What's truly at risk when you join a board, legally, financially, reputationally?

Yeah, probably, uh, you know, to me, the legal risk is overdone.

I mean, you know, I have people say to me, "Oh, well, why would you be a director?" And they quote Mainzeal, right? Well, you know, you can look at the directors in there, and they did some silly stuff, and, and it was a, it was a massive thing.

Um, the financial risk, not so much.

The financial risk is probably more tied to the reputational risk, 'cause if you get a bad reputation, you're not gonna have director spots going forward, so there's your financial hit, right? Um, but the reputation is a big one because, let's face it, New Zealand, we live in a village.

The director pool is sort of reasonably smallish.

Everybody knows everybody.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

And then done separate interviews with directors and provide feedback, which has been quite illuminating.

Um, but of course, you don't really have the, the time or maybe even the money to do those in the earlier stages.

So you can do your own skills matrix.

But, you know, the way that we tend to do it is, you know, we'll do a board evaluation once a year.

And that's really as simple as a set of, uh, sort of 30-odd questions that each director answers, and then we collate it and discuss it as a group.

Uh, but the skills matrix is the right one, and the one that I use, which has evolved, and I do tweak it for different businesses.

What's the best governance advice you've received?