This Wilmington startup caters exclusively to boards of directors

You sit on the board of directors of a local nonprofit. It’s an honor, but actually getting your board to communicate efficiently can be a burden.
Jessica has been overwhelmed with her newborn. John is a snowbird, so he’s never around in the winter. And Jerry? Between running his new software company and managing his old one, it’s nearly impossible to schedule him in for meetings. Come on, Jerry.
Governance ain’t a cakewalk. That’s an ailment Wilmington-based startup Board Director hopes to remedy.
Now a year-and-a-half old, Board Director’s software aims to be a central portal for board communications, board document sharing and board governance.
“All [board members] need to do is log into the system, look into the backend and now they can make sure all their governance documents are located in one repository,” said founder Michael Barrick.

Barrick, a local web dev, said the idea came to him while he was working on projects for a handful of nonprofits in Philadelphia and Delaware.
“Each one of them kept saying, ‘Do you know any solutions for document sharing and storage for nonprofits?'” he said. “As I dug deeper, I realized boards need a file storage system, but it needs to be organized and they need a scheduling system in there.”
Barrick built and designed the product, beta’d it locally and rolled it out. Now, Board Director’s team is four members deep and services a handful of local nonprofits and colleges, including Cancer Support Community Delaware.
Barrick said Board Director’s target market is three- to five-year-old nonprofits with generally younger boards. And as for the competition?
“People are not doing anything at all,” Barrick said. “Faxes, email, paper. That’s our No. 1 competitor right there — doing nothing.” There’s Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive, but according to Barrick, no software offers the integrated services Board Director does for as low a price as they do.
“We charge a very simple $5 per seat,” Barrick said. “If you have a board of four, it’s $20 per month.”
Barrick said he wants Board Director to be the place to go for nonprofits’ executive directors. “They’re the ones that schedule the meetings, attach the documents, make sure governance documents are uploaded into the system,” he said. “They can do everything within our system.”
While there are plenty of nonprofits to service, Board Director hopes to branch out to for-profit organizations like B Corporations and S Corporations.