Do You Need an Advisory Board?

The subject is a board of advisors.

It begs the question, does an independent creative firm, ad agency, design firm, et cetera, do they need a board of advisors, a board of directors? What you do in this piece is you go quite deep into the history of boards of directors and the role of a board.

I found it fascinating, but you start this piece by asking, what are the forces that influence the principal's behavior? And the answers are really revealing.

As an owner of an independent creator firm, you don't have a boss.

You don't have one big boss.

You make that point.

But you also say, well, you do have these other kind of sorts of bosses.

Yeah.

And one of them is free market labor, where your employees are in some small way your bosses.

And that's your reference to the 13th Amendment.

Do you want to start there? Yeah.

Yeah.

Who's protecting the firm from you? That's kind of the question.

In a publicly traded company, you've got a board and they can fire you.

You don't have that in a small independent firm.

which you kind of love, but it also means that there's a lot of small independent firms that really aren't doing all that well because some of these things haven't caught up with them.

So what are the consequences if you don't do a good job leading your firm One is your employees can just leave you, and that happens.

I'm kind of surprised that more employees don't leave.

The only reason they don't leave more often is because it's kind of hard to find another job sometimes.

The ones who leave a lot are the ones that leave to go start another job because they think they can be a better boss than you are.

And then all the clients too, this one's hilarious to me because you think, okay, I can't have a boss.

I've got to get out of this job that I'm in.

And then you discover now instead of one boss, you've got a dozen bosses, right? Each one of your clients.

Sucker.

Yeah.