Building an Advisory Ecosystem with Coco Brown of The Athena Alliance

Let’s talk about building an advisory board.

I think we would all agree that having strong advisors and mentors in your corner brings huge benefits to every organization. Not just as sound advice in making business decisions but also providing introductions and bringing credibility to the business. 

So when is the right time to build your advisory board? As soon as you find the right people who will help. This means before you hire your first employees. 

Building an advisory board, much like building company values, is often an activity to do later. But guess what, later is too late!

It is like pouring a foundation after the house has been built. 

Investing the time to build a board before things get too crazy, is the smartest way to ensure that the decisions you make are solid enough to bring the business to it’s full potential.

Guest Bio:

Coco Brown is the Founder and CEO of The Athena Alliance. Athena has helped thousands of leaders grow and advance in their executive careers, and has brought over 400 women to corporate boards from growth stage private companies to name brand public companies. 

Coco has personally worked with hundreds of top leaders, CEOs and boards to evolve modern leadership. She’s served on ten commercial and non-profit boards and advisory boards, and has led two notable companies (Taos, acquired by IBM, and now Athena). 

She is part of Nasdaq's Governance Insights Council, and is often called on to share guidance to the evolving focus and breadth of responsibility within the Modern Boardroom.

TODAY WE DISCUSS:

• When to build your board of advisors
• How to leverage your advisors through investment cycles

Challenge?

• Not having the right board in place when the company gets to funding
• Not building a structure, cadence 
• End up with a board that is forced on you. 
• Not being as strategic as you can be. 
• In a formal advisory capacity

Why is this important to the company?

• If your are not thinking early about this, when funding comes you may not have a strong pool of potential independents for your board
• Becomes feeder for the formal board
• Need to balance the power of the board
• Even without that - maybe you never need a formal fiduciary board beyond the core founder/owners. But not having an ecosystem of advisors around you limits the competitive advantage you get by consulting outside your employee base. 

Rick’s Nuggets

• Making decisions on your own, 
  • Gut without data

How do we solve the problem? 

• Mindset
• Most of us oriented around the team under - the team we are building
• You need to orient as well to the team around you
• Framework -How the team evolves over time
  • Close connections that best approximate the roles you will need to build
  • Lesser known to you, but better known publicly - pool of people to draw on 
  • Formalized - work on issues of the business together over time, in a rhythm/ cadence
• Structure -
  • Individual relationships
    • Experts who are honest with you
  • Think tank - bench for something formal in the future:
    • Mixed group
    • Diverse 
  • Formal