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Monthly Meetings and Your Management Company

At Wentworth, we see each board meeting as a way to measure the status of a building. Each month, we carefully prepare an agenda for every one of our properties, setting forth in detail what items we will be discussing at the meeting, and showing the progress of the various projects we are working on for the board. We prepare a package for each board member, which includes the agenda and all the back-up material needed to allow for discussion of the various items on the agenda. These board packages are detailed, full of information and organized to make the board member’s job less confusing, and to facilitate decision-making.

But monthly meetings are also a time for boards to measure the status of their management company. Is the agenda properly organized and thought out? Can the items listed be discussed in a reasonable length of time? Is the proper background material included? Is the manager fully versed and prepared to lead discussions of the topics at hand? If not, has a professional been brought to the meeting to help facilitate these discussion? These are the questions you should be asking yourself as you run through the agenda at your next meeting. After all, you hire the manager to run your building for you; the manner in which they run your board meetings tells you a lot about the way your management company operates.

At Wentworth, we pride ourselves on the fact that all of our board meetings, and annual meetings for that matter, are run in a professional, organized, careful manner. We try to keep each meeting to a reasonable length of time, usually one and a half hours or so, because we know that anything more than that makes concentration difficult. In addition, long meetings usually indicate that there is too much on the agenda; we believe that a concise agenda makes for a well-run meeting.

Another area of concern for boards is the level of knowledge of the manager. At Wentworth, we constantly educate our managers on the important topics of the day, from Local Law issues to legal updates to management trends. We send our managers to seminars on a regular basis to keep abreast of the latest technology and to get a better feeling for the industry in general. If your manager is uninformed or unsure of a topic on the agenda, that is a clear indication of a problem with the way your management firm is handling your building.

We encourage you to use your monthly meeting as a yardstick to measure the quality of management you are receiving, and to remember that the manager has been hired to run your building in a thoughtful, professional, efficient manner. To discuss issues occurring at your monthly meetings, please call our president, Jonathan Klein.