Hire a good company secretary

Many years ago I was going through a board evaluation assessment with a CEO and she shook his head in amazement. “I didn’t know that the outsourced company secretary was supposed to be doing all these things! I’ve clearly not been getting a good return on the monthly retainer I pay him.”

Not wanting the company secretary to get unnecessarily blamed, I gently told the CEO that perhaps she didn’t know what she didn’t know and had not structured some of the duties that the assessment was reviewing into the company secretary’s contract. “Well now I know and I’m going to extract my pound of flesh. We’ve been doing too much ourselves,” was her pithy response.