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?
David Cummings on Startups 
Great post. Would like to add ‘New Hires’ to the list as well as ‘Failures & Learnings’