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How I run board meetings for Unify

How I run board meetings for Unify

Plus: learnings from our Nov ‘24 board meeting

Austin Hughes
December 04, 2024

Hey hey, Austin here 👋

Welcome to The Pipeline—the newsletter to help scale your revenue team’s creativity.

I know I said this last week. But the reception to The Pipeline has been wild. I got a ton of positive replies and text messages in response to last week’s essay. The support means a lot, and I’m glad this material has been resonating.

We’re coming off of our most recent board meeting at Unify. The way we ran this one was a bit different. Thought I’d give you an inside look.

Let’s get into it.

📒 GTM Playbook

How I run board meetings for Unify

Plus: learnings from our Nov ‘24 board meeting

We had our most recent board meeting 2 weeks ago. This was our 4th since starting Unify.

Walking into my first board meeting the nerves were real, and I didn’t know what to expect.

We have a good rhythm in place now, so I figured it’d be helpful to you as any early-stage founder or exec if I shared how we run board meetings.

Funny enough, we made a small change in the most recent one that made a massive impact. Let’s talk about it.

The shift.

I had a conversation with a mentor of mine earlier in the fall, and he said something that reversed how I thought about board meetings.

He said: “The board meeting is for you.”

His push was that we should run the meeting in a way that allows us to extract maximum value for the founders. And when we do that, we have the board’s best interest in mind too. Since they’re big owners in the company.

A lot of founders believe board meetings are for the investors. To update them. Share numbers. All that.

We used to run our early board meetings that way. We’d run through the slides and take questions as they came up.

And that is still part of a good board meeting. You need to update your investors. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to believe all of the numbers should really be sent and read ahead of time.

Is the best use of everyone’s time really clicking through a data-heavy slide deck?

The reality is that board meetings should be used to solve the biggest constraint(s) in your business at the moment.

So this time, we only covered about 5 of the 40 total slides in the actual board meeting. The rest were sent 2 days before the meeting and we asked them to pre-read.

This let us spend the 90 minute board meeting deep diving into 2-3 strategic topics. We were able to go very deep and walk away with new perspectives.

This was insanely valuable. The board pushed us to think big.

Think big.

It’s funny. Things are going really well at Unify today. We grew ARR +119% Q/Q. And we hit our full-year 2024 goal 3 months early.

Last quarter we hit an inflection point as a company.

But if you sat in on the board meeting you’d think everything was a mess. We spent all of the time running through what was wrong. What weaknesses would keep us from getting from <$10M to $100M+ ARR as a company?

It was time for us to think bigger about what Unify looks like multiple steps ahead of where we are today.

The biggest question we debated: who do we want to be?

Simplifying a bit we talked about 2 paths:

Go deeper with mid-market customers, and build a bundled offering
Sell to enterprises

The board pushed us on the idea that there are several paths that we could go down as a company that lead to a winning outcome, but we need to be intentional about a path and commit.

Right now, we don’t sell to mega enterprises that have 10,000+ employees. In theory, I guess we could. But that would also require us to change the DNA of our company, sales motion and product a lot.

What Connor and I are passionate about is building a delightful product that 100,000+ companies can use. We are a product team at our core. We want to be the core workflow software that revenue teams run their business on.

We want to build the next platform.

And when you're building for true enterprise, you can’t build the best possible product because you’re forced to integrate with the customer’s existing systems and all customers have bespoke needs.

There are a lot of different ways to build a winning company.

Each path requires you to optimize for different things along the way. For Unify it will heavily influence the new product that we ship in Q1/Q2 of this coming year.

Today we’re going to be intentional about what we want Unify to look like in 5 years.

I’m thankful to have such a great group of people on our board. We wouldn’t be where we’re at right now without folks like Jake, Yaz, Vince and Avery.

Hope this is helpful 🙌

WHAT’S NEW AT UNIFY

Unify Activity Feed: All Your Signals in One Place

Signals are insights into companies and prospects who are in market to buy.

Unify has a ton of real-time signals (10+ to be more specific) to help you identify and engage with warm prospects at exactly the right time.

Why do signals matter? You’ll book more meetings because you’re reaching out when you know buyers are actually shopping.

A few of our customers’ favorite signals:

Website visitors (company and specific individuals)
Moving champions
New hires
Product usage data
Email intent
G2 intent
And more

Crazy stats on how we use signals at Unify:

29% of our new ARR in October came from automated outbound, all powered by signals
We booked 76 meetings with signal-based outbound in October

Learn more about Unify signals here.

BEFORE YOU GO…

If you’ve made it here, I appreciate you reading. I’ve had a lot of fun writing these first three editions.

As always, let me know what you want to hear from me next.