Why your scale-up needs an advisory board before it’s too late

Why your scale-up needs an advisory board before it’s too late

by | Mar 10, 2026 | Business, Management, Venture Capital

We’re not big enough for a board yet.”

I hear this from founders all the time. They’ve got revenue, a growing team, maybe even some funding behind them, but when you ask about their advisory board, the answer is almost always the same: “That’s something for later.”

It’s one of the most expensive mistakes I see in the scale-up world. And it’s completely avoidable.

 

The “later” trap

Here’s what typically happens. A founder gets past product-market fit, revenue starts growing, and they’re suddenly making decisions in areas where they have no deep expertise. International expansion. Fundraising strategy. Building a sales organisation. Navigating regulation. They figure it out as they go, because that’s what founders do. But “figuring it out” at this stage is slow, expensive, and often means learning by making mistakes that someone else has already made.

The irony is that the help is out there. Experienced operators, investors, industry experts, people who have been through exactly these challenges before. But many founders don’t reach out for it until they’re in trouble.

A ten-year study by the Business Development Bank of Canada (link here) found that companies with advisory boards had annual sales 24% higher than those without. And 80% of the business leaders who had advisory boards said they’d set one up again. That’s not a marginal benefit anymore.

 

What an advisory board actually is (and isn’t)

Part of the problem is confusion. Founders hear “board” and think board of directors, with legal obligations, governance requirements, and loss of control. An advisory board is a completely different thing. No legal authority. No votes on company decisions. Just a group of experienced people who meet regularly to challenge your thinking, open doors, and help you avoid the mistakes they’ve already made.

Think of it as your personal support team. In a previous article I talked about building your the A-team: complementary skills, each member filling a gap you can’t fill yourself yet. The three things an advisory board brings:

  1.  Skills you can’t afford yet. Advisory board members are typically the profiles you want in your company, but can’t hire at this stage. A CFO-type who helps you think about fundraising. A commercial leader who’s scaled into markets you’re entering. They bridge the gap until you can bring those roles in-house.
  2. Access to money and customers. Good advisors are well-connected. They can make introductions to investors and potential clients that would take you months to get on your own. This alone can justify the effort of setting up an advisory board.
  3. The truth. This is the big one. Advisors are not your friends, family, fools and fans (the infamous 4Fs). They’ve aligned their reputation with your company. If you’re heading in the wrong direction, they’ll tell you. Directly. Before the market does.

 

When is the right time?

If you’re past product-market fit and starting to face decisions outside your core expertise, you’re already at the right time. You don’t need to wait until you have 50 employees or a Series B. Some of the most impactful advisory boards were set up at the 5-10 person stage.

The founders who get external perspective early don’t just grow faster. They make fewer expensive mistakes along the way. And in a market where capital is harder to come by and competition is fierce, that matters more than ever.

If you’re a founder or CEO thinking about this, start by asking yourself: what are the three biggest decisions I’ll face in the next 12 months, and do I have anyone outside my company who’s been through them before? If the answer is no, you might want to start building that team around you.

Have you worked with an advisory board? Or considered setting one up? Curious to hear what held you back or what made the difference.

Why you need a board of advisors.

 

What is an advisory board for a startup?

An advisory board is an informal group of experienced people who meet regularly to challenge the founder’s thinking, open doors, and provide expertise the company can’t yet hire for. Unlike a board of directors, advisory boards have no legal authority or governance obligations.

When should a scale-up set up an advisory board?

As soon as you’re past product-market fit and facing decisions outside your core expertise, typically at the 5-10 person stage. You don’t need to wait for a Series B.

What's the difference between an advisory board and a board of directors?

A board of directors has legal authority and governance responsibilities. An advisory board has neither. It exists purely to provide strategic input, connections, and honest feedback.

The single point of failure in your startup is you

The single point of failure in your startup is you

by | Feb 25, 2026 | Business, Management

So you got your startup past the first valley of death. You found product-market fit, got some real revenue coming in, maybe even raised a round. Congratulations. But here’s a question that keeps coming back in almost every conversation I have with growth-stage founders: why does everything still run through me?

If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. And it’s not a capacity problem, it’s an architecture problem.

The founder bottleneck

There’s a concept in systems thinking called a “single point of failure“, a component that, if it fails, takes the whole system down. In most startups between 1 and 5 million in revenue, that single point of failure is the founder. Every deal, every hire decision, every product call, it all funnels through one person. The team is waiting for approvals instead of executing. The VP of Sales keeps asking how you close deals “the way you do it.” Your inbox is a warzone.

Sound familiar? The instinct here is to work harder. More hours, more calls, more “let me just jump in because it’s faster.” But that instinct is exactly the problem.
In self-defense (yes, I also run a Krav Maga school, bear with me), one of the first things we teach is that under pressure, your body wants to tense up and fight harder. And that’s precisely what gets you hit. The first skill is learning to relax under threat so you can actually move and respond effectively. Scaling a company works the same way.

What the ones who break through actually do

After working with dozens of startups at EY, IMEC, Intel Capital, and now as a fractional CXO, I’ve noticed that the founders who successfully scale past the bottleneck tend to do three uncomfortable things:

1. They document the ugly version first. Not a polished SOP manual that nobody reads. They literally record themselves doing the thing, whether it’s selling, onboarding or making a key decision, and have someone else turn that into a repeatable process. Imperfect, but suddenly transferable. (If you want a framework for this, have a look at the “E-Myth Revisited” by Michael Gerber, still one of the best books on building systems in a business.)

2. They hire for the system, not the gap. Instead of hiring people to “help out,” they first define what the function should look like at 3x their current size, and then hire the person who can build and run that. The question shifts from “who can take stuff off my plate?” to “what does this machine need to look like without me in it?”
3. They let things break on purpose. They deliberately step out of a process and let it stumble. Not to prove a point, but to find out where the real dependency is. Usually, what they thought required a founder turned out to need a checklist.

The real question

If your company can’t function for a week without you answering questions, you don’t have a scalable business yet, you have a job with employees. The fix isn’t more hours. It’s building something that runs when you’re not in the room.

As I like to say: you are free to choose how you run your company, but you are not free of the consequences of that choice. The founders who grow aren’t the ones who grip harder. They’re the ones who learn to let go of the thing that made them successful in the first place.

What was the hardest thing you had to let go of as your company grew? Curious to hear your experiences. And if you’re stuck at this stage right now, just reach out.

Always think Attack – what does self-defense have to do with management

Always think Attack – what does self-defense have to do with management

by | Oct 2, 2017 | Business, Management, Thoughts

Some years ago, I assisted Ignace Van Doorselaere with the creation of his book “Always Think Attack, street fighting techniques for managers“. This project allowed me to combine my professional knowledge with my activities as a self-defense instructor.

The purpose of the book was to help create better managers that keep the focus on their customers, employees and shareholders. We were not advocating dirty tricks for managers, but on the contrary, using the principles of self-defense to protect companies against disruptive forces.

Purpose of a fight: survive

Self-defense is all about self-preservation. This means avoiding to fight if possible, but but be extremely effective if you cannot avoid the fight. Projecting this on your company, the goal is self-preservation in the long term, which usually means thinking of what is best to both your customers and shareholders. But at the same time be prepared to take immediate action to ensure the survival of your company.

Avoiding the fight – be aware of your environment

In self-defense we call this the pre-fight situation, where you can still get away without having to resort to violence or being attacked. This is broken down into avoidance (don’t get into the fight) and control (stop a situation from escalating, or defuse it). Because once you do get into a fight, you may not escape unharmed either. So the key here is to be alert, and scan for threats around you. This crosses over well into the corporate world, where you need to be on the lookout for potential threats to your company. Those threats can be competitors but also market forces at work that may in the long run totally disrupt your business. Look out for the small signals that can lead to big changes!

Winning = execution

“Winning” in the case of self-defense means that your attacker is not willing or able to continue. This can be through being “broken” either physically or mentally. To be able to win, you will need focus and impact. A near miss is still a miss. Winning means reaching the goals you set, and not letting your ego or emotions get the better of you. In practice, this may mean running like hell if you are attached by a huge group of attackers, because it is in line with your long term goal of survival without being injured.

In the business world, you will need an actual growth state of mind, and the real implementation of the strategy and ideas, because if something isn’t implemented, it’s all wasted effort. A strategy can be for example deciding to not enter a certain market because it is a red ocean for you. But once you do commit your company, don’t do it halfheartedly.

You cannot fool human intuition

Listening to your intuition is important both on the street and in the office. It’s usually your brain or subsconcious mind trying to tell you something that you have not yet consciously realised. So if you have a nagging feeling about a competitor or new product, take a good hard look at them, because there are subtle signs of an imminent danger that you may have missed.

Stay flexible

“If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” is a trap that people can fall into. In self-defense, if your strategy or tactics don’t work, change them rapidly before you get in more trouble than you already are. The same goes for corporate life. Don’t hang on to your strategic long range plan if the ground starts to shift beneath you but be ready to shift into a totally new direction.

You can order the book in Dutch on the site of 4F (link here).

Reading: The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

by | Feb 8, 2017 | Business, Management, Recommended reading

When you think of Netscape, those of us old enough to remember the browser, thinks of Marc Andreessen. But at Netscape (and Opsware), he was joined by Ben Horowitz. Together they founded venture capital company Andreessen Horowitz. This book is a compilation of the lessons that Ben Horowitz learned at those companies, and that he is sharing with us.

The book is a must read for startups and growth ceo’s.  It’s not a book written by a management guru, but by someone who has been in the trenches and doubtless had a lot of sleepless nights figuring out how to make his company survive. There’s a lot of advise for CEO’s in there, ranging from how to direct your company through rough times, to minimising politics in your company.

Some of the highlights that I found worthwhile:

Crediting Grove – It was interesting that in the book Ben Horowitz makes a number of references to the works of Andy Grove, name “High output management” and “Only the paranoid survive“. Andy turned Intel around from a memory company to the biggest chip company in the world, so pay attention, and read his work too.

Lead bullets – “Ben, those silver bullets that you and Mike are looking for are fine and good, but our web server is five times slower. There is no silver bullet that’s going to fix that. No, we are going to have to use a lot of lead bullets.” “There’s not always a magical way out of your problems. Sometimes you just have to knuckle down and keep on going with all that you have.” The other interesting quote in this section was:

“There comes a time in every company’s life when it must fight for its life. If you find yourself running when you should be fighting, you need to ask yourself: “If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?” if you have the better product, why not knuckle up and go to war?”

War and Peace – what CEO are you? – A peacetime CEO will focus on expanding the market  and company’s strength. A wartime CEO is fending off immediate and existential threats (read Only the paranoid survive to catch up on strategic inflection points) . Can one CEO be both? You can read more on wartime versus peacetime CEO’s here.

People Product Profit – In that order. Take care of your people first, they are the ones that will make your product win, and in turn realise your profit.

A Market of ONE – The most important rule of raising money privately, look for a market of one. You only need one investor to believe in you and invest

2 kinds of friends – You need 2 kinds of friends in your life: one with real excitement, and a second kind of friend to call when things go horribly wrong. When your life is on the line and you only have 1 phone call to make, who’s it going to be?

If you’re going to eat shit, don’t nibble – Pretty straightforward!

Don’t believe in statistics – Startup ceo’s should not play the odds. Don’t believe in statistics, believe in calculus. Secret of a successful CEO? There is one skill: focus and make the best move when there are no good moves.

Ask for problems – Build a culture that rewards, not punishes people to bring problems in the open where they can be solved. The “old management standards” say “don’t bring me a problem without bringing a solution”. Well, if the employee had the solution, he wouldn’t need to bring it to the manager now, would he?

Time – spend zero time on what you could have done and spend all of your time on what you can do. Because in the end, nobody cares

Product Managers – good product managers think in terms of delivering superior value to the market place during product planning and  achieving market share and revenues goals during the go to market phase.

Hiring senior people in your company – When do you need to start hiring senior people, what types, advantages and disadvantages? Also an Andy Grove quote that hits home: the peter principle is unavoidable (full quote: “the Peter Principle is unavoidable, because there is no way to know a priori at what level in the hierarchy a manager will be incompetent“). The author gives some good advice on how to check if they are doing a good job, and when and why you need senior people. He addresses the questions like “won’t they ruin the culture with their costumes, political ambitions and the need to go home to see their family?” Maybe yes, but bringing in the right kind of experience at the right time can mean the difference between bankruptcy and glory. You’ll need a new executive to be more than a goal achiever, he/she needs to be part of the team. The CEO needs to evaluate people on current role, and nobody comes out of the womb knowing how to manage a 100 people. Managing at scale is a learned skill rather than a natural ability, and it’s nearly impossible to make judgement in advance.

The shit sandwich – from “the one minute manager” – go look it up. 🙂

Be honest but courteous with feedback – if you think a presentation sucks, just say it and give the reasons why. Watered down feedback is worse than no feedback at all. But… don’t go and show off your superiority.

What’s your story – a company without a story is usually a company without a strategy (see the amazon example – it’s amazing, Jeff Bezos wrote this in 1997!)

 

the hard thing about hard things

Personal brand and personal brain

by | Jan 16, 2012 | Lifehacks, Management, Technology

You are what you tweet. How to work on your personal brand online, throught Fast Company. Using social networking to build your professional brand. I’m not sure if I’d follow the advice to “find five new people to follow or connect with every day”. That’s 1825 people a year, or 18250 over 10 years… that’s a lot of people to interact with…

http://www.fastcompany.com/1805231/u-r-what-u-tweet-5-steps-to-a-better-personal-brand

 

“Personal Brain” from The Brain company. Read good things about it. Trying it out, not seeing the benefits of it (yet).

http://www.thebrain.com/products/personalbrain/

Steve Jobs on marketing & identifying your core values

Steve Jobs on marketing & identifying your core values

by | Oct 10, 2011 | Business, Management, Marketing

Next to the products, Steve Jobs also drove the marketing of Apple relentlessly forward.

Click here to read the article and see the presentation on how he talks about getting the company back on message, after he took the helm of the company again.

Once you’re done with that, check out Guy Kawasaki’s post on things he learned from Steve Jobs. It’s an interesting and thought provoking read. I especially like the first two: expert are clueless, and customers cannot tell you what they need.