Luring Top Talent Via Your Board And Advisors

18 June 2012 – In 2009 I set out on a mission to find the right advisors to build Little Pim up to $1M in sales. Well aware we couldn’t afford to hire all the top talent we wanted, I set out to bring top talent to our company via our board and advisors. Drawing on my background as a nonprofit executive director–where everyone involved was motivated by mission not money–I turned to experts in various fields who cared about language teaching for their own personal reasons, and people I had known from previous careers who could help us build the business.

When I was done, I had an advisory council of 12 and a board of 5. I looked for advisors who were experts in the areas where I knew we needed additional bench strength, including people who knew retail, who had built online businesses and had experience scaling up companies. Some were old friends like David Rosenblatt, who had been an East Asian studies major at Yale where we met, and believed that speaking Mandarin had been a game changer in his career (he was also the former CEO of DoubleClick, which sold to Google). Others were successful entrepreneurs like Stuart Farr who had built and sold a thriving software company, or people working in adjacent fields who had young children learning a second language, like Victor Zaraya, COO of Razor & Tie. I relied heavily on my advisors and board, running plans by them and soliciting their help whenever we had strategic decisions to make. I was also careful not to overuse them! They attended zero meetings. The sum total of their advisory role was to take my calls or emails when Little Pim was facing an issue that was squarely in their purview. They always did. I sent them quarterly updates to keep them in the loop and their collective advice helped keep us on track and often, ahead of the curve.

Read article at [Forbes.com].