#Slack-Off Recap: Building (and Rocking) an Advisory Board
Guest Expert Julia Pimsleur
Every Tuesday from 1–2pm EST, WeFestival hosts business experts in our Slack community through our #Slack-Off series. (JOIN HERE). We recently welcomed Julia Pimsleur into our community to share her advice on how to build an advisory council for your business. Read the highlights and full transcript below.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- When starting your advisory council, look for high profile industry leaders and people who have skills that you can’t hire for yet
- Start small and ask your first council members to help you grow the board
- Communicate with the members of your advisory board directly — they are here to advise you, first and foremost.
- Make your expectations clear — and have check-ins with each person as needed.
Continue reading for the full transcript of the hour-long chat (and don’t forget to sign-up for the WeFestival Slack Community to participate in the next one!)
JULIA PIMSLEUR: Hi everyone, great to have this chance to chat with you. I am the founder of Little Pim, language teaching for young children where I was CEO for 9 years and recently handed off to a new CEO so I could pursue my passion of helping women entrepreneurs go big. I am the author of Million Dollar Women and I teach fundraising workshops and a Masterclass for women who are looking to scale up their businesses.
THE BASICS
How does an “Advisory Board” differ from a “Board of Directors”
People often get these confused and they are totally different. An Advisory Board is people you have asked to help you with the business and you give them this title of Advisor. They have no fiscal responsibility for your company, they are just glorified mentors. I actually call mine Advisory COUNCIL to avoid the confusion. A Board is people who have governance and fiscal responsibilities vis a vis your company.
At what point should a startup start making an advisory board?
It’s never too early to have an Advisory Board (or Council, as I call mine) and it will give your company credibility that can be worth a lot as you are getting off the ground. Also good Advisors attract other good Advisors so even if you start with just 2–3, you can use them to interest other people in joining you. I have more on this in the blog about this on my web site: 3 Easy Steps to Creating Your Advisory Council
BUILDING YOUR ADVISORY BOARD (COUNCIL)
Who should you consider to be on your advisory board? How do you determine their respective roles?
Look for big names, worker bees, and people who have skills you can’t afford to hire for yet.
What tips do you have for approaching a potential advisor? How do you ask?
My first few Advisory Council members were people I knew from my prior career (in filmmaking) and I basically said to them, “you know I am going to bug you anyway, you might as well get a title for it!” They all said yes once i assured them it was a very low time commitment (I said i’d only contact them when I had a question right up their alley and NO IN PERSON GROUP MEETINGS which seems key for everyone!)
I have my eye on an industry leader. He would be a wonderful advisor for both the name and the expertise. Any advice on how to approach a conversation?
If it’s someone high profile I would definitely find someone who knows him to give you a warm intro and try to get coffee with him and save that ask for a second or third meeting. Sometimes it takes several weeks/meetings to get advisors to a place where they feel they know you well enough to say Yes to serving on your council.
I’m lucky to have connected with some great people in my network who have been generous with their time in critiquing my ideas, giving me suggestions on my deck. I have a hard time telling if they are supporters of me in a general way or real supporters of my company, and if there’s a difference and if a dude would ever worry about such things.
Great that you are asking that question! A dude would NOT worry about that (ha ha), but when people are helping you with your company its because they believe in you AND the business. They likely don’t see them as separate. Amanda Palmer has a great riff on this in her book ASK which I love where she talks about how as women we sometimes have trouble just accepting help and that we need to learn to “accept the donuts.”
Did you know that research has shown that as women we have 30% more neurons firing in our brains than men do? It’s in the Confidence Code book and widely known among neuroscientists. So we literally think about things more than men do.
How do you determine what to offer a board advisor? I assume for most startups without cash, it has to be some percentage of Equity. What is the range and how does that vest?
My first few years I did not compensate any advisors; in the later years I did offer Stock Options when I was trying to bring on very specific talent to my Advisory Council (tech, legal, etc.)
Are there typically “terms” for advisors on a Council? Like, a one year commitment, then reassess. Or do you just play it by ear.
Terms are a great idea, because then there isn’t that awkward fading of interest on their part after 1–2 years of you wanting to make room for new advisors but not wanting to ask people currently serving to “step down.”
I’d suggest a one year term, with option to renew. I used to provide a one page letter to my advisors outlining what it meant to serve on the Council — what I expected of them and what they could expect of me, where I would list their name, etc. I think it makes it more official and allows you to call on them in a way you might not have felt as comfortable doing if you hadn’t made clear from the beginning how you’d be doing so (you can even put “once a month check in” or that level of detail in the letter).
If someone is an angel or VC, is there an implied investment commitment? I mean is the bar higher because they are seen as future investors?
I think you should treat angels and VCs like any other advisors. Any of your advisors could become investors (some of mine did). But sometimes angels and VCs like to sit in rooms where they are NOT there because they can write a check!
Can you expand more on “providing value” for your advisors? Do you find that putting their bio up on a website/in investor decks, etc to be enough? What are some other ways early stage start-ups could give value to their advisors?
Some of the ways you can provide value to your advisors include: keeping them up to date on industry trends they may not be aware of; introducing them to their peers in other fields they would not have met without you; inviting them to cool events where you are pitching or participating; introducing them to vendors you are using and swear by to help them in their own lives or companies (think tech, VAs, designers) or to recommend to other companies they are helping out as an investor, advisor or council member. And if all that isn’t enough, buy them bottles of wine! I have done that too : )
COMMUNICATING WITH ADVISORS
It sounds like your advisors have a strong connection. Is it typically just the CEO who reaches out to them or does it vary?
It may be different in other companies, but at Little Pim the understood dynamic was that only the CEO would reach out to Advisors unless the Advisor gave me the greenlight to connect them with someone on my team (for example, when we were getting ready to run infomercials, one of my Advisors had deep experience in this and so he and my SVP of Marketing and Sales talked shop about this without me. But I was the one who asked if he would do that, and I was very protective of their time, as I felt that was the respectful silent contract!)
Have you had any poor experiences with advisors? Or, anyone who said they’d be on your council and then flaked out when you needed their help? If so, how did you handle those situations?
I did not have that specifically happen to me (on the contrary I have multiple stories of advisors who came through in pinches like the one who let my entire team camp out in his conference room for a week after the ceiling on our old loft office fell in one day, or the advisor who on Thanksgiving Day took time away from his family to trouble shoot helping us with our web site, which had just crashed!). If Advisors are not giving as much as you’d like it could be that the expectations were not clear (you can check in with them on that) or that their life circumstances have changed and they can’t give the kind of support they thought they could when they said yes. Either way i’d check in with them and see why they are being slow to respond. You can always add other advisors to the council who have similar skill set so you have a back up plan if one of them lets you down!
MILLION DOLLAR WOMEN
I was reading about your book. Love to know what inspired you to write it and why you decided to switch to helping women entrepreneurs go big ?
I found my new passion of helping women go big because I was so lucky to have wonderful mentors and role models when I was building my business but they were all men. I really craved learning from other women. Also when I raised capital for Little Pim Ifound that the process so intimidating and hard that Ii wanted to make it easier for other women. Also I have two boys : ) So this is how I am helping to advance women. I truly believe helping more women go big is the quickest way to close the persistent financial gender gap in this country.
Do you think it makes a difference being a woman entrepreneur vs just being great at what you do? I know there is a “ceiling” to break through. I guess I don’t think it about so much, I just do the work.
I think being a woman is different. There are ways it makes our lives easier and ways it makes it harder. I think 85% of what we need to master is the same for both genders (hire the best people, set the strategy and keep the money in the bank — to quote Fred Wilson’s famous blog). But that 15% that is DIFFERENT is what I wanted to hear more about when I was building my business and what I am bringing through my MDW activities (the book, teaching, etc).
Face adversity head on and drive your company towards success. I recently saw the movie JOY, where Jennifer Lawrence plays the role of real life Joy Mangano, a divorced, downtrodden mother who ultimately becomes the inventor of the Miracle Mop, a savvy entrepreneur and successful businesswoman. So much of her story really hit home for me.
I just bought your book Million Dollar Women. I am curious why (as you wrote in your intro) only 3% of women only make north of a $1MM ?
Thanks for buying my book and my research on why so few women get to $1M (it’s 3% for women and 6% for men) is that we need to do more work in three areas: Mindset, Skillset and Network. When we get those three right, we can get to $1M much faster. Women are also still mainly running businesses in harder to scale sectors like professional services, though that is changing as more women found tech companies or consumer and education companies that use tech (and therefore have more scaling potential). I am on a mission to hep one million women get to $1M in revenues by 2020!
LINKS
3 Easy Steps to Creating Your Advisory Council
Master Class for Women Entrepreneurs
The Confidence Code, Kattie Kay and Claire Shipman
The Art of Asking, Amanda Palmer
