How To Conduct Corporate Meetings

How should I conduct corporate meetings?

Conducting of corporate meetings, and let's just talk about board of directors meetings first because obviously, there are shareholder meetings, board of director meetings, meetings with the officers, the president and CEO of the company, but I'm going to focus on the board of directors meetings. Now, the corporate formalities that you have is holding regular meetings. In most states, shareholder meetings and board meetings are required at least annually. I tend to recommend that if you're one of those companies that needs to meet about a lot of things to kind of do it monthly, or at a minimum you might want to do it quarterly. So let's assume that every quarter you have a meeting. Well, the meeting is going to be conducted in accordance wtih the company's bylogs. The bylogs will set out what notice needs to go out, what the notice should say, when the meeting can be held, how it can be adjourned and what business you might want to talk about. In most states the notice needs to go out between ten and sixty days of the meeting, so if you have a meeting on March 10th, any time from the last day of February to sixty days prior you can send out a notice. In that notice, you'd want to send it to all of the directors, and state what type of business you're going to be conducting. It's not necessary, but it's common courtesy to do so. Then at the meeting, the chairperson or whoever is the person that you select will call the meeting to order and there will be typically the secretary of the company or if you have a lawyer, the lawyer of the company, would record the minutes of that meeting and say what's transpired. They'll put down who attended, whether or not there was a quorum, a quorum being enough people to actually hold a meeting, and then how things were voted on, whether it was voted unanimously, or if there was a majority or if the vote failed. Then they'll state typically when the next meeting is going to be and what time that it was adjurned. And if there's any kind of irregularity or a problem or you need to take a break, a lot of times that can be handled in there as well. But not keeping up with corporate formalities like that can really get a company in trouble in what's called alter-ego liability or piercing the corporate veil.