Why You Need An Advisory Board Before A Business Plan

Kuli Kuli meeting over moringa tea

I was sitting in a coffee shop next to a tremendously powerful businesswoman. Nervously, I asked her what was the one thing I should be doing to launch my business and get investors to take me seriously. Five years later, her words still resonate. “When your business has no credibility, you build it through your advisory board.”

I convinced her to join as my first advisor a few months later. This was in 2013 - my business wouldn’t officially launch until nearly six months later. Her advice, and the advice of other advisors that I subsequently recruited, has proved invaluable in helping to shape the growth of my now multi-million dollar startup over the past five years.

These days, I often find myself seated at the other side of the table, helping early-stage entrepreneurs get their businesses off the ground. Too often I see entrepreneurs who are focused solely on funding, telling me things like, “if I can just raise $250k I know we’ll take off.”

When I tell them to get feedback and try to validate their idea before fundraising, I often hear things like “Oh yeah, I’ve heard asking for advice can be a great way to get investment.” Even once I’ve convinced him or her that having advisors is valuable for its own sake, not as a means to an end, I still find that very few entrepreneurs understand how to find the right advisors, what to offer them and how to best utilize them.

Often people think that you have to be well-connected in order to recruit good advisors. As someone who started a food business at age 23 with zero food industry experience, I’ve found it’s entirely possible to build a powerful network from scratch.

The first step is to research other companies who you’d like your startup to be when it grows up. For me, that meant figuring out what companies were introducing new superfoods to the market and doing it in a creative and impactful way. Once I found those companies, I read up on their founders and looked through LinkedIn to see if I might have any 2nd or 3rd degree connections who could introduce me. I knew that once I could get my foot in the door with one food CEO, there was a strong chance that he or she could introduce me to other CEOs.

I treated that first potential advisor conversation like it was the most important job interview of my life. I studied her company, watched her TED talk and came up with a list of questions. I ended the conversation with two, all-important asks. “Can I reach out to you from time to time with questions?” and “Do you know anyone else in this space who I could speak with?”

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