3 People You Need On The Advisory Board For Your Start Up
After I wrote this post, I had a lively discussion with @Roomthinker in the comments section. He made great points on the importance of formalizing your business before you go out to sell your product/solution to the market. His view was that this is critical if you want to be taken seriously by the corporates or out in the business world and I fully concur with him. In addition to the registration and the formalization process, I would like to suggest that a tech entrepreneur should have one more thing in place at the beginning: an advisory board. Most start ups overlook having a board because often, this is viewed as a component that is only important to big corporates which have structures in place. In my opinion, a board is most important when you are setting out, and you should set it up the moment you decide to convert your idea into a business.
Why this early?
A good advisory board will give you needed reality check when you are starting out. When you are enamoured with a business idea, the last thing you want is someone telling you what could go wrong. Most people tend to keep their ideas to themselves to avoid discouraging input on what could go wrong. The reality however is that at the starting point, the most important person to have on your side is that chap who highlights what COULD go wrong, then helps you work on avoiding it from going wrong. This is what a board brings to the table.
A board also brings to your business critical skills that you do not have but need and cannot afford when you are starting out. This brings me to the point of this article, which is to highlight the critical skills you need in your start up advisory board . Tech businesses are my pet topic so I’ll use it as an example. Most techies I have spoken to confess that their passion is to create solutions; coding and programming. Most express apathy towards the business aspects of this. To convert your love for coding into a business, I would like to suggest that you bring these guys on board:
1. Marketing / business management guru: If you are not a marketer, selling is no fun. I know this first hand because I am not a marketer. If you are a techie and (most probably) an introvert, you will need an extroverted, people-loving marketer on your board. At inception, a marketer helps you define your position in the market, your competitive advantage, and could help you carry out an informal market research to determine whether the gap you perceive in the market exists, and if people are willing to pay for it.
Once you have the solution and you are ready to go to market, the marketer will help you build a credible pitch that focuses on the customer and the problem you are solving and not your technology as many tech businesses in Kenya do. Most selling pitches fail because they are built from a technology point of view, instead of a marketing perspective. This guy will add this to your business. A good marketer will also give you useful insights on your branding and positioning.
2. An incisive legal mind: The tech marketplace is rife with stories of techies who have lost big time because of overlooking the legal aspects of their businesses. Let us say you have pitched to a major corporation and they are going to buy your product. You negotiate on pricing and other modalities, then they mention that their legal department will send you an agreement to seal the deal. The said agreement ends up being a verbose 20 page document with words whose implication you do not quite understand like “tripartite” and “exclusions” and “exit clauses”. What do you do? Most people just sign and hope for the best, which rarely works in their favour. On your board, you need someone who understands these things and can actually help you negotiate and push back on the legal clauses that protect your interests.
3. A bean counter this is another word for an accountant or a finance mind. Do not call them bean counters to their face though 🙂
This guy will help you ensure that the finances of your company are set up right from the start. They will sort out your taxes, help you cost your product and negotiate the financial aspects of your business and basically ensure that the money that’s coming in is being used for the benefit of the business.
We could speak of other great people to have like an like an entrepreneur, and at a later stage a human resource specialist, but I feel that the above three are a good place to start off from.
As always, there’s no “one size fits all” solution. You may find that you are a jack of all trades and can juggle all the roles, in which case more power to you. Most of us are not.
In conclusion, you should come up with a summary of skills you require in your advisory board then approach these people to join you. Consider this your first pitch, an attempt to make a case for your business. Sometimes you will find people who are happy to do it free of charge, others want a share in the business while others want a small sitting allowance which is payable only when you meet. In my opinion, the last two are more likely to bring more value than the people who do this free of charge (unless their mission is to sit on boards of start ups).
What other skills do you think are critical to have on a tech business board of advisors? Let us discuss in the comments section.
