In my Entrepreneurship class, we have a different speaker every week that talks about their entrepreneurship experience and “confessions”. One of the very first speakers talked about the importance of having a board of advisors. He was talking about a biomedical company that he had started.
Board of advisors, board of directors, and similar concepts tend to remind us of large, sophisticated companies and not the typical internet business that we might be running out of our home. We, the small business owners of internet, should also put together a board of advisors.
Why We Do Need A Board Of Advisors
The concept of getting advice from other professionals in our field (internet business) is nothing new. We always post our new/improved websites to website hospital categories of forums for reviews and feedback. Almost all of us constantly use many other webmasters as members of our board of advisors without noticing it.
There are a lot of good outcomes from asking for advice from other people, especially webmasters. Everyone tends to look at issues (in this case websites) in their own perspective. We have different perspectives from each other so by talking to others we are exposing ourselves to many new perspectives regarding the features and services our site offers. So we should keep doing it.
The problem or shortcoming that the above strategy has is that it relies on many webmasters. Often the webmaster that gives us advice on site B is not the same webmaster that gave advice on site A. Therefore he is not familiar with our habits, standards, way of executing our ideas, and so forth. Knowing these factors about us, can help the advisor to give us better and more specific advice.
The webmasters we rely on have different skill levels and it’s hard to tell their skills simply by their short review on our “Review My Site” thread. We have been running our online business for a while and are naturally at a higher skill level than an average webmaster; however most of the people that have time to review other websites are newer webmasters. Therefore we are not always getting the most in-depth reviews when looking for one.
So put together a board of advisors from professionals in your area of work. Do keep asking for reviews on webmaster forums and from friends and family. However, if you plan to take your business to a higher level having a board of advisor consisting of professionals better than yourself can be prove very successful.
Who To Put On The Board
First let’s figure out what the function of this board is. A board of advisor takes on the responsibility to critic your past actions, key future decisions, new ideas as well as to give you different perspectives on various issues. While you could ask your advisors questions such as “how good does my site look?”, the more important questions are of the form “what and how can certain new features help improve the site?”.
It is very important to put together a diverse team of advisors that can help you in many areas including small business, marketing, entrepreneurship, financial, and more. Not everyone on the board should have internet skills; as a matter of fact it is best to have non-internet-skilled advisors on board too for different perspectives.
Example of non-skilled advisor: My mom thinks the “Work From Home” ads on TV or Internet are very attractive and she is actually interested to learn more about them. I consider almost all of them spam and useless and would have never thought people are forgiving enough to believe them.
It is also important to construct your board of advisors from local professionals around where you live so that you and them can meet together at least once every 3 months. As internet entrepreneurs, we sometimes lose touch of the real world and the importance of networking with locals.
One of the beautiful things about a board of advisors is that often you can put together a team of highly skilled professionals free. Most of the times people are happy to give advice and help their peers/students to succeed, but don’t abuse that. Put the team together truly because you want to hear their advice and improve your business/service.
The main professions that I would like to include in my board of advisors are:
- Marketing advisor
- An internet entrepreneur that has already passed my current level in the online world.
- Business advisor
- A friend that knows me at a personal level
How To Find Advisors
Once you know the skills you’d like the board of advisors to posses, you need to actually find advisors with such strengths. Following are some tips that might help you in the process:
- Look local. Find people that live close by so that getting together for meetings are practical.
- Search through people you already know. You would be surprised how many professional you come across on a daily basis without noticing.
- Go to local entrepreneurship meetings/get together and meet people that are more successful than yourself. Every town and area has such meetings in one form or another, go out and find them.
- Go to the local college/university. Professors have a passion for teaching and helping others. They would be more than happy to help if they have time.
- Don’t ask the CEO family friend that you know. CEOs and people with high responsibilities have a very busy schedule. So while they might be successful and have great advice, they won’t be able to spend time learning about your business or meet with you and the other advisors.
I have asked a number of people with the above skills to join my board of advisors. Once the team is put together I will introduce them in a sepearte post.
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Tags: advisor, board of advisor, Business, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, start up
