Navigating The Boardroom with SBI Growth

Early in my career I walked into a board meeting and dropped a bombshell: after two months in the seat, I told the room the real problem wasn't sales — the team was actually winning 32% of their deals, which is solid — it was that marketing wasn't generating enough pipeline to feed them. The message wasn't wrong. The timing was. Nobody in that room had heard any of it before, and I watched the confusion spread around the table in real time.

That mistake is why, when I sat down with Tony Erickson for the second installment of our SBI series, we spent the whole conversation on pre-wiring. Nothing that shows up in a board meeting should be the first time anyone's heard it — I run a weekly flash report that goes to sales ops, the C-suite, and every board member, and I try to call attention to anything unusual well before the meeting itself.

We also talked about consistency: don't change the font, don't reorder the deck, don't chase every board member's pet framework from their other portfolio companies. One PE firm I worked with told me flatly not to touch their board deck template — the color red stays red, even if I don't love it — because familiarity is what lets a board actually focus on strategy instead of getting lost in a new format every quarter.

When you do that consistently, most of my board time isn't spent walking through slides at all. It's just confirming what people already know.