Hot Seat: The Practical Guide To A Homeowner Association Annual Meeting

In my twenty plus years of experience in managing homeowner associations, I am frequently told by board members that the most stressful part of serving on the board of directors is the annual meeting. I once attended an annual meeting in which a member was asked if he was willing to serve on the board. He told the assembly “yes,” but with the condition that he would not attend the annual meeting while on the board. The membership laughed and he responded seriously with, “I am not joking.” It doesn’t have to be this way. Because so many board members found annual meetings stressful, for years I looked for a book specifically dealing with homeowner association annual meetings. I thought, "What a great gift to send to our board member clients!”. The books I discovered were geared primarily for legislative bodies and dealt with parliamentary issues that rarely, if ever, arise in a homeowner association annual meeting. Some books were so theoretically driven that they offered no real practical advice. In short, there were no books that could improve the annual meeting experience for board members and the rest of the membership. No book seemed to take into account the raw emotional aspects of many homeowner association meetings and the stress that can result. What I was in search of was a real-world guide for annual meetings. A guide with actionable tactics that could be implemented to immediately have a positive impact on an annual meeting. A positive impact, no matter the number of association members present or the number of contentious issues going on within the homeowner association. There were none that I felt addressed this topic in the way it needed to be addressed. I then decided to write my own book that would be of benefit to my Board member clients. What is in this book is, for lack of a better phrase, “the secret sauce” of successfully holding a homeowner association annual meeting. I started with the basics for the member new to living within a homeowner association who wished to gain a better understandi