Several public and private companies include a Board-of-Directors (BOD), which is a governing body of individuals that meet periodically to plan corporate management policies of the respective company. However, the members of conventional BOD meetings often perceive such meetings as sub-optimal because of time-consuming preparation, execution, and follow-up processes associated with such meetings. Additionally, the members may have a sub-optimal experience of the conventional BOD meetings because of various factors, such as, but not limited to, varying focus areas for discussions, subjectivity in opinions of members, varying expectations from members, and lack of collaboration applications for members.
It is a general perception among the BOD members that the BOD preparation, execution, and follow-up process provide a sub-optimal experience. Effectiveness of a BOD meeting may be defined as the combination of a feelings of BOD members and a tangible progress in supporting the company. Here, feelings of the BOD members may imply that the BOD members are enlightened, productive, contributory, and decisive on any decisions of the business as outlined in the agenda before the BOD meeting. Further, the tangible progress implies that these meetings build on previous meetings throughout the year to create a new layer of BOD competence and value addition for the next operating year.
Another consideration is that conventional BOD meetings often do not focus on capital allocation. The BOD meetings focus on sales and/or marketing but may not focus on how capital is being spent and if it is spent in the correct areas. Second, conventional BOD meetings do not have a continuous measurement or practice of comparing to a designated North Star(s) company as a part of the BOD agenda. There is no conventional BOD-related system that enables a private company to have a quarterly North Star progression application to follow a more dynamic and progressive BOD agenda that is always synced to strategy. Therefore, it is critical to overcome this challenge and it must be convenient and time efficient to create a transformative BOD experience for the BOD members.
Therefore, there is a need to optimize the experience of members in a BOD meeting.
The system discussed herein are generally related to a computer-executable application to enhance the meeting experience and board meeting tasks in an organization. In particular, the embodiments discussed are related to a computer-executable application for analyzing, processing, and/or presenting data associated with an organization in a Board-of-Directors (BOD) environment.
Further advantages of the invention will become apparent by reference to the detailed description of preferred embodiments when considered in conjunction with the drawings, which should be considered non-limiting:
1.2 Hardware Introduction
The system and method using the system and method described herein may be implemented using system and hardware elements shown and described herein. For example,
The network 110 may be wired or wireless links. If it is wired, the network may include coaxial cable, twisted pair lines, USB cabling, or optical lines. The wireless network may operate using BLUETOOTH, Wi-Fi, Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), infrared, or satellite networks. The wireless links may also include any cellular network standards used to communicate among mobile devices including the many standards prepared by the International Telecommunication Union such as 3G, 4G, and LTE. Cellular network standards may include GSM, GPRS, LTE, WiMAX, and WiMAX-Advanced. Cellular network standards may use various channel communications such as FDMA, TDMA, CDMA, or SDMA. The various networks may be used individually or in an interconnected way and are thus depicted as shown in
The network 110 may be located across many geographies and may have a topology organized as point-to-point, bus, star, ring, mesh, or tree. The network 110 may be an overlay network which is virtual and sits on top of one or more layers of other networks.
A system may include multiple servers 104a-c stored in high-density rack systems. If the servers are part of a common network, they do not need to be physically near one another but instead may be connected by a wide-area network (WAN) connection or similar connection.
Management of group of networked servers may be de-centralized. For example, one or more servers 104a-c may include modules to support one or more management services for networked servers including management of dynamic data, such as techniques for handling failover, data replication, and increasing the networked server's performance.
The servers 104a-c may be file servers, application servers, web servers, proxy servers, network appliances, gateways, gateway servers, virtualization servers, deployment servers, SSL VPN servers, or firewalls.
When the network 110 is in a cloud environment, the cloud network 110 may be public, private, or hybrid. Public clouds may include public servers maintained by third parties. Public clouds may be connected to servers over a public network. Private clouds may include private servers that are physically maintained by clients. Private clouds may be connected to servers over a private network. Hybrid clouds may, as the name indicates, include both public and private networks.
The cloud network may include delivery using IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) or Storage, Database, Information, Process, Application, Integration, Security, Management, Testing-as-a-service. IaaS may provide access to features, computers (virtual or on dedicated hardware), and data storage space. PaaS may include storage, networking, servers or virtualization, as well as additional resources such as, e.g., the operating system, middleware, or runtime resources. SaaS may be run and managed by the service provider and SaaS usually refers to end-user applications. A common example of a SaaS application is SALESFORCE or web-based email.
A client 102a-c may access IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS resources using preset standards and the clients 102a-c may be authenticated. For example, a server or authentication server may authenticate a user via security certificates, HTTPS, or API keys. API keys may include various encryption standards such as, e.g., Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Data resources may be sent over Transport Layer Security (TLS) or Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).
The clients 102a-c and servers 104a-c may be embodied in a computer, network device or appliance capable of communicating with a network and performing the actions herein.
The storage device 126 may include an operating system, software, and a network user behavior module 128, in which may reside the network user behavior system and method described in more detail below.
The computing device 120 may include a memory port, a bridge, one or more input/output devices, and a cache memory in communication with the central processing unit.
The central processing unit 122 may be a logic circuitry such as a microprocessor that responds to and processes instructions fetched from the main memory 124. The CPU 122 may use instruction level parallelism, thread level parallelism, different levels of cache, and multi-core processors. A multi-core processor may include two or more processing units on a single computing component.
The main memory 124 may include one or more memory chips capable of storing data and allowing any storage location to be directly accessed by the CPU 122. The main memory unit 124 may be volatile and faster than storage memory 126. Main memory units 124 may be dynamic random access memory (DRAM) or any variants, including static random access memory (SRAM). The main memory 124 or the storage 126 may be non-volatile.
The CPU 122 may communicate directly with a cache memory via a secondary bus, sometimes referred to as a backside bus. In other embodiments, the CPU 122 may communicate with cache memory using the system bus 150. Cache memory typically has a faster response time than main memory 124 and is typically provided by SRAM or similar RAM memory.
Input devices may include smart speakers, keyboards, mice, trackpads, trackballs, touchpads, touch mice, multi-touch touchpads and touch mice, microphones, multi-array microphones, drawing tablets, cameras, single-lens reflex camera (SLR), digital SLR (DSLR), CMOS sensors, accelerometers, infrared optical sensors, pressure sensors, magnetometer sensors, angular rate sensors, depth sensors, proximity sensors, ambient light sensors, gyroscopic sensors, or other sensors. Output devices may include the same smart speakers, video displays, graphical displays, speakers, headphones, inkjet printers, laser printers, and 3D printers.
Additional I/O devices may have both input and output capabilities, including haptic feedback devices, touchscreen displays, or multi-touch displays. Touchscreen, multi-touch displays, touchpads, touch mice, or other touch sensing devices may use different technologies to sense touch, including, e.g., capacitive, surface capacitive, projected capacitive touch (PCT), in-cell capacitive, resistive, infrared, waveguide, dispersive signal touch (DST), in-cell optical, surface acoustic wave (SAW), bending wave touch (BWT), or force-based sensing technologies. Some multi-touch devices may allow two or more contact points with the surface, allowing advanced functionality including, e.g., pinch, spread, rotate, scroll, or other gestures.
In some embodiments, display devices 142 may be connected to the I/O controller 140. Display devices may include liquid crystal displays (LCD), thin film transistor LCD (TFT-LCD), blue phase LCD, electronic papers (e-ink) displays, flexile displays, light emitting diode displays (LED), digital light processing (DLP) displays, liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) displays, organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays, active-matrix organic light-emitting diode (AMOLED) displays, liquid crystal laser displays, time-multiplexed optical shutter (TMOS) displays, or 3D displays.
The computing device 120 may include a network interface 130 to interface to the network 110 through a variety of connections including standard telephone lines LAN or WAN links (802.11, T1, T3, Gigabit Ethernet), broadband connections (ISDN, Frame Relay, ATM, Gigabit Ethernet, Ethernet-over-SONET, ADSL, VDSL, BPON, GPON, fiber optical including FiOS), wireless connections, or some combination of any or all of the above. Connections may be established using a variety of communication protocols. The computing device 120 may communicate with other computing devices via any type and/or form of gateway or tunneling protocol such as Secure Socket Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS). The network interface 130 may include a built-in network adapter, network interface card, PCMCIA network card, EXPRESSCARD network card, card bus network adapter, wireless network adapter, USB network adapter, modem or any other device suitable for interfacing the computing device 120 to any type of network capable of communication and performing the operations described herein.
The computing device 120 may operate under the control of an operating system that controls scheduling of tasks and access to system resources. The computing device 120 may be running any operating system such as any of the versions of the MICROSOFT WINDOWS operating systems, the different releases of the Unix and Linux operating systems, any version of the MAC OS for Macintosh computers, any embedded operating system, any real-time operating system, any open source operating system, any proprietary operating system, any operating systems for mobile computing devices, or any other operating system capable of running on the computing device and performing the operations described herein.
The computer system 120 may be any workstation, telephone, desktop computer, laptop or notebook computer, netbook, tablet, server, handheld computer, mobile telephone, smartphone or other portable telecommunications device, media playing device, a gaming system, mobile computing device, or any other type and/or form of computing, telecommunications or media device that is capable of communication.
In all of the hardware systems mentioned above, the method and system described herein may be embodied in some form and perform the functions explained herein through software, programmed hardware, or other computing means. The method and system described herein may also be done with some steps in software, and others done by a user.
1.2 System Introduction
The following detailed description is presented to enable a person skilled in the art to make and use the invention. For purposes of explanation, specific details are set forth to provide a thorough understanding of the present invention. However, it will be apparent to one skilled in the art that these specific details are not required to practice the invention. Descriptions of specific applications are provided only as representative examples. Various modifications to the preferred embodiments will be readily apparent to one skilled in the art, and the general principles defined herein may be applied to other embodiments and applications without departing from the scope of the invention. The present invention is not intended to be limited to the embodiments shown but is to be accorded the widest possible scope consistent with the principles and features disclosed herein.
To overcome the challenges associated with the conventional BOD meeting, a computer-executable application helps systemize BOD meetings for all members and delivers a dynamic, energized, progressive, and decision-oriented Board meeting.
An objective of the embodiments herein may be to create a tool that encourages and captures best practices for preparing for and conducting a BOD meeting and accordingly, execute such best practices for effective and connected BOD meetings. Another objective of the embodiments presented herein may be to provide a framework for scoring each BOD meeting by members with respect to one or more parameters such as quality, acuity, efficiency, and/or depth of topics.
An additional objective of the embodiments presented herein may be to use real-time score card output for subsequent BOD meetings or any other meetings. Yet another objective may be to contextually link each BOD meeting to a subsequent BOD meeting with speed and convenience. Another objective of the embodiments presented herein may be to deliver dynamic scenarios of a company trend versus NorthStar cohorts. Another objective of the embodiments presented may be to enable selected content (e.g. cut and lift content) to be distributed to remaining employees of the company. Yet another objective of the embodiments may be to use the application for communication between members during a BOD meeting as well as integrate such communications to cloud storages, data sources, and commonly known communication applications.
The system described herein may be considered as a corporate and/or board member operating system that connects the running of a meeting to a building of a company with the key decision makers. As a system of record, a user can add anything to it, and its value grows at an increasing rate with increased use. It may be open and extensible using APIs (public comps, north star cohorts discussed below), it may connect people and resources together. It may deliver proprietary live presentation design and experiences on multiple form factors as mentioned below.
In an exemplary scenario, the computer-executable application presented herein may be implemented by private and venture-backed companies with approximately $5 million and above in revenue and employing a Board of Directors. In this example, companies with Boards who have accessed third party capital may implement the computer-executable application. However, a person skilled in the art would appreciate that revenue, market capitalization and/or other financial factors may not be necessary criteria to implement the embodiments presented herein, for a specific company and any number or type of factors may be considered without departing from the scope of the ongoing disclosure.
In another example, a fully onboarded customer using the application described herein may have the CEO, their direct reports including admin and a one or more additional users of the application in the Finance department. Additionally, there may be three to six users per Company Board. Over a period of time, there may be more users in a Company from the various functions who serve as team leaders. The application presented herein may enable increased collaboration between all stakeholders.
In the above example, a typical year one customer may include ten users of the application. This application may be the most important product used by a BOD member and one of the most important products for the CEO and company. Usage of the application may occur frequently and intensely before and after a BOD meeting versus just a few days before and during the BOD meeting. This application may act as a decision support application for the most important matters of the company.
In accordance with the embodiments presented herein, the application may be executable on any known computing device such as, but not limited to, mobile phones, laptops, tablets, desktops, and so on. The application described in this disclosure may include at least four product components:
Component 1 (Sign up)—The first component may be a sign-up component that may allow a BOD member to login into the application, as will be described later.
Component 2 (Template or Frame of company)—The second component may include a template or a frame of, for example, but not limited, a three-year vision of a company. In an exemplary scenario, this component may include a table or text visual or to present associated data on the three years vision in a single view for conciseness. The three year vision may include the CEO's vision of key statements and metrics associated with the company. In another exemplary scenario, this data may also be included in an Office suite application document that articulates a target profile of the company in subsequent three years.
Component 3 (BOD Meeting Workflow)—The third component may include visuals and content inputs to prepare, perform, and follow-up a BOD meeting. In an exemplary scenario, there may be an information architecture depending on implementation requirements, as described later.
Component 4 (NorthStar module)—The fourth component may also be referred to as ‘ValuDash’ in an exemplary scenario. In the third component (BOD meeting workflow), there may be a codebase and a data set that may allow a user of the application to select a public company referred to as “NorthStar.” The application may allow the user (e.g. BOD member) to discover key metrics and compare performance of their company against the performance of the NorthStar(s) company that is selected. In an exemplary scenario, the Northstar module may present a data set of several public Software as a Service (SaaS) companies. This data may include financials, Key performance indices (KPIs), scraped qualitative insights, and CEO comments.
In an embodiment, the application may also optionally, include a modeling capability. For instance, the application may include a sales and marketing investment model that may allow the BOD members to toggle real-time, during or prior to a BOD meeting, several scenarios of growth to burn/profit trade-offs. This may resolve the conventional challenge with respect to capital allocation, thereby, changing a static BOD meeting into a more dynamic BOD meeting about strategic progression.
The application may provide an anchor of the company three-year vision that pivots each board meeting to associate their short term to long term objectives. The application may additionally provide a systemized technique for BOD preparation, execution, and follow-up from each quarterly meeting across multiple years. Additionally, the application may also provide self-selected NorthStar(s) for the company to track its performance relative to a benchmark.
An objective of the application may be to demonstrate to the BOD members that a gap or delta between their company with a capital of for example, but not limited to, $15 million or $25 million is not substantive with respect to a capital of a public company two years before IPO. An exemplary inference for a CEO from the application may be “it could be just two more years and X amount of capital additionally required to equal a Northstar size, two years before an IPO.” In this example, a subsequent objective realized by the CEO may be “What do we need to do now to get on that same line of growth and performance as the Northstar?” The conventional mechanisms to conduct BOD meetings do not offer a BOD package that resolves the above-described scenario in a consistent, easy, and progressive manner.
In another scenario, the application may present data using graphs, tables, capsules, side bars, or other creative art to transform the BOD meeting to an enlightened, energized, fun, and decision-oriented BOD meeting.
The methods and systems are described in more detail with reference to
Another option under the ‘Companies and Cohorts’ tab may be ‘My Cohorts,’ which may include a cohort comparison previously saved in a computing device of the BOD member. Yet another option under the ‘Companies and Cohorts’ tab may be ‘trending cohorts,’ which may on being selected, display a list of popular companies with a specific criterion.
The comps module 402 may also include a comps table, which may indicate a comparison of the company with another public company and its performance 1 and 2 years before initial public offering (IPO) of the public company.
Further, a ‘performance’ tab may display public data on financial performance of the selected company based on selected metrics, time duration/series and associated trends or insights. The visualization of the financial performance may be customizable. Additionally, the ‘performance’ tab may also display meeting performance associated with the selected company depending on similar criteria as mentioned above. The ‘performance’ tab may also display the sentiment and efficiency of the meetings held by the selected company's executives based on public information accessible by the application. The visualization of presented information related to sentiment and efficiency along with the associated trends or insights, may be customizable by the BOD member depending on design requirements.
The specific company module 702 may additionally include a ‘Northstar’ tab to indicate the Northstar companies and assist the BOD member to view insights or trends related to their performance along with their sales and marketing models. For instance, an insight may include a performance of a Northstar company 2 years before the company's IPO versus the current performance of a company that the BOD member may be evaluating. Another insight may indicate various funding milestones in the past for the Northstar company. These insights may assist the CEO to estimate growth of their company in comparison to the Northstar company.
The specific company module 702 may additionally include a ‘meeting preparation’ tab. This tab may assist the BOD member to select a previous meeting of a company they may be associated with. The BOD member may access the meeting details along with the schedule and agenda items associated with the selected meeting. The BOD member may also view attendees, notes, presentation materials, and/or any additional documents associated with the previous meeting to prepare for an upcoming meeting. The ‘meeting preparation’ tab may also include options to create a new meeting, set agenda items for the created meeting, schedule invite attendees, and edit a calendar associated with a meeting. This tab may also display a T minus calendar that may display a number of days till the upcoming meeting.
Further, the company module 702 may assist the BOD member to select a previous meeting and access the meeting details along with the schedule and agenda items associated with the selected meeting. The BOD member may also view attendees, notes, presentation materials, and/or any additional documents associated with the meeting.
The BOD member may also access a logbook associated with a BOD meeting held by the selected company in a ‘log’ tab, as illustrated in
Further, the information architecture, when used by the CEO or an internal stakeholder may also include a comps module similar to the comps module 402, as described earlier.
Further, the information architecture for the CEO or internal stakeholder may also include a task module 1102, a calendar module 1104, and a resource module 1106, as illustrated in
Further, the information architecture for the CEO or internal stakeholder may also include a search module 1202, a notifications module 1204, and an account module 1206 similar to the corresponding modules described earlier in the context of
Further, the information architecture for the CEO or internal stakeholder may also include a home module 1302. In an embodiment, the home module 1312 may additionally include a ‘status’ tab, which may include various options, as illustrated in
Further, the home module 1302 may also include an ‘overview’ tab, which may include various options, as described in the context of
The ‘performance’ tab, as illustrated in
The home module 1302 may additionally include a ‘meeting preparation’ tab, as illustrated in
The home module 1302 may also include a ‘log’ tab that includes several details associated with all previous meetings held by the company, as illustrated in
The key metrics database and insights service 1512 may include an S&M Model 1550 that includes models 1554 that access information in a database 1552 that may be fed by an excel sheet. The models may include a sequence of IF/THEN statements built on a database of business assumptions entered about the company. An example IF/THEN statement may be “If we add______% to our sales budget, we can expect______% sales growth.” There may be hundreds of these statements based on established business logic and these models will be helpful to users as they make business decisions.
The financial performance insights 1560 also include a database fed by an Excel sheet and may include company data and graphs based on company performance. Again, this information helps users understand the company's position at any time.
The comps metric 1570 similarly fed by a database 1572 of public company EDGAR data fed by crawlers allows a user to review metrics of other companies that may be desirable to compare as Northstars.
And finally the analytics and insights insight 1580 fed by a database and models 1584 compares the subject company to Northstar companies using data from the comps database 1572 using a variety of selectable metrics.
The board of directors service 1520 includes services for calendaring 1522, tasks 1524, the board book builder and templates 1526, board meetings organization 1527, and conducting board meetings 1528 using other services 1529 within the system.
The aggregator connects to the key metrics 1512 and bod service 1520 as well as the permissions database 1530, but also generates events via a service like Kafka 1540 to an event service 1542 to generate emails and other notifications 1544.
This is a product specifically designed for private, venture backed CEOs and Board members who are scaling from seed stage to pre IPO stage. Mission is a system based on experienced operators and investors in venture capital and private equity. There are two perspectives of the platform, which are connected together with a long term strategic decision-making framework.”
The system is tailored both to Founders and CEOs who desire greater alignment, consistency and strategic contributions among all Board members and Board members who EAGER to provide THOSE strategic insights and operational support to the CEO and management team.
Here is a select set of features and workflows of the Mission system.
Now to see Mission in action . . . Meet our customer WorkLink. WorkLink is a platform for both employees and management. It delivers a secure personalized IT tool kit for every employee across every work channel. Second, WorkLink gives management an AI based engagement engine to maximize productivity for the company.
Let's see first hand what the Mission platform can do. First we'll follow Elinor, CEO of Worklink.
As part of her set up process with Mission, Elinor laid out a comprehensive Three Year Vision based on the Mission-provided framework, which addresses Marketplace landscape and key internal drivers. This provides the board continuity between long term WorkLink objectives and the current operating cycle.
After taking a look at her Three-Year vision Framework, Elinor goes to her Status homepage for her company, Worklink. This status page shows her everything in the platform at a snapshot view.
Right at the top, in the Meeting Prep section, she sees that It's T-55; Worklink is about two months out from their Q3 2021 quarterly board meeting.
The top level navigation will give her access to the Comps section, her Tasks, her Calendar, the Resources section, as well as her personal profile and notifications. Here she sees a notification reminder that her Monthly Board Call is coming up in 3 days.
Elinor knows her team is all set for the monthly board call. For her quarterly, meeting, however, she knows within about a week, she should draft a BOD agenda for review with her BOD Chair and then begin to assign tasks for creating the board book. But first she wants to review last quarter's meeting summary for continuity with the upcoming meeting.
Now, in the Log section of her company's Mission workspace, where all past meeting content lives, she goes to the most recent meeting and clicks Summary.
First, Elinor clicks on the Follow-ups tab, to double check that all the action items from the meeting last month are completed. Great, all these tasks are marked as complete. Then, she wants to dive into the sentiment ratings so she clicks “Sentiment.”
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After her refresher, she's ready to officially begin her next meeting agenda.
FIGS. 26A26C show meeting prep, check publish status, details published, Agenda and Board Book not published, check/interact with preparation schedule, and check off task as complete.
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In the Journal, she begins her system-generated Prep Prompts for this meeting. The platform includes these customizable quarterly prep prompt templates for every stakeholder, to ensure everyone comes as prepared as possible. For Elinor, it helps her think critically about her company and her board and get in the right mindset before initiating a new meeting's agenda.
Elinor answers thought-provoking questions, such as about her biggest learning last quarter, any major competitor news, and whether her requests for support from the last meeting was done.
After reviewing last quarter's financial dashboard, sentiment results, north stars progression, and completing the Prep Prompts, she feels prepared to go back and create her agenda for this meeting.
In
In this case, all the sections are already pre-assigned for her team due to her chosen template. The platform Board Book templates also include PPT templates for agenda items such as Product update, Financial Summary etc
Elinor decides to add a new agenda item section to review North Stars, makes the duration 15 minutes, and assigns the presenter as her CFO, Ruth Payroth. Ruth will be notified and will populate the agenda item content.
Elinor clicks Save changes.
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She knows the board book is still in progress, but feels confident about the agenda items and meeting flow.
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Now we'll see how WorkLink's CFO, Ruth Payroth, uses the Mission platform, as shown in
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Intelligent insights from the Mission platform highlight important data-driven findings, such as a notable rise in a metric compared to last year.
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For every public company in the Mission Comps database, there is a detailed page with current data and IPO data, especially the two years before the companies went IPO. This customized data for IPO minus two years and IPO minus one year are the most instructive and useful to any private PE or VC backed company building to a billion. Every company page will also have intelligent insights and scraped CEO quotes, and a company timeline with key funding milestones.
For every public company in the Mission Comps database, there is a detailed page with current data and IPO data, especially the two years before the companies went IPO. This customized data for IPO minus two years and IPO minus one year are the most instructive and useful to any private PE or VC backed company building to a billion. Every company page will also have intelligent insights and scraped CEO quotes, and a company timeline with key funding milestones.
In
She clicks “Add to North Stars,” and goes to the North Stars page to take a look.
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Ruth decides to run a growth projection using the Sales & Marketing model, as she thinks that will be a highly useful tool for the upcoming board meeting, to prove that WorkLink has high potential for breakaway growth.
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Ruth decides to run a growth projection using the Sales & Marketing model, as she thinks that will be a highly useful tool for the upcoming board meeting, to prove that WorkLink has high potential for breakaway growth.
In the Sales & Marketing model, Ruth chooses to run a Growth projection and defines the CAGR as 25%.
In
She's liking the trend, and adds the data page to the Board Book for the Q3 meeting—specifically for the Review North Stars agenda item which Elinor assigned to her.
Soon enough, she gets a notification—a note from Elinor on the Board Book asking her to run the projection with an increased CAGR. Ruth quickly clicks Update projection data and enters in 50% as the new CAGR.
Yes, that's more like it, she thinks, seeing that this model projects they will clear $100M in revenue by 2025. Scrolling down, she looks at the table, which indicates the specific projection values for each year compared to the North Stars.
She knows this is perfect for the Board who has been asking for more growth scenarios. She knows this is a market based, unique and effective process to discuss different scenarios of growth to burn over the next two years. She′ll add this version to the Board Book instead.
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As the CFO, it is Ruth's role to be the live meeting administrator, including managing the participants and waiting room and officially advancing the meeting from agenda item to agenda item.
Once they have reached quorum, Ruth clicks Start Meeting. This officially kicks off the live meeting and shows the first agenda item, Big Picture, as active. Elinor shares her screen, and plays her CEO Quarterly Spotlight video.
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She clicks “Present screen” and chooses her Projections & North Stars data chart from the attached agenda files.
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She sees the votes come in live as the board members vote. Once the results are all in, she clicks Continue
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He notes that the Q3 meeting for WorkLink is in 3 days from now, and the Board Book is available.
That reminds him, he wanted to create a cohort analysis to compare against WorkLink, and recommend some new North Stars to the WorkLink executive team.
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They choose Dropbox, DocuSign, Alteryx, Smartsheet, and Box.
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He can also run Sales & Marketing model growth projections from this page, like in the North Stars section.
He renames the cohort to “Additional North Star Ideas” and clicks Share. Here he can download a PDF or copy a share link to the interactive page. He click copy share link and copies the link to send to Elinor and Ruth.
Then, he clicks on WorkLink to go to their Company page.
Here, he lands on the Overview page of WorkLink. Every time he lands on a company page, he's presented with their vision statement, their key company details and current performance metrics.
He also takes a look at the Three Year Vision which Elinor has laid out, which looks at Marketplace landscape and key internal drivers.
In
Here, he looks through the long-form Board Book package, which includes last meeting's minutes, Elinor's video spotlight, Performance spreadsheets, North Star graphs and more.
He clicks Download, in order to download the package and view it offline, but he appreciates that he can always return to the Board Book link to view the package and files, even on his phone.
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They ping Elinor to come back into the exec session to share their sentiment results, notes and other executive summary data, and they have a productive discussion on the state of the company.
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Conclusion of Demo Script
And that's a tour of Mission's key features.
An additional feature of the Mission product will be a proactive, single sheet snapshot of market trends, quotes and competitive information that is delivered to Board members in advance of the upcoming Board meeting.
The Resources section of Mission will include templates, preparation prompts and various tools for recurring and special Board agenda items. Examples of recurring board topics will be templated for Sales and Marketing, Product, KPI trees, ‘if/then’ models of growth, Sales compensation models, and more.
The product is also mobile enabled providing a system of intelligence, engagement and collaboration all on your phone.
Mission is a system to build better companies faster among CEOs, management and Board members committed for the long term.
Certain terms and phrases have been used throughout the disclosure and will have the following meanings in the context of the ongoing disclosure.
A “BOD member” may refer to an individual with substantive business or investment experience. The BOD member may not necessarily be technology proficient, but they may be proficient in basic computing skills. For instance, the BOD member may be qualified and/or skilled to use basic computer applications such as, but not limited to, an Office suite application, communication applications, cloud storage applications to conduct various business activities. Such a member may not necessarily be interested in investing excessive time on undesired topics in a BOD meeting except the desired content and discussion.
A “CEO” in the context of a BOD meeting may be a first time CEO or an experienced CEO. The BOD meeting environment may provide an environment, where the CEO is risk averse, cautious, and measured. The CEO may be technologically proficient or has sufficient qualification, skill, and/or technology support to make her or him technology enabled.
A “Chief Financial Officer (CFO)” may also be referred to as “Finance Leader” in the context of a BOD meeting. The CFO may be an individual with more or less experience than the CEO. The CFO may not necessarily be technology proficient and may not necessarily be willing to incur expenditure on technology unless the technology reduces time or company expenses. The CFO may have sufficient qualification and/or skill to be considered as an owner of a BOD presentation (e.g. a slide-deck) and may be required to perform majority activities in the BOD meeting. Without a CFO buy-in, new product adoption/technology may not be allowed in the BOD meeting.
An “Admin” may an individual who may be skilled in performing administrative activities. The personality of an Admin may vary significantly from person to person and may be diverse across demographics. The admin may be technology proficient in Office suite applications and communication-related applications.
The BOD meeting may also include several other members such as, but not limited to, a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), Chief Procurement Officer (CPO), Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), a legal representative and a Human Resources representative.
A “buyer” may follow the same persona as the members in the BOD meeting such as, but not limited to, (a) investors in private companies and (b) the CEOs, CFOs, and Admins of the company. An important demand driver on Buyers is that a venture or private equity investor usually attends four to seven different BOD meetings every year with little to no standardization across companies for BOD meetings.
The system use a two-step or phase of CEO and management team process of strategy, scenario building and operating plan decisions that can be used for board of director meetings and decision making in a more dynamic, effective and efficient process. The system may have a two phased system that first focuses on CEO and management team strategic framing of the company's long term objectives and using the system capabilities to build scenarios and make internal decisions regarding investment and priorities. These conclusions based on the original workflows, vision, prompts, north stars and invest and scale system modules may then be used for the CEO and management to seamlessly integrate into a multiyear, multi horizon Board of Directors meetings, real-time decision scenarios, voting, proprietary messaging both public and private with a closed loop feedback and sentiment feature with stored artifacts via logs for a five to ten year Board member tenure.
In an embodiment, one or more computer-readable storage media may be used in implementing embodiments consistent with the present disclosure. A computer-readable storage medium refers to any type of physical memory on which information or data readable by a processor may be stored. Thus, a computer-readable storage medium may store instructions for execution by one or more processors, including instructions for causing the processor(s) to perform steps or stages consistent with the embodiments described herein. The term “computer-readable medium” should be understood to include tangible items and exclude carrier waves and transient signals, i.e., be non-transitory. Examples include random access memory (RAM), read-only memory (ROM), volatile memory, nonvolatile memory, hard drives, CD ROMs, DVDs, flash drives, disks, and any other known physical storage media.
The terms “comprising,” “including,” and “having,” as used in the claim and specification herein, shall be considered as indicating an open group that may include other elements not specified. The terms “a,” “an,” and the singular forms of words shall be taken to include the plural form of the same words, such that the terms mean that one or more of something is provided. The term “one” or “single” may be used to indicate that one and only one of something is intended. Similarly, other specific integer values, such as “two,” may be used when a specific number of things is intended. The terms “preferably,” “preferred,” “prefer,” “optionally,” “may,” and similar terms are used to indicate that an item, condition, or step being referred to is an optional (not required) feature of the invention.
The invention has been described with reference to various specific and preferred embodiments and techniques. However, many variations and modifications may be made while remaining within the spirit and scope of the invention. It will be apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art that methods, devices, device elements, materials, procedures, and techniques other than those specifically described herein can be applied to the practice of the invention as broadly disclosed herein without resort to undue experimentation. All art-known functional equivalents of methods, devices, device elements, materials, procedures, and techniques described herein are intended to be encompassed by this invention. Whenever a range is disclosed, all subranges and individual values are intended to be encompassed. This invention is not to be limited by the embodiments disclosed, including any shown in the drawings or exemplified in the specification, which are given by way of example and not of limitation. Additionally, the various embodiments of the networks, devices, and/or modules described herein contain optional features that can be individually or together applied to any other embodiment shown or contemplated here to be mixed and matched with the features of such networks, devices, and/or modules.
While the invention has been described with respect to a limited number of embodiments, those skilled in the art, having benefit of this disclosure, will appreciate that other embodiments can be devised which do not depart from the scope of the invention as disclosed herein.
Number | Date | Country | |
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63274573 | Nov 2021 | US |