How Life Without Barriers Saves up to 5 Days per Month on Board Meeting Prep
One of Australia's largest not-for-profit organisations reclaims 2-5 days per month by automating their meeting prep
KEY RESULTS
2-5 days
saved per month
40+
meetings managed annually
Instant
shell minutes generation
Zero
re-numbering stress
.png "Kellie King")
Kellie King
Senior Executive Officer, Corporate Governance
.png "Life Without Barriers")
Life Without Barriers
One of Australia's largest not-for-profit organisations, delivering services to vulnerable people across 300+ communities nationwide. Services include disability support, mental health, child and youth services, aged care, and refugee support.
Size: 8,000+ employees | Boards/Committees: 1 board + 4 committees + 5 subsidiary boards | Customer since: June 2025
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Life Without Barriers manages a minimum of 40 board and committee meetings annually across one main board, four committees, and one subsidiary board. Before implementing boardcycle, Senior Executive Officer for Corporate Governance Kellie King spent up to two days preparing for each meeting—constantly re-numbering agendas, re-timing items, and manually creating shell minutes and run sheets.
Since implementing boardcycle in June 2025, Life Without Barriers has reclaimed 2-5 days per month that were previously consumed by repetitive administrative tasks. More significantly, Kellie now spends her evenings with family instead of on her laptop preparing for meetings.
THE CHALLENGE
"Re-numbering and re-timing just drove me insane"
Life Without Barriers' board preparation process was entirely manual, built in Word and characterised by constant rework. Agendas would be drafted, approved, then changed multiple times during internal review processes. Papers would arrive late, requiring further changes.
4-5x
Agenda iterations per meeting
~2 days
Prep work per meeting
1-2 hours
Preparing shell minutes
A lot
Of work after hours
The Specific Pain Points
Endless re-numbering and re-timing: "When I first started in this role, re-numbering and re-timing... just drove me insane," Kellie explains. "We might rejig an agenda four or five times before a meeting is actually finalised."
Low-value work with no automation: Kellie knew this manual work was wasting her time but had no idea how to automate it. "I knew it was wasting my time... I had no clue that there was a better way to do it."
Last-minute document creation: Shell minutes and run sheets were left until the very last minute because agendas kept changing, making everything feel "a bit more stressful and a bit late to the party."
Working excessive hours: Much of this work spilled into evenings and weekends, taking time away from family.
"The draft agenda may get changed through the review process and then once papers come in, the order may get changed again to make sure the information flow makes sense for meeting attendees, but also creating further manual work for the governance team."
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THE SOLUTION
"Everything can just be the push of a button"
When Kellie saw boardcycle's demonstration, two features immediately caught her attention: instant agenda updates and one-click shell minutes generation. Where she previously spent one to two hours setting up shell minutes before each meeting, boardcycle now generates them instantaneously from the agenda structure.
"It was seeing the ease of changing agendas, and how it automatically did it in less than a second, which was fabulous."
The New Workflow
Life Without Barriers implemented boardcycle in June 2025 and immediately transformed their workflow. Instead of building agendas, shell minutes, run sheets, and action lists as separate, manual processes, everything now flows automatically from a single agenda-building process.
"I think everything's just a lot clearer and cleaner," Kellie explains. "There's less manual tracking required. Everything's where it should be. It's in boardcycle. I know where to go."
THE RESULTS
5 Days Saved Monthly and Time Back with Family
Quantified Time Savings
"I think I've probably saved two to five days a month, depending on the month, with boardcycle," Kellie reports. "On our busier months, it's easily five days when I think about re-numbering, re-timing, and writing the minute shells alone."
The time savings extend beyond Kellie's own work. Because run sheets can now be generated with a single click, she's taken over that responsibility from a colleague who previously spent considerable time creating them manually.
"I actually think the agendas are what save most time because even though you're putting a lot of work into building it, it just flows out of that. So once it's built, everything is ready, which is fabulous."
"I'm putting it into my family. Not working excessive hours and being present in my life is absolutely the main outcome of boardcycle outside of work."
"There's nothing worse than being in a meeting and the timing is off on the agenda. It's quite embarrassing. Boardcycle's automation has eliminated these mistakes."
"Less stress before meetings because I know if the agenda is set up correctly, I know everything can just be the push of a button from there. So I'm not writing a minute shell on the way to the meeting on a plane."
Better Collaboration
With more time available, Kellie can focus on working with executives and team members on their contributions to meetings. "It gives me a lot more time to focus on collaborating with teams on their role in each meeting and getting the best from them for the organisation."
This shift from administrative work to strategic collaboration is exactly what boardcycle enables - freeing CoSecs from the grind to focus on the parts of their role that actually require their expertise.
Team Scalability
As Life Without Barriers expanded their governance team in 2026, boardcycle's centralised visibility became critical. "With it being in boardcycle, new team members are able to see exactly where things are up to and understand the next step in the process... that clarity of where things are at, especially for a larger team, is really important and will save a lot of time."
"Lower stress overall!"
Ready to streamline your board prep?
Ready to build and manage agendas faster and better? Ready for shell minutes in one click? Ready to focus on what really matters, and let us handle the rest? Then get in touch.
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