Five Ways an Advisory Board Can Transform Your Business
Do you want to grow, achieve accountability and learn new ways to solve old problems, especially in our current COVID-19 environment? Enter the advantage of having a well-formed advisory board for your business. A great board of advisors can be a vital sounding board and source of strategic insights, helping you develop new perspectives toward growth — and the significant shifts that come with growth.
Growth is change, pure and simple. And change is accomplished through hard decisions that can significantly shift your business. These decisions will be easier if you have help from a group of trusted individuals dedicated to seeing you succeed. Here are five shifts or transformations you can expect as the result of embracing an advisory board.
Significant Shifts
1. Your Personal Role
As your company grows with employees and board members, or from under $1 million to $5 million or $10 million in revenue and more, your role will shift from technician to manager to leader, and ultimately to advisor or bridge builder. You can’t remain in the “stuff” of your business when you need to be at the 50,000-foot level developing your winning strategy.
2. Your People
Staff members who help you reach one growth stage might not be those you need to reach the next. This is one of the hardest parts of business ownership. Each employee is different, and sometimes a long-time employee does evolve with your company — maybe into a different role. But as your company grows, it will require new experiences, ideas and leadership. And taking on aggressive shifts or goals inevitably reveals needed staff changes in your organization. It is difficult to accept that attrition is sometimes needed. But the silver lining is you’ll attract talent that previously might have skipped over you — talent that will take your company to where you want it to be.
3. Your Customers
One of the barriers to growth today is the profound transformation in customer behavior. How do you increase your sales to customers who are fully informed about the products and services they want to buy; who are armed with comparative data about quality, availability, and price; and who are determined to be successful on their terms? The answer is a shift from being unique to being first choice with a very focused customer group.
4. Your Business Strategy
Good strategy is the evolution of your central idea or theme for winning through continually changing circumstances. Having a clear strategy requires you to make trade-offs in competing by choosing what not to do. Your choices will shift about how you are going to compete and how you will make money in the future. You choose which customers you are going to focus on, and how you will position and deliver your offer in a way that makes you meaningfully different from your competitors.
5. Your Advisors
Like your staff, your advisors will likely shift as well. There will come a point when your company’s growth goals surpass an advisor’s level of knowledge, experience or interest, so be sure to create a structure that allows advisors to make a smooth exit. Your board is a fluid dynamic of a business and will continue to evolve alongside of you.
Building your advisory board is one of the most important steps you can take to achieve your company growth. If you don’t have a board of advisors in place, now is a good time to start. With today’s global uncertainty, you can’t afford not to have one.
Contact me for more information on advisory boards and how you can embrace one.
© 2020 David Paul Carter. All rights reserved.
Originally published at https://www.davidpaulcarter.com on September 21, 2020.
