Why You Should Create a Personal Board Deck
In my last professional role (VP of Sales and Marketing for a Venture-Backed FinTech Company), I was responsible for putting together a monthly update to our board members. We had Key Performance Indicators that we used to monitor the health of our business and a budget that based on hitting our performance goals. As we wrapped each month, it was on me to catalog our Marketing, Business Development and Sales metrics and provide an update to our investors.
I now keep a personal board deck, which gets quarterly updates and which I review live with my accountability partner err... “board member” Kasia (who also writes an amazing newsletter, BTW). This process has been a game-changer for me, so I am sharing more this week.
*** Shout out to Kasia who’s created and shared the OG board deck — her idea, not mine, she’s totally brill.
The Deck — My deck has three main components:
Long Term Vision / Goals — Big af goals broken down across 10 year, 5 year, and 1 year increments. I use the same goal setting framework provided in my book, ManifestHer.
Quarterly Vision, Priorities, Prompts and Upcoming — Leveraging the 1 year goals from #1, above, here’s some example slides of mine.
Vision — is like a mini vision board with imagery representative the things I am prioritizing during that time period. As an example: Priority = “Health” imagery under health might be a woman walking, on the stair master, doing yoga, weight-lifting, etc.
Priorities — essentially an excel table with no more than 6 header rows, in each header row is one of my key priorities. Under each header are habits, initiatives or activities that I prioritize doing during the time period to support/activate that priority. As an example: Priority in Header Row = “Health” the habits under Health might include: “Sleep 8 hrs, Hydrate >100oz of water daily, Move >1hr daily, take multi-vitamin daily”
Prompts — basically these prompts are just questions to keep me on track or get me back on track if I “fall off the wagon” so-to-speak. As an example: Priority = Health, prompt might be “In six months, will you regret not making your health a priority today?” or “What can you do today to nourish your body?”
Upcoming — here I log upcoming calendar events or activities that relate to the priority. As an example: Priority = Health you might find “Doctor Appt Jun 1” or something of the like.
Appendix — this houses a miscellaneous assortment of ideas, lessons, and other useful insights/resources (e.g. my personal style look book, which you read about last week’s newsletter)
As any of the above evolves, so does the deck. I built it in Google Slides, so I simply make a copy of the entire deck and update the new copy accordingly. I store all the old copies in a folder, so I can revisit whenever I want to see how my goals have evolved and/or been crossed off the list.
The Review Process — Kasia and I typically reserve 1.5 hours for the quarterly review, giving us ample time to share our updates and receive feedback/advice before trading places. We have a standing quarterly invite that can be moved around to accommodate schedules, but it ALWAYS stays on the calendar.
Give it a Try Yourself — Ask a friend if she’d be willing to commit to doing this with you for no less than three quarters in a row. Using the instructions above, create your personal board deck (make it your own!), log your big af goals and then take time to map out your upcoming quarter — visions, priorities, prompts and upcoming events. Find time on the calendar for you and your friend to do show/tell and receive perspective/feedback. Before the end of your session, plan your next quarterly review.
Then, let me know what you think! I can’t wait to hear if you enjoy this process as much as I do!
