I’ve spoken to some business leaders who were worried that setting up an advisory board might reveal gaps in their skill sets and leave them feeling vulnerable.

I was surprised the first time I heard that, but, when I thought about it, I realised how uncomfortable that might feel. The best way I know to handle a worry is head-on, so let’s take a look at this in more detail.

The first thing we should confront is the idea that an advisory board will highlight anything you’re not good at. The fact is everyone has gaps in their skill set. The advisory board is there to make sure that the gaps in your skill set don’t destroy your business!

Nobody is good at everything. There just isn’t enough time to learn all the skills you need, and you have to prioritise. Most people who’ve built a business are good at the core activity of that business.

If you founded a construction business, the chances are you’re a builder. If you run a software company, you probably started out as a software designer or engineer.

The truth is, to run a successful company — and especially to break through the growth ceiling — those core skills aren’t enough. You need a lot of other specialist skills as well.

For example, every business needs to keep accounts. If you’re a freelancer or sole proprietor, that might just mean keeping a spreadsheet. But once the business reaches a certain size, it’s going to take professional accounting skills.

Unless you run an accounting firm, it’s pretty safe to say you don’t have those. At this point you know there’s a gap in your skill set — you can’t do the accounts.

What do you do about this? Are you going to try to hide it, pretend to look after the books yourself while secretly getting someone to handle it for you?

No, of course not! You hire an accountant.

Yes, there are skills you don’t have — accountancy, in this case — but you aren’t worried about revealing this by hiring someone who has those skills. After all, every business does that.

For example, you might not have the skills experience in step change growth, contracts, competitive intelligence, strategic planning, performance management, law, negotiation, or strong sales skills.

So why are many business owners worried about revealing skills gaps to an advisory board?

I think this goes back to the type of people who tend to build successful companies. We’ve looked at this before, but it’s relevant here, too.

If you’re running a business, you have an internal locus of control. You know that the commercial environment you work in is shaped by your decisions and actions. And you don’t necessarily want people to know that there are parts of the environment you don’t have the skills to shape.

Feeling this way is understandable. Probably, to grow as much as you already have, you’ve had to impose your personality on people and inspire them with your vision.

To do that you need to be confident, and you also need to present yourself as being highly competent and able to achieve everything you say you’re going to do.

In this situation, people are naturally reluctant to admit that there are aspects they’re not as good at as others. It can put a dent in the bold, confident appearance you’re working to build, so the instinct is to keep quiet about any skills you don’t have.

And, for quite a while, you can get away with that.

Unfortunately, sooner or later you’ll hit that growth ceiling we’ve talked about a few times already. You can’t build a business alone, however determined and hardworking you are. At some point you’re going to have to make an inventory of the things you can’t do yourself and bring in someone who can do them.

For many people, this isn’t easy. When you’ve come this far through your own efforts, acknowledging that you need expertise you don’t have yourself can feel an awful lot like an admission of failure. It seems like going backwards.

Surrounding Yourself With Skilled People

As your business grows, so does the work involved in running it. If you try to do it all yourself, it’ll eat up all your time, and, as the leader of the business, you have more important things to be doing. You need to handle the aspects where you add the most value.

One of the keys to great leadership is knowing when to hand a job over to someone else. You have to be able to pick the right people, tell them what you want them to do, then stand back and trust them to do it. If you can’t delegate, you can’t lead.

When I worked at one of Australia’s water utilities, I surrounded myself with people who were far better in their particular area than I was.

I had a pricing expert, a business development expert, people who were talented at law and corporate planning. I had my own set of skills, but there were a lot more skills I needed to have to do my role and didn’t actually have.

The solution was to find people who did have those skills and then lead them. That meant I could bring a company-wide perspective to specialist areas, and it made the holes in my skill set irrelevant. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t a legal expert, since I could rely on someone who was.

If there are things you’re not good at, there’s always a point where they will be exposed. You can stop just short of that point, but your business won’t grow any further. You’ll probably be able to conceal your weak points more or less indefinitely.

The question is, why bother?

Revealing something you’re not good at is only a problem if it’s revealed to someone who can exploit it. If the tax office knows you’re not good at accounts, that might be an issue — he’s going to be looking for errors, and if he finds any that’s going to cost you money.

But if you hire an accountant and tell him you’re not good at accounts, it doesn’t matter. Why would you need to be good at accounts when you have an accountant? As long as they’re good at them, you’re fine.

When you’re a single trader or a very small company, it’s reasonable to want to be able to do everything yourself. You probably have to do it all yourself.

You’re too small to have specialists, and, when something must be done, everybody needs to pitch in. As you grow, that becomes unrealistic.

If you’re an independent tradesperson working on one job at a time, you can do all the work yourself. As soon as you expand, that has to change.

You’re going to have to trust someone else to do one of them, if you’re doing two jobs. In a way, even that’s exposing a gap in your skill set — you can’t be in two places at once.

Obviously, nobody’s embarrassed at their inability to be in two places at once because it’s not as if they’re the only one. But what about your inability to do marketing, for example? All your competitors seem to be able to do it, and you don’t want to expose the fact that they’re more talented than you are.

The reality is that, unless you actually run a marketing company, none of your competitors are much good at marketing, either. They all employ a marketing manager or have a relationship with a marketing company. They also have a book keeper or accountant, a lawyer, and an IT manager.

The point here is that nobody actually expects you personally to be good at everything. Your competitors don’t and, more importantly, your potential customers don’t. Clients come to you because of your ability at your core skills.

They don’t care if you can’t do the accounts because they probably already have an accountant and they assume you have one, too. They’re not looking for a jack of all trades. They do business with you because you’re a master of one, and that’s really all they’re interested in.

Most of us understand this on an intellectual level. We know the reason accountants exist is that most business people can’t do their own accounts. Electricians exist because most people can’t do their own wiring.

Specialisation is the driving force behind the modern economy, and that applies inside companies as well as between them. The key to success and growth is to do what I did at the water utility and in my own business — surround yourself with people who have the skills you don’t have yourself, then build them into a high-performance team where each member’s skills support the others.

You already do this, or you wouldn’t have come as far as you have. All that’s left is to recognise that building a good team and accessing skills that you don’t have yourself are really the same thing.

And that’s what an advisory board will bring to your business – skills you don’t have that help the team.