Startups change fast. One day you and your co-founders are locking down pre-seed funding to develop an MVP. Blink, and suddenly you’re managing a scaling team, milestone customer acquisitions, and major VC raises. But there’s one element of your operations that can often fail to evolve at the same pace – the board. This is a major mistake. Fast-growth startups need to derive meaningful value from their advisers and board members. To achieve this, the board should be as chameleon-esque as the company it’s supporting.
The early-stage board
At an early stage, a start-up board should be light touch. Good boards are small, supportive and give a company time. This allows management teams to focus on growth, product market fit and early customer acquisition. You don’t want a board that pulls founder attention away from these fundamentals. If early-stage boards become talking shops – where you debate metrics or spend hours pouring over detailed reports – they stop adding value.
Instead, you want a nimble board. That means one that’s willing to give founding teams the ‘space and grace’ they need to crack on. But also one that’s happy to pitch in when you really need them. Having people in your corner who can lend a practical hand – whether it’s around hiring, raising, selling, or strategy – is vital in the early days.
The scaling board
As a company starts to scale, so should the board. At this stage of your journey, there will be more investors to factor in and more complex challenges to navigate. The role of the expanded board during this phase of the journey is to focus minds and keep things on track.
A good board can use its experience to flag anything the company should be considering or factoring into the scale-up strategy. Effective boards recognise that they don’t set the strategy (that’s up to the management team). Instead, they leverage their experience to optimise your strategic direction and finesse the value creation plan. Experienced board members will have been around the block a few times before. This means they can bring their ‘pattern recognition’ to the strategy table and help founders and CEOs avoid age-old mistakes.
You’re also likely to have greater compliance and governance needs at this stage of growth. So it’s important that your board is well set up to handle its legal responsibilities and act as a custodian of your business – becoming the ‘regulatory rudder’ on your start-up ship.
The profitability board
As you hit profitability and scale, you’ll likely start considering potential acquisitions or exit opportunities. To set you up for success, the board should start to “project upwards”, reflecting the size and stature of the company you’re about to become. This means having an experienced board that can confidently cover the various compliance, legal, financial, and strategic decisions you’ll face during this phase.
It’s a high stakes and, potentially, high reward stage of your journey. So you’ll want to populate your board with people who have handled critical decisions of this nature before. Their role is to act as trusted advisers and mentors during your decision-making.
Having diversity of thought around the table can also help you make better choices in these important moments. Try to avoid a board composed of folks who have valuable but ultimately similar experience. Seek out people who have pursued different paths, seen different outcomes, and can bring those insights to bear on your strategy.
Founders shouldn’t neglect the evolution of their boards. They should be constantly asking whether the current set-up is actively supporting and empowering the current stage of growth, and if the status-quo format has served its purpose. Review, refresh, regroup – it’s the only way to ensure your board remains as dynamic as the company it’s supporting.
Dr Anas Nader is CEO & co-founder at Patchwork Health, a healthtech company building workforce solutions for the NHS that unlock flexible, sustainable work for clinical teams.
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