New Director Orientation: What to Do in Your First 90 Days on the Board

Jason Hamilton Mikes, JD, MBA
Founder & Managing Shareholder

• Published September 25, 2026
• Reviewed by Jason Hamilton Mikes, JD, MBA, September 26, 2026
• Florida Statutes as of July 1, 2026
• Applies to: Condominiums · HOAs · Cooperatives

Your first ninety days on an association board decide how useful the next three years will be. There is a statutory deadline running against you from the day you are seated, a stack of documents that only helps if you read it in the right order, and a set of operational facts nobody will volunteer. The work is not difficult. It is just specific, and most boards never tell a new member what it is.

The clock starts the day you are seated

You joined a board that is already in motion. Contracts are running. An insurance policy is in force. A budget adopted before you arrived is being spent. Somewhere there is a compliance deadline nobody has mentioned at a meeting in six months. None of it pauses because the membership elected somebody new.

Two things follow. First, you have an obligation of your own with a short fuse on it, and it is yours personally rather than the association's. Second, within your first few meetings you will be asked to vote on matters that were substantially decided before you were elected, and you will either vote on the basis of your own reading or vote with whoever sounds most confident. A board that hands a new director a portal login and a wish of good luck usually gets a director who defers for a year because there is nothing else available to do. What follows is the orientation a competent board provides, and the orientation a new director should ask for when it is not offered.

The certification and education deadline

Florida requires every newly elected or appointed director to document their qualification to serve. The requirement is not the same in each chapter, and the differences matter because a director who files the wrong thing has filed nothing.

Suspension is the part boards get wrong. It is not a penalty the board votes to impose. The statute suspends the director by operation of law, and a suspended director cannot vote and should not be counted toward a quorum. A board that lets a lapsed director vote on a special assessment has handed any owner who dislikes the assessment a procedural argument that costs real money to answer.

File with the secretary, keep your own copy, and confirm the certificate reached the official records. Condominium director certifications are among the documents that must be posted to the association's website or application under § 718.111(12)(g)2., so a missing certificate is visible to every owner. Our guide to condominium director certification walks through the filing.

What to read, and the order to read it in

Read in order of authority, because a document lower on the list yields to everything above it. Reading the rules first tells you what your community currently does. It does not tell you what the association is permitted to do, which is the question you were elected to answer.

1. The declaration (or, in a cooperative, the proprietary lease). This is the contract among the owners. It fixes what is a unit, what is common, who maintains what, and how assessments are shared.
2. The articles of incorporation. Short, usually ignored, and the source of the board's size and the association's corporate powers.
3. The bylaws. Meetings, quorum, notice, officers, committees, elections. Read alongside the statute, because § 718.112(2) deems the condominium bylaws to include the statutory requirements whether or not anyone ever amended them.
4. The rules and written board policies. Collection, records requests, architectural standards, amenity rules.
5. The adopted budget and reserve schedule for the current year, with the prior year alongside it.
6. The most recent annual financial report and the latest monthly financial package.
7. The insurance declarations pages for every policy: property, general liability, directors and officers, fidelity or crime, flood, umbrella, workers' compensation.
8. Twelve months of approved minutes, board and membership.
9. Every inspection or study report: milestone inspection, structural integrity reserve study, reserve study, engineering and roof evaluations.
10. The contracts binder. Management, landscape, pool, elevator, broker of record, and any construction or restoration agreement.

Twelve months of minutes is the single highest-value item on that list and the one new directors skip. Minutes tell you what the board has already decided, what it deferred, what an owner objected to, and what counsel was asked. A decision the board made last March constrains what you can sensibly do this fall, and you will not learn about it any other way.

The briefing you are entitled to

Six briefings belong in your first thirty days. Ask for them by name, in writing, and ask that the request go on an agenda so both the request and the answer appear in the minutes.

• Contracts. A one-page schedule of every agreement: vendor, scope, annual cost, term end date, renewal mechanism, notice period to terminate, and whether it auto-renews. Most associations have at least one agreement that renews automatically unless notice is given a fixed number of days out, and the notice window usually closes without anybody noticing.
• Litigation and claims. Every open matter, every threatened matter, every insurance claim and its status, every demand letter received in the last two years, and every pre-suit mediation or arbitration demand. Ask who is paying the defense and under which policy.
• The insurance program. Not just carrier names. Limits, deductibles including any percentage hurricane deductible, the valuation basis, and the date of the last replacement-cost appraisal. A condominium association must update that determination at least every three years under § 718.111(11)(a).
• Reserves. The balance by component, the funding schedule, whether the association is funding on that schedule, and whether the membership has ever voted to reduce or pause contributions.
• Structural compliance. Whether any building is subject to a milestone inspection, when the next one is due, whether a SIRS has been completed, and whether phase-two repairs have been recommended.
• Collections. The delinquency rate, the aging report, which accounts are with counsel, and whether a written collection policy exists and is followed.

If a briefing cannot be produced, that is itself the finding. An association that cannot list its own contracts on one page has a management problem that predates you.

The deadlines that do not move

Learn these six dates in your first month. They are the deadlines that produce liability when missed, and none of them are forgiven because the board turned over.

The professionals, and how to use them

Your association pays for expertise it frequently fails to use. Know who these people are and what each one is actually for.

• The community association manager. Implements board decisions, runs the day-to-day, prepares the packet, handles vendors and owner communications. A manager executes policy and does not set it.
• The association's attorney. Represents the association as an entity, not individual directors. Used correctly, counsel is consulted before a decision rather than after a demand letter.
• The accountant. Prepares the annual financial report at the level the association's revenue requires and files the tax return.
• The engineer or reserve professional. Performs the milestone inspection, the structural integrity reserve study, and the specifications for major work, and tells you a proposal is inadequate before you sign it.
• The insurance agent. Places coverage and explains what is and is not covered. Ask for a plain-language coverage summary and keep asking until you get one.

The two most common failures are asking the manager a legal question and asking the attorney an operational one. Route by the nature of the risk. If the wrong answer costs the association a lawsuit, an election rerun, a rescinded assessment or a fine, it is a question for counsel. Our note on when to call the association attorney gives the practical test.

An orientation agenda a board can actually run

Ninety minutes, scheduled within three weeks of the election, with the manager present and the attorney available by phone for the last fifteen. This is a working session, not a board meeting, so confirm whether your documents and chapter require it to be noticed before you schedule it.

1. Ten minutes. The community: units or parcels, age, buildings and stories, what the association maintains and what owners maintain.
2. Ten minutes. The documents, in order of authority, with a one-page map of where each subject is addressed.
3. Fifteen minutes. The money: this year's budget, what changed, reserve balances against the schedule, and the assessment structure.
4. Fifteen minutes. The insurance program, deductibles included, and the claims history.
5. Fifteen minutes. Contracts, renewal dates and notice windows, and any project in progress.
6. Ten minutes. Structural compliance status and the next deadline on the calendar.
7. Ten minutes. Collections and where accounts sit in the process.
8. Five minutes. Meeting mechanics: notice, agendas, minutes, records requests, and the certification filing.
9. Five minutes. Roles, and how a director routes a question.

Give every attendee the document package a week in advance and ask each new director to arrive with three written questions. A downloadable new director orientation guide is available if you want a version to hand out.

If nobody orients you

Some boards will not do this, and a new director who pushes too hard in week one can spend the rest of the term as the difficult one. Do it anyway, in writing and without heat.

Send the manager a short, dated request listing the documents you want, and ask that the board calendar an orientation session. If the documents are not produced, you have the same inspection rights every owner has: condominium records must be made available within 10 working days of a written request under § 718.111(12)(c)1., and HOA records within 10 business days under § 720.303(5), with minimum damages of $50 per day for a willful failure. Our guide to official records covers the mechanics on both sides of a request.

Then read the last year of financial reports yourself. If you can only do one thing, do that one. The financial statements and the aging report tell you more about how an association is actually being run than any briefing will, and our walkthrough on reviewing financial reports is written for directors who are not accountants.

Contact Hamilton Mikes

Hamilton Mikes runs board orientations for condominium, HOA and cooperative boards across Lee, Collier and Charlotte Counties, and prepares the document and deadline packages new directors need. Call 239-594-7227 or visit our Corporate Governance page.