073 | Stop Going It Alone: How Advisory Boards Help Founders Win Bigger with Evan Kraut

[00:00:00] Patrick: What if the one thing standing between your business and its next level of growth isn’t another strategy, but a room full of the right people giving you guidance? Welcome back to another episode of the Vital Wealth Strategies Podcast. I’m your host, Patrick Lonergan, and today we’re diving into something that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough.
[00:00:21] Patrick: How to build and leverage an advisory board to help you grow faster, make better decisions, and avoid costly mistakes. My guest today is Evan Krt, the co-founder and managing partner of Board Stream, where they build and manage advisory boards as a service helping business owners like you tap into real time experienced insight without having to figure it out all on your own.
[00:00:43] Patrick: Evan’s background spans everything from high growth startups and private equity to agency leadership and angel investing. He’s built and served on countless advisory boards and today’s he’s sharing the exact framework that can help you do the same. And while we’re talking about building smarter structures in your business, make sure you’re not leaving money on the table when it comes to taxes.
[00:01:04] Patrick: Head over to vital strategies.com/tax where you can start building a personalized tax strategy to help you keep more of what you make. It’s one of the most impactful moves you can make for your bottom line. Now, in today’s episode, Evan and I will talk through what advisory boards actually are, when you’re ready for one, and how to avoid the common traps business owners fall into when trying to build one on their own.
[00:01:27] Patrick: We also cover how customer advisory boards can help reduce churn, how project-based boards can help you move into acquisitions, and how a well structured board can create alignment across your executive team. By the end of this conversation, you’ll walk away with a clear understanding of what kind of board might be right for you, how to get started, and why the strategy can be a complete game changer for your business.
[00:01:49] Patrick: This is a powerful one, so stick around to the end. Let’s get into it. All right. On today’s podcast we’ve got Evan Krat. He’s the co-founder and managing partner of Board Stream, which builds and manages advisory boards as a service. Uh, now Evan, we’ve had some conversations about this ’cause we’ve got a client that’s looking into this.
[00:02:08] Patrick: So I’m, I’m excited to continue those conversations and, uh, thank you so much for, for joining us here today.
[00:02:14] Evan: Yeah, thanks for having me, Patrick. I’m honored. I’ve been listening to a bunch of the previous pods and really impressive guests and I hope I could live up to the expectation. I have
[00:02:24] Patrick: no
[00:02:24] Evan: doubt that,
[00:02:24] Patrick: uh, you’ll live up to the expectation.
[00:02:26] Patrick: ’cause I, I think the, the arena that we’re gonna be talking about today is really valuable for our, our listeners. When I think about what the entrepreneur’s trying to accomplish, you know, business is hard. And so we’re, we often see, and I’m a part of a number of these, like, uh, we join peer groups to get feedback on, on how to run our businesses more effectively.
[00:02:46] Patrick: Now that could be. Eo, it could be, I don’t know, strategic Coach, C 12, some of these, uh, uh, I know there’s a number of other options out there, but I think the way you’re structuring these, I, I think it’s almost like the, the grownup version. Like, Hey, let’s formalize this a little bit and really get into it.
[00:03:05] Patrick: And so I, I think, you know, just to continue on, it’s a challenge. Like, I, I, business is hard. I like getting good feedback, but it’s like, I don’t know how to put these things together. I don’t know how to structure a board in a way that’s going to be the best use of everybody’s time, the best use of my time and resources.
[00:03:20] Patrick: And then, you know, it just philosophically, it’s like I want to have the best minds in the, the room giving me wisdom and guidance. And I’m excited to hear how you, you help us solve some of those problems. So thank you so much for joining us. It’s, uh, this is gonna be good. So can you give us a little bit of your background?
[00:03:39] Patrick: I know you’ve got, uh, lots of, uh. Experiences, seasoned executive, but um, uh, you know, and everything from high growth startups to, uh, advertising agencies. So I want, I wanna hear a little bit of your background and why you’re sort of positioned to help us, uh, figure out this advisory board issue that we have.
[00:03:58] Evan: Yeah, so, um, I’ve definitely had an interesting career from the standpoint of different functional roles, different industries, different sizes of companies. Um, and I know everybody’s like, oh, well what’s the connective thread between, you know, each pivot or each change? I’m still not sure I know what that connective thread is, um, but I’ll give you the quick, you know, uh, overview of where I came from.
[00:04:23] Evan: I first came out of college thinking I wanted to be in finance. I, uh, was very interested in the stock market and investing, playing around with, you know, a few dollars even in high school, figuring out how to invest. Um, and this was in the nineties. Market was hot. You know, tech boom was starting to happen.
[00:04:42] Evan: I was getting swept up in that wave. So after graduation, I did get my first job in finance at UBS, but I very quickly realized that the 50, 60,000 person global bank type of yeah, you know, place for me wasn’t really a great fit. I felt that entrepreneurial bug, um, and really wanted to either join a startup or do something a little bit more entrepreneurial.
[00:05:06] Evan: Coincidentally, at the time, my father, who had been in the apparel manufacturing industry for his whole career, he was already late fifties at this point. Decides at that time to start his own company. So he had previously worked for other companies and had other kind of roles, more as an independent sales rep.
[00:05:25] Evan: Um mm-hmm. But finally took the plunge, had gotten started, and when I was getting, you know, a little antsy and wanted to leave UBS, um, he basically was like, well, why don’t you come help me for a couple of months, maybe a year while you look for that next job and see if you, you know, could help me and learn a few things along the way.
[00:05:44] Evan: I’m very close with my dad, so I thought about it seriously, wasn’t passionate, frankly, about perel or fashion or that, you know, industry, but a chance to work with him, a chance to be essentially the vice president of a company after having, you know, one career experience was exciting. Um, and I decided to jump in and it was there.
[00:06:03] Evan: That really kind of set me on this course of entrepreneur hood. Um, and I didn’t even know how. Similar. His experience was to what I was really looking for until I got in there. So jumped in. We were essentially learning as we went, finding manufacturing partners overseas, selling to retailers in the United States.
[00:06:26] Evan: I was learning sales, I was learning marketing, I was learning, manufacturing and logistics, um, and playing almost every role that I could possibly play. The one that really grabbed me was the sales and marketing side. I was just more excited and passionate about how to sell and how to learn how to market, you know, our goods, our brand.
[00:06:48] Evan: So the years that I spent, um, which actually turned out pretty well, I was able to put my father into retirement and, you know, have him, you know, be a little bit more comfortable financially. Yeah. Um, but again, wasn’t excited enough to stay in that industry. So when I then thought about where I wanted to go next, it was something in the realm of sales and marketing as a functional role.
[00:07:11] Evan: And then I was still excited about. Tech and tech startups and you know, things like that. Um, but what then happened, uh, a good friend who I had known just personally had a growing and starting to become pretty successful marketing agency and he was excited about the opportunity to possibly bring me in.
[00:07:31] Evan: I would’ve been, I was the first real outside sales hire after the founders, was that juxtaposition of marketing. It was an interesting time in around 2007 when social media was starting to become a thing, tech and tech startups and how they were working with agencies was starting to all happen. And so jumped in and I joined this agency.
[00:07:53] Evan: At the time it was like 30 people and most were freelance and we were just figuring things out. Um, but the time was right. The founder was incredible, and we took that agency through a number of amazing milestones from. One, just growing significantly for a couple of years, having private equity come in and take a majority of that agency and three years to the date of that private equity firm investing, we sold to a big digital agency overseas.
[00:08:25] Evan: Um, and a year after that sold to one of the world’s largest agency holding companies called Publicis Group. So I just enjoyed this rocket ship ride. Um, a lot of luck. And of course we were doing great work and I found myself at a pretty senior level at that point, chief Growth Officer, which was really like head of sales, um, for what was then a well-known, you know, successful agency.
[00:08:48] Evan: So that was kind of the main, you know, rocket ride that I was on to get me to, you know, the executive level.
[00:08:55] Patrick: I love that. And there was so much experience you got there that, uh, I’d like to just highlight, you know, I think jumping into your, the business your, your dad was, was running. You know, when you you do that, you get lots of it, right?
[00:09:08] Patrick: You’re putting on all the hats and you’re just trying to make it go. And I think that’s, that’s great. And that’s how business generally works. Then to see, you know, the next iteration of your career in the agency and seeing all of those different milestones, uh, take place pretty quickly gave you a ton of experience to, you know, it’s one thing to run a business well, it’s a different thing when you start looking at private equity and how they start to analyze the business, how they run the business and, and those other, uh, successive acquisitions, uh, all gave you, I think, tremendous insight into, okay, how do we take businesses through different levels?
[00:09:47] Patrick: Because one of the things that we, we’ve talked about and, uh, we see with our, our clients is you, you sort of get to a certain size and then you almost have to restructure everything, right? The structure that got you there isn’t going to be the structure that moves you to the next level. And so you’ve seen.
[00:10:02] Patrick: Businesses go through those, and I think that’s, uh, that’s tremendous. Yeah. Wonderful.
[00:10:06] Evan: I would agree. It was good fortune more than anything that I found myself in the right place to experience that kind of, you know, ride, because most people don’t get to do that. Mm-hmm. And it was truly just a lot of luck.
[00:10:21] Patrick: Yeah. Well, I like to define luck as when opportunity meets, uh, preparedness. Yep. Right? So you were prepared, the opportunity showed up and you took it. And so I, a lot of people would’ve just let those opportunities pass themselves, uh, by and wouldn’t get to, uh, be there. And not only did you take advantage of it, but you, you clearly, uh, kept moving yourself up the, the ladder inside of the organization, even as it grew and was acquired by, by different businesses.
[00:10:48] Patrick: So, uh, I think that says a little something about your skillset, so, yeah. Right. Congratulations there. That’s, uh, that’s great. Okay. So when we think about advisory boards, I think of one main advisory board, but I think there’s probably a couple other ones that we can talk about as well, right? Like we can think of the, the traditional, uh, strategic advisory board where we’re gonna bring in like, you know, key players in that we know of that could really add a lot of value that have maybe been there, done that before, that can help us, us grow.
[00:11:16] Patrick: So I think that’s sort of the main one. And then there’s also the customer advisory board, which I’m, I’m really excited to, to dig into. And then also there’s maybe even like a project advisory board that I think is worth, um, spending a little time on as well. ’cause that, that also has my interest. Yeah. So I don’t know where you wanna start with the different boards, but I’ll let you take it from
[00:11:38] Evan: here.
[00:11:38] Evan: So the, the final part of that career journey probably helps lead us into exactly how. My passion for advising and advisory boards really came, you know, to be, um, so after that amazing nine year run, right? Exiting the agency and being at a senior role, uh, at the Publicis group. Um, two interesting forks kind of happen for me.
[00:12:02] Evan: One is I had a small, you know, percentage of equity in the agency that I had earned into over those years. And when we had that final earnout check, you know, come through, um, my ambition was to become an angel investor. And I had been already seeing deal flow, meaning interesting startups coming in fundraising because of my role in the agency.
[00:12:28] Evan: That was an interesting position to be in because in the New York, you know, kind of startups, you know. System. Um, once an agency, once a startup raises money, they’re looking for marketing services, they’re looking for strategic services, and so a lot of them end up going and meeting with agencies and understanding how can I be doing my branding, my marketing, my website build.
[00:12:50] Evan: We were doing all that kind of work and again, just it got bit by the bug, loved the whole entrepreneurial, you know, journey that these founders were on. Now that I had a few dollars, I was thinking maybe I’ll back a few of these startups and see how that goes. Mm-hmm. And so with that, I kind of jumped in and as part of me writing a very small, you know, little angel check just as part of a round, I was also offering up my services, personal services.
[00:13:18] Evan: Right. Advice, guidance, introductions, you know, connections to other people, of course. And I found myself in some cases, you know, just being an informal kind of advisor and in other cases being asked to be on their official advisory board. Now when you’re talking about an early stage company, they very rarely have an official advisory board that really operates like a, a board.
[00:13:43] Evan: It’s more like a loose association of contact that may or may not even talk to each other and are really just available to the founders, the executive team, when a problem arises or when an opportunity, you know, comes up or when they need a connection. Um, but that really started me on. The journey of understanding like what a great advisor looks like, how they really help contribute to a business.
[00:14:09] Evan: And even at those earliest stages, right. Concept on a napkin, raised a few dollars ready to bring on advisors.
[00:14:15] Patrick: I’m just generally curious about the, the angel side, ’cause this is, this is fascinating to me ’cause it, we’ve got some, uh, contacts that are been angel investors and once people figure out that you a, are valuable from a, we’ll call it advisory perspective as well as can invest some money, like you start getting flooded with opportunities.
[00:14:36] Patrick: Yeah. Did you see that happening to you? Was it like, oh my gosh, I need to like either, you know, exit the, the angel investing piece? ’cause I just, I don’t, I can’t sift through all these or I’m only gonna take specific opportunities. Yeah. I’m just, I’d like to just take a little detour into your angel investing and then we’ll, we’ll come back to the Yeah, for sure.
[00:14:55] Patrick: But, uh,
[00:14:56] Evan: so yes, you’re right. The minute you are. Noted as an investor, even a small angel, uh, you end up on these lists. You end up in, you know, conversations amongst founders and other VCs who of course are constantly, you know, sharing insight on how companies can raise. And we started to get swamped, and I say we.
[00:15:17] Evan: Mm-hmm. Um, almost instantaneously upon deciding I wanted to start angel investing, I, um, reached out to my first cousin who’s almost like a big brother to me, very successful in business. We were always talking about investing in the public markets and different business strategies, and I essentially just let him know what I was thinking and he was like, I’m in, let.
[00:15:41] Evan: Put some money together and co-invest like partners in this, uh, you know, angel investing thing. So we did that and he helped a lot in terms of evaluating opportunities, really having a little bit more of the financial rigor. He was an ex CFO for big companies, you know, earlier in his career. Sure. And so together we were kinda teamed up, but it was, it was an onslaught.
[00:16:05] Evan: It’s dozens of emails in your inbox every day, every week pitching you, raising around, you know, do you wanna invest? Do you wanna be an advisor? Can you help? Can you introduce us? Um, and it is way too much. And this is a part-time, you know, kind of after hours thing, it does become overwhelming. Mm-hmm. So one is picking your lane, right?
[00:16:28] Evan: Yeah. And becoming known for what you invest in, whether that’s the stage of company you invest in. Right. Are you a first check kind of an investor where it’s. The founders haven’t even built the product yet, or they’re not even in market yet. Are you focused on a certain vertical, like a category? Is it e-commerce or is it B2B SaaS?
[00:16:47] Evan: And that helps, you know, narrow the amount of inbound that you get. Um, and then over time we just figured out how to kind of manage it. But I will admit that we probably just ignored the, the majority of inbound.
[00:17:02] Patrick: Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s fantastic. And, and I see that experience being able to help you build these advisory boards, so I appreciate that little detour.
[00:17:12] Patrick: But, uh, yeah, now back to, um, building the advisory board.
[00:17:16] Evan: Yes. So, so this was the other fork in that road. So on the one side, I personally just got excited and interested in angel investing and went down that path. And then the advising came along with that. On the day job side of things. So the same agency that we had this amazing exit, um, we were also very innovative and we actually incubated a little piece of software inside the walls of the agency as essentially a tool we thought we would use on behalf of our clients.
[00:17:45] Evan: It was kind of a market research insights tool, um, getting customer feedback for brands on their marketing, on their product. And that little incubated tech startup after the private equity guys first came in and saw that that was getting interesting, and then spun it out. That startup became its own startup and rolled outta the agency, raised a venture, and became almost like a sister agency or company, you know, to the agency.
[00:18:12] Evan: As we then went through those next phases of growth. Um, years later, and this was after we had completed, you know, the kind of final acquisition and we were all deciding what we wanted to do next. That board of directors, so not advisory board, but the actual board, um, brought the CEO founder of the agency back to the helm of this startup, uh, to take over and really bringing that to the next level.
[00:18:37] Evan: And that’s when our CEO kind of started bringing the band back together again. He went over first, kind of figured out what he wanted to do with this tech startup that we had spun out. He had the right approach and strategy, and then, you know, got the kind of existing investors to. Funded a little bit more so that he could hire out his executive team.
[00:18:57] Evan: And we all jumped back on, you know, with this amazing CEO who had already taken us all the way, um, yeah, to this startup. And this startup was a market research, a B2B SaaS platform for market research. So targeting very big brands, the Fortune 1000, who would essentially use this platform to do market research, consumer research, 24 7, 365, you could launch a question, a survey, a focus group, and get answers from your consumers the same day.
[00:19:27] Evan: Very novel solution at the time. And, um, then we were all together again in this venture-backed tech startup. And admittedly, that was actually my first time being an executive in a, you know, tech startup. Really. I had been investing in some of them. I had been close with some, but this was a whole new experience.
[00:19:47] Evan: And because of that, it was really new for all of us. We knew we needed extra support, advice, guidance. Mm-hmm. And that is what led us to creating an advisory board. So versus Right, these kind of smaller, earlier startup advisory boards that I had been a part of. This was now a company doing millions of dollars in revenue, growing, hiring, scaling in a lot of the right ways, but doing so with our own gut driving us right.
[00:20:18] Evan: And not really having. Experts, subject matter experts, customers, really guiding our product roadmap, our positioning, you know, our services and how we were engaging them. And once we decided we were gonna do this, we went out and we looked for the best possible, you know, advisors we could find through our networks.
[00:20:39] Evan: Um, and during that process realized that our customers should not be ignored. Some of our key senior level customers were providing us similar and even more impactful, you know, advice and guidance on things that only they would understand being so close to our product and services that we decided to do a hybrid board, which was half strategic advisors and half customer advisors, and essentially launched this as a very formal program, right?
[00:21:08] Evan: Quarterly advisory board meetings, real onboarding to the advisors. As a group engagement, you know, structure, um, and this advisory board over the years going forward, from that point, became one of the most impactful driving forces for our company’s growth. We, Forex revenue became such a stronger company, a better run company, um, and a more valuable company as a result of having this advisory board.
[00:21:40] Evan: And that is really the thing that then just clicked for me. And the concept of every company needs this. We need to build something like an advisory boards as a service business. And decided once I finished my four year, you know, tour of duty at this company, I was gonna go out and build this idea. And one of my colleagues was, uh, the president at this company and we decided to do it together.
[00:22:05] Evan: Mm-hmm.
[00:22:06] Patrick: I love it. So I, I’ve got a general question. At what point does the business should a business. Go from that, uh, very loose advisory board to tipping over to, okay, we’re a grownup now. Yeah, we need to formalize this, this process. Is there a revenue threshold? Is there a EBITDA number? Like, do you have some, some guidance on when this makes sense for, for somebody to start considering this?
[00:22:32] Patrick: Yes.
[00:22:33] Evan: It’s a great question and it’s an interesting one because I wish there was some very specific trigger, like once you hit this revenue milestone or once you hit, you know, that customer concentration, you’re ready. But it’s really a few things. Interestingly, the one that we see all the time now that really makes the biggest difference is when you have a built out leadership team.
[00:22:56] Evan: So what I mean by that is, right. A lot of. Entrepreneurial businesses are driven by the founders, the co-founders. Maybe they have a couple of executives in a few of the roles, right? Maybe you are early to hire A CFO, but you don’t yet have a chief marketing officer or you know, a chief product officer or whatever your, you know, business necessitates.
[00:23:20] Evan: The companies that are really ready for a more formalized, sophisticated advisory board are the ones that have at least a mostly built out executive leadership team. Because one of the biggest things that these advisory boards solve is executive alignment, right? When you have not just the founder making all the decisions, you’ve kind of gone beyond that point and you’re at that next stage where other, you know, key leaders need to be able to run with their particular function and, you know, build out their departments and the like.
[00:23:56] Evan: It just naturally starts to break, right? You don’t have the same obvious alignment when the same person is making the decision on sales and the same person’s making the decision on product and marketing. And so you need this kind of alignment vehicle to really help get the executive team clear on why are you gonna invest in this particular area?
[00:24:16] Evan: Well, it’s coming from customer feedback or it’s coming from experts who have done, you know, this exact thing and know where, you know, the bodies are buried, so to speak, like you know where not to go. Um, and so that’s one key thing. Other is, is that what do you do with the feedback that you get from your advisors, right?
[00:24:37] Evan: That is actually the part that most companies fall down on, meaning you cultivate this amazing advisory board, whether it’s your customer strategic or what have you. You get them in a room, you’re talking about different challenges. You’re getting advice. Who’s really capturing that advice, who’s digging in and getting even deeper on those details, and then turning them into actionable strategies.
[00:25:00] Evan: It’s the functional leaders who are ultimately, at the end of the day, gonna be executing against that. But if you’re only getting that insight at the CEO level and it’s getting watered down and distilled, it’s like a game of telephone. Like, you get some of the, you know, details, but not all of the clarity as to where that came from and why.
[00:25:18] Evan: Yeah. You, you miss out on so much of the value.
[00:25:21] Patrick: Yeah, no, that’s, that’s really good. ’cause I, I see that in my own business. I, I go out to, you know, peer groups and what have you, and I come back and I’m like, Hey guys, real cool idea. Let’s, and I give them the, the three minute version right. Of something that we talked about for an hour.
[00:25:34] Patrick: That’s right. You know, and, uh, there’s just no way to get all of that data to the team, uh, in an informal type setting. So. That’s right. I think that’s, that’s fantastic. So let’s say I’m listening to this. I’m going, all right, Evan. All right. This sounds amazing. What is like step one of building an advisory board?
[00:25:52] Patrick: How do I, how do I go about like putting some of these pieces in place?
[00:25:56] Evan: Yeah. So it may be obvious, but it’s surprisingly not obvious in practice. Num, step one is what are the business goals? And I don’t mean goals or business goals for an advisory board. I mean the core, main priorities of the business, right?
[00:26:15] Evan: So if you were going to an investor, you know, presentation, what are the critical needs of the overall business, right? Is it a product or service challenge or goal? Is it a leadership talent issue or goal? Is it about a competitive, you know, threat? Like those are the key things that then inform the strategy behind what type of advisory board do you need, right?
[00:26:42] Evan: Are you facing high customer churn, right? Like your existing customers or kinda. Not renewing their licenses. If you’re a product or you know, software business, is it that you’re getting low NPS or customer satisfaction scores, right? So that’s a customer problem. So it would therefore make sense that you might want a customer advisory board, right?
[00:27:02] Evan: Mm-hmm. To support you there. Is it that you have an inorganic growth strategy that you need to pursue acquiring other businesses, rolling them up, but you don’t have a corporate development leader or somebody with m and a experience and integration experience in your core leadership team. That might make more sense for a strategic, you know, advisor and what they could really help, um, on that front.
[00:27:25] Evan: And so the core business priorities and the core goals of the business, then, you know, de define why and what type of advisory board you were gonna build.
[00:27:34] Patrick: Yeah. This is fantastic. And I, and I’m gonna sort of weave a thread through a few of the things that you, you’ve said here. You know, I think about, you know, the built out leadership team, uh, also the business goals like.
[00:27:48] Patrick: Correct me if I’m wrong here, but I, I see systems like, uh, EOS, traction, you know, the entrepreneur operating system from Gina Wickman as being almost critical. I think businesses need a period, but like, you know, if we don’t have a track to run on, if we don’t have a vision for where we’re going and some long-term goals and some ways to, you know, bring back, again, even if my executive team’s all in the, uh, advisory board meeting, right?
[00:28:14] Patrick: Like we still need a system for deciding what should go on the top of our list to attack. And then, um, who’s gonna do it? Who’s gonna be responsible? You know, what, what support are we gonna bring? Like, if there’s none of that, like, built in, you know, I think it’s, it’s really hard to take these, these ideas from a discussion to implementation and, and inertia.
[00:28:38] Patrick: Such a powerful thing. You know, it’s so easy to just keep doing what we’re doing. We need a system in place to help us break out of that, that, uh, sort of. Uh, momentum that we’ve created, and that can be good or bad. Right? Um, you know, we need to be able to change that. So do you see businesses that are effectively building advisory boards, having a structure like EOS in traction to, um, you know, help execute on those things?
[00:29:03] Patrick: Is it, is that, I’ll just leave that question. Yeah.
[00:29:05] Evan: It’s funny you bring that up. So I had known about the book Traction of course, and knew the high level what it really was, right? Um, the Entrepreneur operating system sounds cool. Didn’t really dig in until starting board Stream. Um, and at that point, as a founder myself and trying to figure out how to run my company, I decided to buy the book and actually really get into it.
[00:29:32] Evan: Um, and it, it is an amazing structure for running a business. Um, absolutely it does. A successful advisory board requires that type of thinking at the very least, right? Mm-hmm. Because you do need to understand how you are driving your business forward, how your advisors are supporting, you know, that forward progress.
[00:29:57] Evan: How are you reporting on the success of the initiatives? One of the other, there’s a lot of things that fall outta that. Mm-hmm. One of the most important things that also companies don’t necessarily, uh, consider when they build an advisory board is the feedback loop. Meaning, of course, every executive expects to get advice from advisors, right?
[00:30:21] Evan: What doesn’t always happen is the company reporting back to the advisors, Hey, we had this discussion about why we’re gonna go after this particular opportunity or change our positioning in this way. You helped us think through. The pros, the cons, how we should go about this, and here is what we decided to do and here is how it’s going.
[00:30:42] Evan: Not only is that just good practice, but it much more deeply engages the advisors to continue to care and, you know, be present and wanna support the company when they feel like their contributions are actually being taken seriously and implemented. It happens all the time when, you know, I hear from companies that might just have a loose, a more loosely affiliated group of advisors.
[00:31:09] Evan: Mm-hmm. They start to bail out the advisors. They’re just like, yeah, you keep calling me and ask me questions. You don’t ever follow back up. I don’t even know what you ended up doing. And now you’re asking me for another question. Are you even gonna do anything with this? Why am I spending my time on it?
[00:31:24] Patrick: Yeah. No, that’s, that’s fantastic. And I think that’s something all of our listeners should take note of. Even if you don’t have a formal advisory board, when somebody gives you advice, you take it and implement it. Give them the feedback. Even if you don’t implement it, absolutely. You should give ’em the feedback as to why.
[00:31:38] Patrick: Right. Because they’re gonna go, oh, okay, cool. I understand how you’re thinking. I understand how you’re running your business. Um, I appreciate the, the knowledge that, uh, you know, what I gave you worked, you know, that, like you said, it gives me, uh, some excitement to just continue to pour into you. If I know that this is, uh, having, having an impact, that’s right.
[00:31:58] Patrick: Then let me add, that’s
[00:31:59] Evan: wonderful. Then that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy from the standpoint of. Why a company benefits more from an advisory board versus just one-off, one-to-one advisors because mm-hmm. You are now keeping a consistent, ongoing, hopefully long-term relationship with this advisory board, right?
[00:32:21] Evan: At the very least for like annual terms, biannual terms. Then what happens is every time you meet that advisor has context. They have a clearer, deeper understanding of the business, the challenges, the people on the team, and then their advice becomes more valuable because they have more context versus a one-off advisor.
[00:32:43] Evan: Like the example I was just giving, I get a call tomorrow from somebody I haven’t spoken to in three months. They’re asking me how to fix their sales process and I don’t even know what their sales process is. I haven’t even heard what the, you know, approach is. So now I need to spend an hour trying to even, you know.
[00:32:59] Evan: Identify what they’re doing and what’s working and what’s not. Then come up with advice that’s kind of in a silo with no other inputs versus an ongoing dialogue. They really become an extension of the team.
[00:33:14] Patrick: Hey, real quick before we get back to the conversation. If you’re working hard to grow your business, but you feel like you’re giving away too much to taxes, it’s time to take a more strategic approach. Head over to vital strategies.com/tax and start building a personalized tax strategy designed to help you keep more of what you earn legally, ethically, and with confidence.
[00:33:34] Patrick: Because it’s not just about how much you make, it’s about how much you keep and how intentionally you build your wealth. Again, that’s vital strategies.com/tax. Now, let’s get back to the episode. Just thinking about the agenda for the advisory board meeting. And it probably looks a lot like the L 10, uh, from, uh, yeah, E os where it’s like, Hey, here’s.
[00:33:56] Patrick: Here’s good news, here’s, uh, scorecard, right? Like, hey, here’s the progress we’re making. Uh, looking at the, um, you know, initiatives we implemented, you know, the results of those. Like, I think all of those things are, um, are so important. They’re giving feedback back to the, the advisors that are, are, um, you know, providing value to your organization, and then you’re not wasting people’s time.
[00:34:24] Patrick: You know, that’s another big deal, right? Like in the world we live in, everybody’s busy, you know, we always have another thing that could go on our calendar. And so, um, I have to choose whether I want your thing on my calendar or if I wanna go do something else. And, uh, uh, so that’s that’s good. So after, like building out our business goals, right?
[00:34:43] Patrick: When we’re, we’re starting to build our advisory team, what’s, what’s next in the process of, of, of that? How do I, uh, how do I continue to build this board? Yeah. Yeah.
[00:34:53] Evan: So the goals lead to kind of the. Charter, well, the charter is sort of the formal name for the document that really memorializes what your advisory board program is all about from the mission vision, of course, the goals, the advisor personas or profiles that you’re looking for to really achieve those goals.
[00:35:15] Evan: How you’re gonna run the advisory board program from a engagement standpoint, right? Are you gonna do quarterly advisory board meetings? Are they gonna be in person, are they gonna be virtual? Are you gonna have any other touchpoint, you know, throughout the year who’s gonna run the program? Internal or external or both?
[00:35:31] Evan: Um, all of that is really memorialized in the charter. And then it’s time to recruit the advisors and so. Depending on the goals, right? And what you’ve laid out in the charter, that’s a recruitment process for strategic advisors, also for your customers, but a little easier to fish in your own pond there with your customers and the ones you know, ’cause you have a built relationship who are gonna really lean in and, and help.
[00:35:53] Evan: Um, and then ultimately it’s getting them onboarded, getting the advisor agreements, figuring out any compensation related, um, and then to your previous, you know, point, setting the agenda and almost the annual plan for what you’re gonna focus on, whether it’s quarterly, which is usually the most common and does align with the EOS methodology of like quarterly rocks and, you know, the, the key priorities for each quarter.
[00:36:19] Evan: Um, very similar in that way. And so perhaps you’re planning a product roadmap, you know, relaunch later in the year, you want to get some initial guidance, thoughts, advice. You might have your chief product officer come and present, you know, current product. Customer feedback related to current product.
[00:36:38] Evan: What’s on the list of potential, you know, strategies that you’re pursuing for, you know, the bigger rollout. And that might be the main, you know, focus for a advisory board session, you know, for a quarter. Yeah,
[00:36:52] Patrick: yeah. No, I love that. And I, I, I love this idea of the charter that’s going to help me, you know, outline Exactly.
[00:37:00] Patrick: You know, what this is going to look like. Now, can you explain to me how Board Stream helps me make those decisions? Because it sounds like there’s a number of decision points there that I need to, to figure out, like everything from, are we gonna fly everybody in and do this in person, uh, if they’re from all over the country to paid positions to, uh, how do I, how do I decide what’s, what’s the best quote, unquote.
[00:37:25] Evan: Yeah. And that’s at the core of what we do and why we felt like Board Stream needed to exist, right? Because companies don’t, I. Inherently know how to do this type of thing. And if they haven’t experienced it directly, been a part of another company that had a really well, you know, defined and well run, you know, advisory board, everybody’s just winging it, you know, and maybe they’re soliciting some advice to figure out how to do this.
[00:37:48] Evan: Um, we have built our own proprietary process, which is essentially the strategy first. So how we do this is we do in-depth interviews with all of the executives of the company. We get their goals, priorities, a deeper understanding of the business on a one-to-one basis, so that then we can compare and al align and see where there’s alignment and misalignment amongst even closely, you know, close colleagues, like the executive team on what their goals are and how this all, you know, works together.
[00:38:20] Evan: Um, once we kind of present that back and work with the, you know, exec team to really understand where are they aligned, where are we focusing, you know, the goals of the board, that’s a pretty, you know, interesting process where most execs are usually a bit surprised as to what they, you know, hear from their, you know, their fellow colleagues.
[00:38:38] Evan: Mm-hmm. It’s just the kind of thing that. We take for granted. You’re not always talking about right. Where you’re clear on things and initiatives and where you’re not and where your day-to-day job is pointing, you know, your arrow versus your colleagues. Mm-hmm. Um, and so then that feeds into really what type of board do we need?
[00:38:58] Evan: We help make that decision on behalf of the executives, right? Mm-hmm. If the goals skew much more towards product client success, customer success, you know, issues like churn or customer expansion as a key goal, things of that nature, we’re definitely recommending a cab, right? A customer advisory board.
[00:39:18] Evan: Yeah. If they are outside the scope of customers and they are things that would be more better served by a strategic advisory group, that’s where we’re, you know, providing some guidance. And then it’s just a matter of best practice around the. What’s the right compensation for advisors who can solve the kinds of problems that that company has.
[00:39:40] Evan: Um, you may not need the, you know, c level executive at a Fortune 1000 company to be on your advisory board. Like you, you don’t always have that kind of like celebrity business executive need. You may just need somebody who’s kind of been there, done that in a similar seat, couple years ahead of you, or a couple of stages ahead of you.
[00:40:02] Evan: And oftentimes we find that those make for the best advisors, they’re much more current in the executional considerations. You know, they’re really in it so they understand the nuances of how to get it done, um, and, you know, purpose built for each company. Yeah.
[00:40:19] Patrick: Yeah. No, I, I love that. And this is just an advisor question.
[00:40:22] Patrick: Like, I think you, you hit on a really important point there, right? Because I could see somebody that’s, I. For lack of a better term, retired, you know? Yeah. Uh, and like Jack Welch is a, I’ll say a genius. Sure. You know, everybody thought Jack was a genius when, you know, he was running ge it was just crushing year over year.
[00:40:38] Patrick: But I don’t know if Jack would be great on my, you know, my board today for a number of reasons. You know, Jack’s been sort of out of the game for a little while. He’s still super sharp, but, uh, you know, his experiences with, you know, fortune 10. Yeah. You know, I don’t know how big GE got, but they were up there.
[00:40:54] Patrick: They might’ve been the largest company, uh, at one point. So it’s like, how important is it? ’cause uh, it could be tempting to go, oh, I’ve got this, this really cool name, but they really can’t add that much value where it might be a complete stranger, um, that, you know, is, is doing really well in their business.
[00:41:11] Patrick: So are most of these people on the advisory board, and maybe it’s a mix still in the game, are they still running their own businesses still involved and they’re just, uh, able to bring, uh, some insight into what you’re doing? Yes. Or are they.
[00:41:23] Evan: The far majority are still active executives, you know, within business.
[00:41:28] Evan: But we do see very often, um, retired, you know, super successful ex executives joining advisory boards. And for some advisory boards, it does make sense. You know, a lot of companies think of their advisory board as a marketing vehicle, and it is. Mm-hmm. But sure rarely is that the best use case for an advisory board.
[00:41:52] Evan: You know, it’s just one marketing tactic, right? So if you have somebody, you know, the likes of a Jack Welch on your advisory board, and you could put that on your website and put that in your investor deck and use his name in your copy and content that has a lot of marketing value. And so a lot of companies will go after not literally that level of famous, you know, business investor, but even just, you know, x.
[00:42:18] Evan: Successful founders who have sold their companies or some top level executive at a Google, Amazon, et cetera, just to get those names on their advisory board. And then it’s a bit more transactional and marketing and they’re probably not giving you a lot of time and effort in terms of the, in the business, you know, strategies.
[00:42:36] Evan: But it has its place, you know, in this whole ecosystem.
[00:42:40] Patrick: Yeah, yeah. I love it. And I, I want to almost walk back a few of my comments. ’cause you know, I, I think there’s, there’s some truths in business that are enduring, right? They were true a hundred years ago and they’re still gonna be true today. And people like Jack are gonna be able to like, speak into those truths, you know, from a tactical perspective.
[00:42:57] Patrick: They may not know the best social media platform to market on. Right. But, uh, um, that’s okay. I can fill that, uh, with another, uh, board position. So I agree. Okay.
[00:43:07] Evan: There is also one other, um, consideration when thinking about an advisory board, and it goes back to the cohesion of a board and not just individual advisors.
[00:43:16] Evan: You really want the people around the table to be of at least a similar level in terms of their, you know, experience and their tenure. Right? Because rarely are you gonna have a dynamic, you know, conversation with the former CEO of a multi-billion dollar public company and then a director of marketing from a more, you know, relevant but small company.
[00:43:44] Evan: That person is gonna not feel confident speaking up in a room with a few of the like, world’s greatest, you know, leaders. You really wanna have more of a right sized level. Mm-hmm. Um, where all the advisors have a comradery, have a connection, become their own, you know, community with the company at the center.
[00:44:04] Evan: Right. Bringing them all together. Um, but it is really important in terms of the profiling of who we would build as an advisory board around.
[00:44:13] Patrick: I love it. And that, that brings me to another question, you know, because we were talking about experience diversity, right? How important is diversity in regards to a board in general?
[00:44:23] Patrick: You know, I’ve seen some interesting data around that. When you start, uh, bringing in different race, different sects, you know, you, you start to get, um, I dunno, maybe we’ll say better outcomes, you know, because you’re, you’re getting perspectives that you may not get if you didn’t have that diversity. How important is that in the, the process of, of building the
[00:44:41] Evan: board?
[00:44:41] Evan: It’s really at the top of the list of important. I, I think where I would hesitate to say it’s not literally having the diversity by every race, religion, ethnicity, gender, but diversity of thought. And so different experiences in their careers, in their lives, understanding different business models and, you know, different ways of working.
[00:45:10] Evan: And then of course, yes, diversity as people, um, have, you know, we haven’t done the research necessarily ourselves, but all the research suggests that that is going to deliver better outcomes, right? Yeah. You, you don’t have blind spots from not thinking about a certain audience within your, you know, client base when you have a more well-rounded board thinking about, you know, all the different, you know, customer segments or ways that your business is, you know, building itself.
[00:45:43] Evan: And it, it’s really, really important.
[00:45:46] Patrick: Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. And the diversity of thought, uh, brings up an interesting, uh, point, and I can’t remember where I read this, but they were like, oftentimes it from an industry perspective, you know, when we surround ourselves with industry insiders. We all think it needs to be done a certain way, right?
[00:46:02] Patrick: And then we bring somebody, let’s say I’m a service-based business and I bring in a manufacturing business, uh, CEO to be on my board. And they might bring a different perspective, you know, even though we’re not manufacturing widgets, they, they might go, Hey, have you thought about delivering it to the market this way?
[00:46:18] Patrick: Um, and, you know, it could be, uh, they could provide some eye-opening opportunities there. So, agreed. Are you seeing that type of board construction, like you’re bringing people in that are, uh, just sharp business minds versus like, sharpen the industry?
[00:46:33] Evan: Yeah. You know, typically, I’ll admit that most executives lean towards, or tend to prefer industry experts, right?
[00:46:42] Evan: Who mm-hmm. Been there, done that, know it, kind of have the shorthand too. Where to go. Um, but we are constantly proposing the more, you know, diverse and, and broader set of potential candidates Right. To join these advisory boards. Um, and we see great value from Yeah. That way of thinking. Um, it’s hard, right?
[00:47:04] Evan: Because then they may not understand your business and the challenges that are unique to your industry, and then it’s just a job of proper onboarding. Right. And that’s another one of the things that most companies don’t do a great job of in-house and what we strive, you know, as board stream to deliver.
[00:47:21] Evan: Mm-hmm. It’s great onboarding for the advisors, right? We had just gone throughout, you know, through this deep strategic exercise to understand the business, their challenges, their goals. It’s upon us to now help the advisors get that, you know, jumpstart to understand what are they being asked to contribute here, you know, and does this fit their knowledge, their skillset, and just how are they gonna contribute?
[00:47:47] Patrick: I love this. So, so far we’ve identified, here’s, here’s what I’ve got for the steps. We need to have business goals. Then we create our charter that says, this is how our, our organization is going to run this, uh, advisory board. Then we’re gonna go select advisors, and then, uh, we need to onboard those advisors.
[00:48:05] Patrick: I think about the, when we onboard employees to our business, I think within, it’s in a very short period of time, how you onboard is going to determine that that employee’s experience, and it’s going to determine how long they stay. A hundred percent. And so, uh, I assume the same thing’s true with, um, uh, our advisory board.
[00:48:25] Patrick: And then, so now that I’ve onboarded people, you know, I, I believe it would be really useful for me to have some structure for my, my ongoing, you know, my, my meetings, my feedback loops for people. Can you tell us a little bit about what we should do for, for those, those areas? Yeah,
[00:48:41] Evan: so then we’re in execution, right?
[00:48:43] Evan: So then we’ve got the board recruited, we’ve got the goals, we’ve got the charter, everybody’s ready to go. It’s then how does this fit into your workflow as a business? There are some simple best practices, like I mentioned before, the quarterly advisory board meetings that are usually full days, you know, perhaps a dinner the night before real, you know, bonding opportunity and mm-hmm opportunity for the advisors to get to know each other as well as the executives, and really a structured agenda for what those meetings are focusing on.
[00:49:12] Evan: What is the pre-read, what is the information that’s gonna help even further onboard, right? The advisors to each one of the sessions. And then what are the outputs? How are we capturing those insights, turning those into action, you know, actionable key takeaways. Um, and then what is the, uh, in between quarterly or if they are quarterly advisory board meetings, how are we keeping the advisors apprised of what’s going on?
[00:49:38] Evan: Helping to solicit feedback and, you know, help on across the business, you know, in between those meetings. Um, we do a lot of things that kind of fall into the almost market research side, you know, of, of the table where we’re soliciting input through surveys, through in-depth interviews, um, speaking with the executives on how challenges are evolving so that we’re starting to think about what our next.
[00:50:05] Evan: You know, meeting agenda is gonna look like, um, and really planning out the whole year ahead. Mm-hmm. Even just as placeholders to really be thoughtful about, here’s the year, here are our quarterly, you know, goals and the quarterly rocks, but we do know what the whole year is gonna basically look like and how are we gonna start to think about the progression from the Q1, you know, meeting through the Q4 meeting, um, and really what information do we need to make those the most impactful and productive along the way.
[00:50:35] Evan: Um, and then a lot of things change throughout the year, right? Major market move and AI becomes, you know, feasible for businesses. And now we need to think about how we’re gonna implement that in our business. And we may do another, you know, one-off advisory session to really help talk through even just how to put that into the plans, how to prioritize that in the agendas.
[00:50:58] Evan: And so it has to be dynamic. But with some, exactly to your point, like templated plan of engagement so that the advisors know what to expect. We could put, you know, holds on their calendars, right? Everybody’s busy. We need to make sure they know they’re gonna be spending a day with us right. In a couple months.
[00:51:16] Evan: Um, and just that ongoing execution.
[00:51:19] Patrick: Yeah, I love it. I’d like to talk about customer advisory and then project advisory boards. Yeah. Let’s jump into that on this. I think
[00:51:26] Evan: customer advisory boards specifically, um, are probably the most well understood of all the different types of advisory boards. Um, many, if not most of the Fortune 1000 B2B companies have cabs, customer advisory boards.
[00:51:44] Evan: Mm-hmm. Um, they know this, you know, strategy and they really take it seriously. They have. Perhaps many, many customer advisory boards within one organization. Um, there’s a few big companies, for example, Adobe, where they have cabs for almost every different major division within Adobe. Right. Um, and they’re constantly using them as a way to build deeper relationships with key, you know, enterprise accounts, um, all around the world.
[00:52:14] Evan: So they operate in different markets. They may have a cab specific to APAC or AMEA or, you know, north America, and then across the different product segments based on different clientele. Um, so this has been a proven model and strategy at the very large right. Public company level. A little less so in the private venture backed, private equity backed, you know, ecosystem, which is a little bit more where we operate today.
[00:52:42] Patrick: Yeah, yeah. No, I’m, I’m interested in this. There’s, there’s something that comes to mind. Uh, it’s a Henry Ford quote, and so. Um, and he beats up on a little bit of like, taking feedback from your customers. Yep. He was like, if I, if I would’ve asked my customers what they wanted, they would’ve told me, you know, a faster horse, right?
[00:52:59] Patrick: Yep. Uh, and he went on to build him a car. And so, uh, is there a little bit of concern of the, the customer doesn’t know exactly, um, what they want until we sort of show it to ’em, like, Hey, here’s this amazing thing we built. And maybe that’s part of the process, but can you tell us a little bit about the value?
[00:53:19] Patrick: You touched on a few of those pieces, but, uh, yeah. ’cause I, I like the idea. I would love to hear from my, my clients more regularly, like, what we’re doing well, what we don’t like, you know, and areas we can improve. Um, so yeah, I’m, yeah. I’m curious about how to construct this and get the most value out of
[00:53:36] Evan: it.
[00:53:36] Evan: It’s a great point. It’s very salient and it comes up all the time, right? We meet very impressive, you know, technical. Founders who are building an amazing new product that doesn’t exist. And you’re right, in a lot of cases, a customer can’t really provide value on something like that that they’ve never used before, that they may not be able to envision.
[00:54:01] Evan: But there is a huge percentage of things related to your business that they can advise on, right? And so it’s right tool for the right job. You may present your innovation roadmap, you know, like your product roadmap, things like that to your customers. And it may not be that your goal is to solicit their advice on whether you should or shouldn’t, but it’s to give them a sense for how you’re thinking and how the company is evolving and, you know, being forward thinking and striving for, right?
[00:54:36] Evan: Like, better, newer, faster, right? Like product and services. And then when the time comes and you actually have, you know, a more in-depth prototype or you know, an MVP, something along those lines, and then you could start to really solicit, you know, client input, then you really get into the value, which is, is this interesting enough that you would pay for this?
[00:55:01] Evan: Is this something that really solves a pain point? Or are we just building because it’s cool, right? Like mm-hmm. It does really impact. Innovation and, and product roadmap strategy. But I will admit that there are probably other use cases, so to speak, for your customer advisory board than just that innovation, um, agenda.
[00:55:23] Evan: Because every day your company is interacting with their company, right? Mm-hmm. And so every touchpoint, every perception of right, like your company is, is coming to bear. And it’s very hard to capture that feedback because you’ve got maybe a junior or mid-level customer success manager kind of handling that client, so to speak.
[00:55:49] Evan: They may not know how to solicit feedback very well, or their day-to-day customer is not interested in, you know, giving them really radically candid feedback. So maybe it gets escalated, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe then the manager above that, you know, customer, uh, on the client side doesn’t really know what the day-to-day feedback is between their company and your company, you know, in that way.
[00:56:13] Evan: Um, and so unless your company is excellent at being proactive, at soliciting that feedback, at really getting a safe environment right, to engage in like radically candid conversations, most companies cannot get that level of feedback until you’ve built a relationship and the bridge with a senior customer who knows that you’re gonna take the feedback well, that it’s going to get actioned.
[00:56:41] Evan: Um, it’s a whole different approach to getting, you know, customer satisfaction scores. Yeah.
[00:56:48] Patrick: And I see the value in this because generally where we learn what needs to change in our business is not when a client engages and keeps paying us and everything goes well for five years, right? That’s right.
[00:57:01] Patrick: Where we learn is somebody doesn’t engage with us and we’re like, what happened? Right? We felt like this was a great fit, but there was clearly a piece of that that we were missing. And you know, we saw the client asking questions about this and we weren’t answering those very well. Let’s go back to the drawing board and like, you know, fix that.
[00:57:17] Patrick: And same thing, you know, sometimes we’ll engage with the client and we figure out pretty quickly this engagement doesn’t make sense, you know, uh, for a number of different reasons. And then, you know, they’re disengaging and it’s like, okay, we either needed to do better screening on the front end, like to make sure that we were all a great fit to work together, or we needed to build the systems and processes in place to, uh, make sure that engagement was an enduring one.
[00:57:43] Patrick: And both of those things I just mentioned are very expensive. Right. When somebody does engage with us, it costs us a lot of revenue. And when somebody disengages with us, it costs us revenue. That’s right. And so, like, being on the front end of that and being able to engage with our customers in a way where we’re getting some of that feedback on the front end, um, I think would, would be very beneficial for the long-term success of, uh, our revenue stream.
[00:58:07] Patrick: Exactly right.
[00:58:07] Evan: You don’t wanna be surprised by feedback when a customer is churning or canceling, you know, their contract or engagement, you wanna be ahead of it. It’s, it’s like preventative medicine, you know? Yeah. You wanna be getting your health scores, make sure everything’s looking good, you know, before the year begins, and not all of a sudden have a crisis that you’re dealing with at the end.
[00:58:30] Patrick: Yeah. Yeah. This is great. And Evan, would you say that the same sort of threshold, uh, applies to building a customer advisory board as it does to a strategic advisory board? Would that. I’m just thinking of executive team, you know, are all those sort of foundational pieces True? Regardless of what type of board we’re building.
[00:58:49] Evan: To some extent, the things that change with a customer advisory board is, first of all, you need to have great customers that are in your ICP. And so just naturally that is a stage, right? You may be a startup that’s trying all different, you know, markets, you’re going to the SMD, you’re gonna, the mid-market, you’re gonna enterprise, you’re not yet sure what your product is gonna be best suited for.
[00:59:12] Evan: You may build a customer advisory board and then have representation across, you know, the three different, right? Like, uh, size of markets, but that’s gonna be suboptimal, right? Yeah. Like you wanna get to a place where you know who your ICP is. Get insight and feedback from the customers who represent that cohort of customer, right?
[00:59:34] Evan: Like your ICP. Mm-hmm. So it is usually reserved for a little bit of a, of a later stage and you know, more built out company. As well as you just, you don’t wanna risk not looking great, you know, to your clients, right? If you’re gonna bring them in, like behind the velvet rope, so to speak, and share some of the real problems and challenges mm-hmm.
[00:59:56] Evan: You, you gotta be ready for that, right? And if you’re a little too early and you’re not quite sure that you’re gonna be able to manage something like this, um, and you’re inviting customers in to really expose, you know, and see what’s broken. That’s a risk. And so you also want to be sure that you can give them a great experience.
[01:00:15] Evan: Like you wanna be honest, you wanna be truthful and solicit that great feedback, but not when you have like everybody on fire and the place is falling apart and you’re not gonna be able to shield you know, them from that experience.
[01:00:27] Patrick: Yeah. Yep. I love that. And just to just, I, you alluded to this, ICP is ideal customer or client profile, right?
[01:00:34] Patrick: Yes, that’s right. Like, you know, if we got a, if we’re building an ideal client, that’s that person and we wanna have, you know, a long list of those, uh, art clients and customers that’s at the solid Yeah. Cohort of
[01:00:46] Evan: customers there.
[01:00:47] Patrick: Yeah. I love it. All right. This is great. Anything else on customer advisory board we should be talking about?
[01:00:54] Patrick: I would
[01:00:54] Evan: say for me, like myself, I had never really experienced a customer advisory board until my last company where, where we had built this out. In building board stream and learning more about it, I obviously started to uncover, you know, like the insights and the history behind it and the other, you know, players in the space.
[01:01:16] Evan: And what I will say is it is an inevitability for companies, meaning it should be, uh, a strategy and a program that every, especially B2B company has eventually. Right. We were just talking about like the when, so it’s really a when, not if. Um, I have, I can’t even think of a time when an executive or a leadership team said, oh, we shouldn’t have had a camp.
[01:01:46] Evan: Yeah, it is a unanimous, why didn’t we do that sooner? I can’t believe we were operating this business without having this kind of, you know, insight and advice and deep level of engagement and customers who are advocating on our behalf. ’cause they’re so deeply engaged. Like all the benefits of it. And so I’m saying this just to say that I think a lot of companies are scared of doing it.
[01:02:11] Evan: Mm-hmm. You know, and there’s some legitimate concern. It’s a heavy lift. It takes a lot of focus and attention bandwidth. Um, but it is worth every minute penny, um, of time, energy, and effort. And the best companies in the world all have them.
[01:02:28] Patrick: I love it. I love it. You’ve got me thinking. Okay. Now the last advisory board is the project advisory board.
[01:02:35] Patrick: And I’m gonna give you what my brain goes to when we, we, I hear that title, but, uh, let’s say I wanna start making acquisitions. Yep. You know, and I don’t know what it’s like to. Bring in a whole different set of culture and maybe, you know, financing and negotiation. And so what I’m gonna do is build a, a board of people that have been there, done that, uh, on the m and a side, and help me, you know, navigate that process.
[01:03:00] Evan: Is that, is that a good example? You nailed it. You nailed it. That’s exactly the right example for a project advisory board. And really, you know, the word project defines it. This may not be the ongoing, you know, core driving, you know, steering committee for the business for the next several years. This may be an initiative that is either it’s time box, right?
[01:03:22] Evan: It’s a, a focus for just this year or this quarter, or one very specific thing like, you know, inorganic growth and, and doing some m and a, um, or even, you know, another topic like a leadership acquisition strategy where. Maybe you’re not at the place where your company has a chief HR officer and a very seasoned, you know, head of talent who really know how to drive, right?
[01:03:51] Evan: Like the leadership up, up leveling, um, for your company. But once you get a few leaders in, you can then move on, you know, more with the execution. You could build a project advisory board of, right, like talent leaders, HR leaders, right? Like help to kind of, uh, acquire that skillset, um, and not have that be an always on board.
[01:04:12] Evan: So that’s just how I would kind of define it. Um, m and a is a perfect one as well. Now, a company that’s gonna start getting, you know, into doing acquisitions, that’s not a small, uh, you know, short term mindset, right? You may have to kiss a thousand frogs before you actually have a successful consummated, you know, acquisition.
[01:04:32] Evan: Right? Um. But you could learn quickly, right? What does a corporate development process look like? What does due diligence look like? Who’s, who needs to be on that team? How do you source, you know, opportunities? How do you go through like the strategic diligence and then ultimately, you know, the financial diligence and then you can hire somebody, right?
[01:04:54] Evan: Like a corp dev lead. Um, so it’s, it’s like a means to an end in a way. Um, but yes, a great use case.
[01:05:02] Patrick: I love it. This has been great. Uh, Evan, anything else we should talk about in regards to advisory boards before we, before we wrap up?
[01:05:09] Evan: I would just say there’s a lot of great literature online about advisory boards, customer advisory boards.
[01:05:14] Evan: Um, we’re not the only ones in the industry, you know, supporting companies with their advisory board needs. Um, we have a free white paper on our website that is what we call the Essential Guide to Advisory Boards, and it really is a how to guide. So anybody, just curious what it would take, how you might go about this.
[01:05:34] Evan: We talked about a lot of the steps and phases. Yeah. Um, go do a little bit of research right. And, and learn about these things and then figure out if this is the right thing for your company or if not now, when. Um, and just plan for and prepare for what should be something that you implement, you know, in the future.
[01:05:53] Patrick: I love it. So we’ll have links to, uh, that white paper in our show notes so people can go download that and. Evan, I was thinking about this in the context of like, business is oftentimes like a battle, like a war, and I, I, uh, the, the Bible’s got lots of wisdom in regards to the proverbs and just in general.
[01:06:12] Patrick: And uh, uh, Proverbs 24 6 says, by wise guidance, you can wage your war, and in abundance of counselors there is victory. And so I think about that and, um, you know, I think of you as wise counsel in building my wise counsel. I think that, uh, is a good first step. You know, I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to wing it because you only get a, a one shot to make a first impression.
[01:06:35] Patrick: And if you put together a board and it doesn’t succeed, it’s like you’re gonna, you’re gonna burn a lot of what I’ll call relationship capital in that, uh, that, that, so in my mind it’s, it makes a lot of sense to invest, uh, in, in setting this up. Well, and if it’s outside of your key competency, go pay somebody to do it.
[01:06:52] Patrick: We’re we’re big believers in who Not. How like go, go find the who that can help you. Uh, do this. So if somebody wanted to engage with you, say, Hey, yes, I need this thing. What is the best way for them to, to get in touch?
[01:07:03] Evan: Yeah. Uh, find us@boardstream.ai. Um, find me Evan Kraut, like sauerkraut on LinkedIn. I have an open, you know, intro message, et cetera.
[01:07:14] Evan: Um, and I post a bunch of content about advisory boards, the learnings that we have out in the field. Um, so yeah, welcome the follows and welcome the inbound.
[01:07:24] Patrick: Yeah. Wonderful. We’ll make sure we’ve got links to, to all of that in the show notes. And I just think about this, right? Like, when we take action on these things and we build a board of, of peers or customers that can really speak into our business, um, it’s just going to make our our business grow bigger, faster, better, right?
[01:07:42] Patrick: We’re, it’s gonna take some of the hassle and friction outta the process. Uh, I can go learn and do it myself. And generally learning comes from lots of mistakes along the way, right? I would rather leverage those, um. Experiences and wisdom from other advisors that have been there, done that made those mistakes.
[01:07:58] Patrick: So I can, uh, help avoid some of those. And I, I just think about what happens if we don’t take action on this. You know, there’s, uh, we’re just continuing to, you know, struggle in business. Business is hard. It doesn’t matter what level you’re at, you’re gonna still be bumping into challenges and problems and, uh, uh, so I, I think, uh, you can just streamline that process easier, faster.
[01:08:18] Patrick: And so, uh, Evan, I think the work you’re doing@boardstream.ai is fantastic. I think it’s something that people should start considering, uh, now, right? Like at almost any level you need to start building your board of advisors, whether that’s informal. And then at some point you can grow up into a formal structure.
[01:08:35] Patrick: But, uh. I think there’s a ton of great takeaways today for, for people no matter where they’re at in the, the process. But uh, yeah. Thanks so much. This has been wonderful. Yes, thanks for joining us here today. I appreciate it. It’s a pleasure, Patrick. That’s it for today’s episode. Thank you so much for tuning in.
[01:08:50] Patrick: I hope you found real value in this conversation with Evan Kraut and that it got you thinking about how an advisory board could take your business to the next level. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d love for you to share it with someone who could use this information, another entrepreneur, business partner or team member who’s ready to level up.
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[01:09:41] Patrick: Thank you for being a part of this incredible community of vital entrepreneurs. I appreciate you and I look forward to having you back here next time on the Vital Wealth Strategies Podcast, where we help entrepreneurs minimize their taxes, master wealth, and optimize their lives. Until then, keep going, keep building, and keep being vital.