Should your business have a board of advisers?

If you were to ask me, I’d say a successful business has at least the following characteristics:

1) Scalable – growing AND is capable of handling greater growth
2) Sustainable – continues to grow and be profitable if the owner/CEO takes a two to four week vacation, if a key person leaves the company, or if the most important customer is lost.
3) Valuable – the sustainability and growth of future free cash flows are reasonably predictable.

Those successful businesses almost always have one or more of the following things in place:

1) A strong board of directors
2) A strong board of advisers,and/ or
3) Participation in a disciplined accountability process (e.g. peer group, business coach, etc.)

Which, if any, do you use? Please take 5 seconds to let me know at my informal poll.

When I sat down with Information Expert’s Marissa Levin a few weeks ago, she walked through the 18-month long process she went through to build her board of advisers. It was worth the effort. Information Expert’s compound annual growth rate (CAGR) was in the mid-20s before the board was implemented and is on target to increase that growth rate by almost a third. Moreover, Marissa has discovered that the board has improved her employee retention as well as recruiting.

That experience helped her formulate her SCALE model, a process she uses in her new venture – Successful Culture – to help clients build their boards:


Read the rest at the Washington Business Journal.