Star Mountain Capital CEO Brett Hickey sits down with Theresa Boyce of the CEO Trust to discuss the benefits of building an Advisory Board for your company, how to do it and considerations to try to avoid.

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How do you build an Advisory Board for your business?
We really begin with understanding that CEO, their board, and their leadership team, the stage of business, you know what stage of growth they're in, and then most importantly perhaps is where do they want. And with that we then develop profiles. What are the profiles of the fellow CEO's that could best propel that business? And with that, we recruit them from the CEO Trust We have a building materials company that's facing some strategic questions over the next couple of years and they have some burgeoning opportunities too like selling on Amazon, and so we created an advisory board for them and we pulled in a consumer-packaged goods CEO, so you know she knows that Amazon channel really well. We pulled in a hedge fund manager who's also an entrepreneur, we pulled in a person who grew up in the GE culture, so he knows operations and finance well, a female CEO, she has an engineering background running a technology business that also sells to the government. So, this is a pretty diverse team. This is no ripoff. It is great value. In addition, we found that diversity of geography helps, and so we've pulled that crew comes from Texas, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New York and Florida. So, you know some geographic diversity. There's ethnic diversity and sex diversity as well in that particular board. But that's what we're looking for. We're looking for "let's pull together, focused on what you need and want, and what's going to drive your business, but let's bring really different thought into that process, Let's try to bring industries and very different backgrounds into that board.
That's very helpful and your point on question 1 is where do you want to go if you have a CEO that says look what I really want to do is transition to my children or a CEO that says really my plan is to sell in a couple of years or grow as in this case in that capacity and drive into a new growth channel, figuring out the right type of people with the right backgrounds and experience who have I'm sure learned things through challenges and accomplishing that are incredibly different how you put that together. And the second thing I think was valuable in what you mentioned is how we think about diversity which isn't just the sex, origin of a person or the color of our skin, but what are the backgrounds and experiences that people have and geography as people are generally going to have different perspectives and how they think about the consumer landscape and so forth so that's another good insight into the value of diverse thinking and different backgrounds to form the best decisions possible. Now in creating these boards, what are some of the things that you think can be the most impactful and for our audience out there. How can they create their own board, should they, shouldn't they, how can they go about thinking about how to create their own board? Obviously, they can get in touch with you to help them. What are some of the other things they should be thinking about?
Well creating your own board is tricky. The most disastrous thing I've seen is inviting some of your friends. Onto your board.
Start with what not to do
Right Right. So, friends and colleagues, you won't get the diversity of thought you were hoping for and you can end up losing some friends. So, it's better to have a professional board put together that's with you and your business in mind. So, we have a small, very entrepreneurial frozen dessert company, that in their first year had a lot of turmoil. Entrepreneurial businesses often do. They are not national, this is very small, very regional. They had inquiry from Asia, from a distributor who wanted to have their product in Asia. My initial reaction was "That's crazy, we're not even international!" Well fortunately we had some folks on that board with more international experience than me, who said "let us check this out." And one of the board members, he was the president of TGI Fridays international. So, it was easy for him to pick up the phone and call, checked out this distributor and they were legit, and the distributor you would choose.