This is usually for good reason. The leadership team of the company that are responsible for reporting to the Board are typically “heads down” working very hard on moving their company forward and reporting to the Board a bunch of financial data is the last thing on their mind for much of the quarter. But these Board meetings are not only beneficial in one direction — they also provide the heads of the company a time to take a good look at their financials and do some thinking on their own. Without the deadline of a Board meeting looming this would be done less and less often and that could lead to big problems should small problems not be caught early enough.

Fred Wilson’s MBA Monday series of posts today had one on calculating Burn Rate (the amount of money a company is purging without recuperating it) and in it he says that, as a Board, they’ll do sanity checks on the data reported by the company to be sure everything adds up.

“Whenever I get a version of this more sophisticated calculation of burn rate, I always do a sanity check by comparing to the “back of the envelope” method just to be sure they are in the same ballpark.”

These sanity checks are a good thing for the company to do beforehand so that the Board doesn’t need to call you out on it. I’ve seen this happen many times. We’ve reported numbers that we thought were just fine only to find out something simply did not add up. Partially because the people that were putting together the numbers were staring at these numbers for hours and hours at a time. Sometimes things can begin to get fuzzy. That is why these “back of the envelope” sanity checks that Wilson suggest are so vital. They are simple calculations that can be done just to be sure the other, more complex, calculations are even close. This will save you a lot of time and embarrassment.

As a side note, I’ve never been envious of being the person responsible for putting all of this data together. I’ve never been tasked with that responsibility and I’m glad for it. But I think it is an excellent exercise for anyone in the company to have a crack at running through the numbers and pulling your hair out a bit while doing it. You’ll learn a lot.

When compared to other viruses the 2009 Swine Flu really isn’t that bad. At least not yet. So one has to wonder… are things being exaggerated in the media to make money? I think the media is driven much by what people find interesting and people find the effects of H1N1 interesting. For the media it sells newspapers, air time, pageviews, etc. But that is the “job” the news these days, hype.

You may have noticed that recent commercials for products like Lysol, antibacterial soups, hand sanitizer and the like have all included something about protecting from the swine flu. Sure, they’d be dumb not to. People want to hear “Kills all traces of the H1N1 virus”. So tell them what they want to hear and you’ll sell your product.

Lets take a quick look at Reckitt Benckiser Group, the company that distributes Lysol, as an example of a company that could be benefiting from the H1N1 virus being as “important” as it is. They’re stock is up an incredible 23% this year to date. Not bad. By the way, I’m not saying that this growth is only related to the swine flu, I’m just making observations b’okay?

Think about this; are you washing your hands more often? I know I am. So just in that simple process we’re using more water, more soap, more paper towels/electricity. Have you ever seen more hand sanitizer being bought in your life? It is everywhere! There are too many companies to track to quantify the amount of money spent on the prevention of spreading this virus but it has to be in the billions.

I don’t know how much money has been made on the H1N1 virus but I’d bet it is a ton. (And one could easily argue that by me having ads on this very post that I’ll be making money on the virus too.)