How to Form a Board of Advisors for Your Business

This is the next excerpt from small business school. Hattie: Strong advisers can come in the form of peer to peer groups, your CPA, attorney, banker, and insurance broker or you may want to follow in the path of Albert Black, owner of On-Target Supplies and Logistics. He has taken the time to form a Board of Directors. John: One thing I've found very attractive from Albert after the first launch was the fact he had such an attitude about I want to learn. Hattie: John Castle’s senior vice President of EDS is the chairman Of Albert’s Board of Directors. John: He came and approached me and said, “What do you think about the idea of creating an advisory board? We would get other people that he knew in the community that had senior positions in different companies that we’ll meet with him periodically.” Albert: The Board of Directors is more of a formal relationship with On-Target. Even though these people do not have a fiduciary responsibility and they serve an advisory capacity, I send them more information on the company for them to understand the progress and the performance of the company than I do that advisory committee. What I like to think is that I’ll treat them with more formality and in return, they will be more judgmental than my advisory group. John: The role we play is the advisory board, Edward brings to us his ideas, his strategies and we give him our perspective on what you say and often it’s a different perspective from what we’ve seen, how other companies are going through some phases, he’s going through because he starts small and as you begin to grow your business, their different transitions, any small business is going to go through. And people, like the people he has on the advisory board who’ve often been through this and they can say, “Here’s what we saw from our perspective, let me tell you what we think you may be going through and some of the challenges you’re going to face and maybe some opportunities you’ll have.” Vicky: Peter, thank you for all your hard working! Hattie: Vicky Carlson, owner of Office Pavilion, the San Diego based Herman Miller furniture dealership, is a member of the National Dealer Council made up of other dealers. Vicky: This is kind of the rundown of the agenda. Hattie: They meet twice a year and serve as advisers to one another. Male: We were in benchmarking each other, so that we could share each other’s numbers, we are all doing the same things in different cities and by coming together and benchmarking each other, we could improve. That was the basis for the whole organization. We wanted to get better.