Create an Advisory Board for your Business - YouTube

Hello I’m Brett Hickey, the Founder and CEO of Star Mountain Capital.

I’m excited to be here today with Theresa Boyce, Chairman and CEO of the CEO Trust,

a by-invitation only national organization of CEOs where CEOs come together to

help each other through peer advisory, camaraderie, council and referrals.

Theresa brings unique career experience to leading a CEO organization.

She started as a CPA with KPMG.

She did her MBA at Wharton graduating with both a finance and marketing degree.

She then later on did brand management for Proctor and Gamble, which moved her onto a

path of intrapreneurship within a big company and ultimately entrepreneurship.

She has run many professional membership organizations from her undergrad where she started the business

club to 10 years on the Wharton alumni board.

CEO Trust brings together what entrepreneurial spirit is helping CEOs share experiences,

ideas, and learning lessons to ultimately avoid mistakes, build better businesses and

enjoy more fruitful lives.

Today we’re really going to talk about the value and “how to” and “why to” and

what to avoid in building a board.

Why should you create a board for your company?

How should you do it?

What are some considerations to try to avoid and how can Theresa’s company, the CEO Trust,

help you in doing that?

Theresa with that, thank you for being with us today.

We’re excited for you to share some of your learnings and in combination with the number

of people in your organization, really hundreds of years of learnings all kind of bundled

together in one so we’re really excited for the content and everything to share with

people today.

Thank you

First question is - what is some of the value for somebody in creating a peer advisory board?

Why should somebody want to do that?

Theresa: Well the most impactful reason is business results.

A peer advisory board is really hard to beat.

When you get a set of CEOs who have been carefully selected specifically for you and

your business, it’s impactful.

So, about a week ago we had an advisory board meeting for an online education business and

it’s a great business.

They were growing nicely - plateaued - and so they were like “how do we break through?" "How do we get to that next level?"

And so, their board got together, it’s a complex business, they have three business units.

They are all distinct.

They all have a different target. They all have different competitors. They have a different

offering for each and so it’s complicated.

After that meeting, the CEO and COO told me “we so appreciate this board and what they

did for us."

"We were impressed with the laser light focus of these CEOs drilling down on the really

pertinent issues of what drive our business and our results.”

And they walked out of that meeting not only with a better focus themselves on how to use

their available resources to grow their business to that next level, but with some surprising

insights they really didn’t really anticipate for their business.

That’s great so being able to have a peer of other CEOs and business owners that

have likely faced similar challenges, can bring a fresh perspective and really help work through

those challenges and as you say sometimes even come up with new ideas by taking that

step back from people that you know really are the right type of CEOs with the right

type of experience which you guys help put together to bring that thought leadership

and help inspire ideas to build better businesses. That’s fantastic. I know one of the other

organizations that I’ve been a member of for more than a decade is the Young President’s Organization,

YPO, and that’s a similar type of thing where we have a bit of a peer

advisory board on both a personal and business level it’s been tremendously impactful

to my life and that business model fits a few people while yours is also open to a broader group.

That’s a great example around that.

Now that we know why - at the end of the day is to build better businesses and drive

the bottom line - how do you go about creating an advisory board?

Well we really begin with understanding that CEO, their board, and their leadership team,

the stage of business, you know what stage of growth they’re in, and then most importantly perhaps is where do they want. to go?

And with that we then develop profiles. What are the profiles of the fellow CEO’s that could best propel that business?

And with that, we recruit them from the CEO Trust. We have a building materials company that’s facing some strategic

questions over the next couple of years and they have some burgeoning opportunities too

like selling on Amazon, and so we created an Advisory Board for them and we pulled in

a consumer-packaged goods CEO, so you know she knows that Amazon channel really well.

We pulled in a hedge fund manager who’s also an entrepreneur.

We pulled in a person who grew up in the GE culture, so he knows operations and finance well.

A female CEO, who has an engineering background running a technology business that also sells to the government

So this is a pretty diverse team. In addition, we found that diversity of geography helps.

And so we’ve pulled - that crew comes from Texas, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New York and Florida

- so you know some geographic diversity.

There’s ethnic diversity and sex diversity as well in that particular board.

But that’s what we’re looking for.

We’re looking for - let’s pull together, focused on what you need and want, and what’s

going to drive your business, but let’s bring really different thought into that process.

Let’s try to bring different industries and very different backgrounds into that board.

That’s very helpful and your point on question 1 is where do you want to go if you have a

CEO that says look what I really want to do is transition to my children or a CEO that

says really my plan is to sell in a couple of years or grow as in this case in that capacity

and drive into a new growth channel, figuring out the right type of people with the right

backgrounds and experience who have I’m sure learned things through challenges and

accomplishing that are incredibly different how you put that together.

And the second thing I think was valuable in what you mentioned is how we think about

diversity which isn’t just the sex origin of a person or the color of our skin, but

what are the backgrounds and experiences that people have and geography as people are gonna

generally going to have different perspectives and how they think about the consumer landscape

and so forth so that’s another good insight into the value of diverse thinking and different

backgrounds to form the best decisions possible.

Now in creating these boards, what are some of the things that you think can be the most

impactful? And, for our audience out there,

how can they create their own board? Should they, shouldn’t they? How can they go about

thinking about how to create their own board?

Obviously, they can get in touch with you to help them.

What are some of the other things they should be thinking about?

Well creating your own board is tricky.

The most disastrous thing I’ve seen is inviting some of your friends onto your board.

Start with what not to do. Right Right.

So, friends and colleagues, you won’t get the diversity of thought you were hoping for

and you can end up losing some friends.

So, it’s better to have a professional board put together that’s with you and your business in mind.

So, we have a small, very entrepreneurial frozen dessert company, that in their first year

had a lot of turmoil.

Entrepreneurial businesses often do.

They are not national, this is very small, very regional.

They had inquiry from Asia, from a distributor who wanted to have their product in Asia.

My initial reaction was “that’s crazy, we’re not even national!”

Well fortunately we had some folks on that board with more international experience than

me, who said “let us check this out.”

And one of the board members, he was the president of TGI Fridays international.

So, it was easy for him to pick up the phone and call. Checked out this distributor and

they were legit, and actually the distributor you would choose if you were going into that market.

So that little business now, they are exporting to a market in Asia, and that’s going to help

them fund their U.S. growth.

Where as it could’ve been easy to just say no to that because of lack of information and

having people that can help you navigate and make the right decision which if you have

the right, what do they say, “luck favors the prepared” you know that could be very

lucky that someone that’s looking to distribute a product like yours knocks on your door and

says I am ready to go whereas I’m sure chasing other things like that could also be a distraction

so you need people to help you.

The other things that’s happened with that business in particular is they're at their year point of their board

And so, we’ve discovered that businesses change a lot in a year.

And so, at the end of the year we take a fresh look at that board to say “where are you

going next year?” and "how can we create a board for you for the next year?"

And we will cycle off one or two of those CEOs on a routine basis at a year point.

Now because they’re in the Trust, those CEOs who cycle off, they’re happy about

it, they actually helped this business for the last year, and there is a different expertise

that’s needed now because of their help, and so they’ll go and they’ll join another

advisory board where their help is really needed.

And so, there is a warm camaraderie there that maintains and carries forward when those two

run into each other at a future CEO Trust event, they’re glad to see each other and catch up.

Yeah that’s fun and the needs change.

The needs of the business are ever evolving for a whole multitude of factors.

That’s a really unique system you’ve set up there for people to tap into the right

resource and the right time, understanding that a business and it’s needs are dynamic.

Well, thank you Theresa. These are great tips and insights. As you know we value the "Collaborative Ecosystem"

environment as we’ve trademarked here at Star Mountain, and what the CEO Trust

really brings together in that thought leadership, I think is a very intelligent and valuable

business model that we hope many people will learn to take advantage of. I know here at

Star Mountain, we help with our businesses as a value-added lender as one of our verticals,

helping businesses further professionalize and get to the next level, including building

better boards, to help give them insights, building the right KPIs and measurements and

right strategies to execute against, so that they can be a safer, more valuable business

down the road and even for myself personally like a lot of us in finance are good at evaluating

other people but we don’t often turn the mirror on ourselves and look at our own business.

I’ve actually created advisory boards for technology related matters, for HR related

matters, for industry related matters and I’ve found incredibly valuable. It’s a

lot of time and effort but the value is really tremendous from my perspective so I’m sure

you’ve continued to create a lot of values for businesses and I hope other people

take advantage of that.

So thank you very much for being with us today. We’ll put on the board here ways that people

can get in touch and learn more about your business and we wish you continued luck and

finding other ways of working together.

Thank you, thank you

It’s really a pleasure to be here and be with you.

Great thank you Thank you