What does a Business Advisory Board Do?
A business advisory board is a group of experienced people who meet regularly to help a business owner make better decisions, work through challenges and identify opportunities. Unlike a board of directors, an advisory board doesn’t control the business or make decisions on the owner’s behalf. Its role is to provide outside perspective, challenge assumptions and offer practical advice. For an SME owner, that can mean having somewhere to take the decisions you would otherwise be left to work through alone. Because no business owner can be brilliant at everything.
You might know your industry inside out but struggle with people. You might be fantastic at winning new business but avoid looking too closely at the numbers. You might understand operations better than anyone but have no idea how to market what you do. Or perhaps you’re simply too close to the business to see something that would be obvious to someone looking in from the outside. That’s the value of an advisory board. It surrounds you with people who see things differently.
The Alternative Board provides peer advisory services for business owners at different stages of their journey. Many owners initially think they need a business coach or mentor. What they often haven’t experienced is the value of having a group of other business owners around them as well. For years, access to this kind of outside thinking was largely associated with bigger companies. Peer advisory boards make it possible for SME owners to gain similar perspective, without handing over control of their business.
You may have heard of advisory boards without really knowing what happens when people get around the table. The idea is actually quite simple. You bring together people with experience and perspectives you don’t necessarily have yourself. You talk openly about what’s happening in your business. They ask questions, challenge assumptions and share what they have learnt from their own experiences.
Then you decide what to do. Your peers aren’t there to take control of your business. The final decision remains yours, and while expertise from people in areas such as finance, sales, marketing or people management can be valuable, there is another perspective that can be particularly powerful: other successful business owners who understand first hand what you’re dealing with.
How Often Should a Business Advisory Board Meet?
There is no single meeting schedule that works for every advisory board, but consistency matters. Some advisory groups meet frequently, while others come together every few months. What’s important is creating a regular rhythm rather than only seeking advice when something has already gone wrong. Regular meetings also create something many business owners struggle to create for themselves: accountability.
It’s very easy to leave an important strategic decision until next week when a customer calls, an employee needs you or another urgent problem lands on your desk. Knowing you’ll be sitting down with the same people again changes that. Regular meetings can also surface questions you hadn’t realised you needed to ask. And even when your own business is travelling well, hearing what other owners are dealing with can give you ideas, warnings and lessons you can take back into your own business.
Where do Business Advisory Board Meetings Take Place?
Business advisory boards can meet face to face, online or use a combination of both. Face to face meetings can be particularly valuable because business conversations are rarely just about what’s being said. There’s something different about sitting around a table, reading the room and having a genuine conversation.
But advisory boards don’t have to operate exclusively in person. Online meetings can make it easier to bring people together more regularly, while occasionally meeting somewhere different can create the space for deeper strategic conversations. Technology also makes it easier to have additional conversations between meetings when needed.
And sometimes you don’t need the entire group. If you’re dealing with a very specific issue, a conversation with the person whose experience is most relevant may be exactly what you need.
Why do SME Owners / Leaders use Business Advisory Boards?
There isn’t one particular point at which a business owner suddenly “needs” an advisory board. The reasons change as the business changes. The problems you had when you employed five people probably won’t be the problems you have at 20. The questions you asked when you were trying to establish the business may be completely different from those you ask when you’re building a management team, pursuing the next stage of growth or wondering how to make the business less dependent on you. But there are some challenges that come up again and again for SME owners.
Your business is busy, but you don’t have a clear direction
It’s possible to run a busy, profitable business and still feel as though you’re going nowhere. The days fill themselves. Customers need you. Staff need you. Emails arrive. Problems need fixing. Before you know it, another month has disappeared.
According to The Alternative Board’s 2013 Small Business Pulse survey, 91% of business owners believed they could achieve higher revenue with a strategic plan. The challenge for many owners isn’t recognising that strategy matters. It’s finding the time and headspace to actually work on it.
As The Alternative Board Vice President David Scarola explained:
“The most recent survey results validate our long-held belief, based on over two decades of working with thousands of small and medium sized business owners, that having a strategic plan to guide their business is critical to achieving success.”
He added that having a plan isn’t enough. It needs to be reviewed regularly. A business advisory board creates the space to step away from the immediate demands of the business, look further ahead and ask:
Where are we actually trying to go?
You know where you want your business to go, but don’t know how to get there
Having a vision is one thing. Turning it into reality is something else entirely. You might know you want to double the business, build a management team, expand into another market or eventually make yourself less essential to the day to day operation. The difficult part is working out what needs to happen over the next six months, 12 months and three years to make that possible.
An advisory board gives you access to people who may already have travelled parts of that road. Instead of figuring everything out through trial and error, you can draw on what other people have learnt. If growth is your goal, for example, you might need to rethink your sales and marketing before the leads arrive. Then you may need additional people and systems to handle the extra work without destroying your margins.
One decision leads to another. Having different perspectives around the table can help you see the whole journey, not just the next step.
You suspect you’re missing growth opportunities
Have you ever looked at your business and thought, surely there’s a better way to do this? That’s often a sign you’ve reached the limits of what you can see from inside the business. Even brilliant business owners aren’t brilliant at everything. In fact, one of the strengths of a good owner is recognising where someone else knows more than they do.
You might love numbers but hate marketing. You might be brilliant in front of customers but struggle to recruit the right people, or perhaps you’ve become so used to the way your business operates that you’ve stopped questioning whether there’s a better way. Other people see what you’ve stopped seeing. The right peers can look across your sales, marketing, people, finances and operations and ask the questions that uncover gaps, inefficiencies and opportunities you may have overlooked.
Your business has outgrown your network
Business growth rarely happens in isolation. Relationships matter. Customers, suppliers, referral partners, employees and other business owners all become part of the ecosystem around your business, but sometimes the business grows faster than the owner’s network.
An advisory board immediately broadens the circle of people around you. Every person brings their own experience and relationships, which can potentially open doors to new partners, customers, suppliers, employees and opportunities you simply wouldn’t have encountered otherwise.
You keep learning expensive lessons the hard way
Every business owner gets things wrong. The wrong hire. The customer you should never have taken on. The expansion that happened too quickly. The contract you wish you’d read more carefully. The investment that never delivered what you expected.
Mistakes are part of business ownership, but they don’t always have to be your mistakes.
One of the greatest advantages of sitting with experienced business owners is being able to learn from what went wrong for them.
Someone around that table may already have made the decision you’re considering now and lived with the consequences.
Their experience doesn’t mean you’ll always make the same choice they would, but at least you’ll make your decision with your eyes open.
Business Ownership Feels Lonely
This is one of the contradictions of business ownership. You can spend your entire day talking to people and still feel completely alone. There are employees you need to lead. Customers you need to reassure. Suppliers you negotiate with. Family and friends who care about you but don’t always understand why the business is still running through your head at 2am, and sometimes there are things you simply don’t feel comfortable discussing with any of them. You can’t always tell your team you’re worried. You can’t always tell a customer things aren’t going to plan, and your family probably doesn’t want another conversation about cash flow over dinner.
An advisory board gives you somewhere you don’t have to pretend you have all the answers. You can put the problem on the table, talk it through and hear from people who have felt many of the same pressures themselves. Sometimes the value isn’t somebody telling you what to do. It’s having people around you who genuinely understand what it’s like to own a business.
You’re Too Close to the Business to See the Answer.
Spend long enough inside your own business and it’s almost impossible not to develop blind spots. You know how things work. You know why you’ve always done them that way. You also know all the reasons something supposedly “won’t work”. Someone from outside your business doesn’t carry that history. A person with a different background, industry or area of expertise can look at exactly the same problem and see something completely different. That diversity of thinking can challenge assumptions, uncover opportunities and help you find solutions you simply couldn’t see from where you were standing.
You have Great Ideas, but Struggle to Follow Through
Most business owners aren’t short of ideas. The problem is what happens on Monday morning. You leave a strategy session determined to change something. Then a team member calls in sick. A major customer has an issue. An invoice isn’t paid. Your inbox fills up, and that important idea quietly slips down the list. An advisory board creates accountability. When you’ve told a group of people what you’re going to do and know they’ll ask you about it next time, following through suddenly becomes much harder to avoid, but accountability isn’t only about pushing you to do more.
Sometimes the board’s most valuable role is stopping you from chasing an idea that doesn’t deserve your time. Other business owners can challenge whether a goal is realistic, whether the return justifies the effort and whether you’ve properly understood what will be required to achieve it. That can save you just as much time and money as pursuing the right opportunity.
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