If you’re trying to run a dynamic, growing company in the fast-changing modern economy, bureaucracy — or what seems like it — is not your friend.

You want to be well-informed about what’s happening in your business and in the wider market, and, when you make a decision, you want it to be enacted quickly and decisively.

You certainly don’t want information to get bogged down or delayed by different levels of administration taking their time going over every detail and altering bits to suit their specific purposes.

Some form of slow-down around reporting and acting on information is inevitable in any growing business. Keeping it to the appropriate, efficient level is a constant challenge for business owners, so it’s reasonable for them to be concerned about adding any more layers to their organisational structure and possibly decreasing the information flow so much they could lose an opportunity.

It’s no wonder that a lot of business owners may think an advisory board might just be another layer of bureaucracy.

If you were talking about a traditional board of directors, this does require a lot of support and attention to processes — detailed board papers, audit committees, compliance reports, etc. These boards are quite efficient, but their compliance responsibilities and reporting do tend to create work, and additional administrative tasks are guaranteed to slow down even the best-run businesses.

These worries don’t apply to an advisory board. There are a few processes to keep focus and accountability, but it’s easy to keep them to a bare minimum. You need to arrange board meetings and any compensation to members, and you have to keep the minutes. That’s usually about it.

You won’t find yourself with a lot of extra paperwork to cope with, and it won’t slow down your decision-making processes and information flow.

More importantly, an advisory board isn’t a new level of management. It sits off to one side of your normal management structure. It isn’t involved in the day-to-day running of the company at all, so it doesn’t add any extra load to your normal administrative tasks and routines.

Making good use of your advisory board will actually increase the potential for growing your business. The advisory board gives you access to knowledge and experience you need to grow the business and often encourages innovation.

Expertise and experience are important assets to have in your business; however, they don’t need to be employed full-time into your business. Keeping them outside avoids the problem of getting stuck in a mindset, unable to break free. An advisory board can offer a whole new perspective on the business, as well as identify and solve bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the organisation.

Giving The Gift Of Time

Business owners sometimes worry that an advisory board will start to eat up their time, and there’s little enough of that as it is.

Running a business seems to grow to fill all the time you have available, and even then there are always items you struggle to attend to. You have a long list of things to be getting on with, and there just isn’t any time left to deal with a board.

This belief comes from a simple misconception of what an advisory board does.

A saying I like to quote is “You can’t manage time, but you can manage priorities.”

If you want to make effective use of your time, you need to prioritise what you spend it on. That way, you make sure that the most important things get done.

Unfortunately, setting priorities isn’t as easy as it sounds. The reality is that most businesses spend a lot of time rushing around putting out one fire after another, and usually that’s because they got their priorities wrong.

Doing a lot of fire fighting is fine if you’re in start-up mode. As a start-up you’re experimenting a lot, and there will be unexpected problems. At this stage your business will have a pioneering feel about it, as you find out what’s possible, what’s working and what needs to be re-evaluated.

At a certain point, though, you should leave this behind you. As you grow, thing should become more established and professional. If you find that you’re still spending a lot of time fighting fires, it’s a sign that you be focused on designing the sprinkler system instead!

Unfortunately, this is what tends to happen as businesses grow. I don’t think business leaders can really be criticised for this. As you grow, you’re constantly moving into new territory that you don’t have any experience of.

As you do that you’ll find gaps in your systems or processes that worked well enough when you were small but are starting to buckle under the strain as you get bigger. This is normal for a growing organisation, and you will need to develop appropriate systems and processes to support your business.

The outcome of this is that you spend your time being reactive, rather than proactive. And every time you have to react to something, it’s taking up time you could have invested in chasing growth, in working on your business, not in it.

Experienced advisory board members who’ve been through the process of building a company themselves will know where the stress points are likely to appear. Then you can prioritise solving the problems before they emerge.