure you’re thoughtful of that, too.”

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Published in Female Founders Fund

News about female founders and women in VC from a seed-stage fund that invests in the exponential power of exceptional female talent.

Written by Female Founders Fund

An early-stage fund investing in the exponential power of exceptional female talent.

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