Monthly Advisor Update Email

Over the years I’ve been asked several times to be an advisor or mentor. While there are a number of good posts about the benefits of an advisory board (see Jeff’s great thoughts here), I want to focus on a little used technique that adds tremendous value: monthly advisor update emails. After you’ve built an advisory board and scheduled a nice recurring quarterly dinner, one of the best things to do is to keep everyone up-to-date on a regular basis. Monthly feels right as it’s enough time to make progress but not too frequent so as to become burdensome.

Here’s an example template for a monthly advisor update email borrowed from the format Kyle Porter uses for regular team and investor updates:

• Current quarter goals and progress towards goals
• Product update
• Sales update (New MRR, total MRR, and current weighted pipeline)
• Marketing update
• Quarterly priority projects update
• Culture stories

The next time you develop an advisor relationship, regardless of role, make sure a regular update email is incorporated.

What else? What would you add or change about the monthly advisor update email?