POST CATEGORY : CEO Leadership

7 Great Reasons to Have an Advisory Board

By Anita Campbell (www.smallbiztrends.com)

We can all benefit from good advice, and that makes advisory boards a hot topic for the savvy CEO and business owner.

In recent years, advisory boards have become an increasingly popular tool for endeavors ranging from Fortune 100 companies to one-person shops. That’s because a Board of Advisors can do more to make your business grow than any other comparable expenditure.

So here’s some advice: set up your own Advisory Board, and here are seven great reasons to do it today.

SEVEN GREAT REASONS TO HAVE AN ADVISORY BOARD:

1. EXPERTISE YOU CAN’T BUY: Advisory Board members typically bring a combination of skill sets that are totally out of reach for most small businesses.…

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Team Building – Four Stages

We all belong to different teams, or groups of two or more people who have some type of common purpose for connecting. It could be for work, church, fun or any of a number of other reasons. What I observe over and over again is teams get frustrated and don’t perform together. I believe the reason why is they don’t have an understanding of the key stages a group or team goes through.

I believe all groups go through these 4 distinct stages in order to get to the point of being effective:

Form – A group has to form, get to know one another, backgrounds, history, why they are on the team, what are the goals of the team and the members, many teams short change this effort.…

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LEADERSHIP: WHAT ARE THE DRIVERS OF BUSINESS GROWTH

In most businesses that have growth plans there are usually some core drivers of that growth. Listed below are some of the key ones that exist in most growth businesses.

Investor Dissatisfaction and Impatience – this drives many a growth plan. Having invested their money, and wanting to get it out with a significant return, investors (often using their Board influence or financing leverage) attempt to drive CEO’s to create and execute growth plans. Sometimes investor dissatisfaction results in the removal and replacement of a poorly performing Founder/CEO by a CEO who can get the job done.

Market Pressure – drives many growth plans.…

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BUSINESS INDICATORS AND WARNING SIGNS

Do you employ a method to determine the pulse of your business? How many times have you asked or heard someone say; “How did we get in this situation”? When you go to the doctor, he usually will ask a lot of symptomatic questions to help him sort out the possibilities, to determine what brought you into his office. Why then couldn’t we use the same approach to managing the future of our businesses? You can easily practice the same fundamental logic.

For many managers the use of the monthly financial statement and the sales backlog are their only yardstick or indicators of how they are doing.…

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CHANGE: GET BETTER OR GET WORSE – THAT’S IT FOR OPTIONS

People and organizations have only two alternatives: get better or get worse, improve or decay. While the thought of status quo might seem comforting, status quo is really decay in sheep’s clothing. Certainly status quo is decay relative to companies who are improving and innovating in the competitive market place. In the personal career arena, status quo is decay relative to those who are improving their career potential.

Take a look at everything that is going on around and in us. Everything seems to be in the process of getting better (growing) or decaying (dying). An example of this is a steel beam, which one might tend to think of as being permanent.…

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