June 14, 2022
How to Build a Board of Advisors | Darryl Hicks, Founder of Flexpay
Most startup founders recognize they need advisors. The question is who do you get, how do you get them, and how do you structure it all? In this episode, Darryl shares his framework for how to set up the perfect board of advisors.
It starts by imagining that you're five years in the future once your startup is a huge success
and asking yourself- what are all the key pieces that are required? From there, Darryl methodically targets advisors that will help with each of the key pieces. He discusses how to get in front of them, how to convince them to join, and how to structure the advisory board.
As a startup founder you will need advisors to help on your journey. Listen to this episode to learn how to do it right.
01:30 - Why you need a board of advisors
08:42 - Formal vs Informal Advisors
11:34 - Filling out the board
13:46 - Don't ask for regular checkups
18:33 - How to pick the members
20:42 - Compensation
22:23 - How to get them to join
27:13 - Recap
WEBVTT
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I didn't go get people that are semi-retired or professional Board people.
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I wanted people that are in the trenches executing, like CEO of a company, senior tech talent, people that are out there in the trenches day to day with significant responsibilities.
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Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show, brought to you by Mistral, a seed stage firm based in Canada.
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I'm Pablo I'm a founder turned VC.
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My goal is to help early-stage founders like you find product-market fit.
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Today, we have Darryl, the co-founder and CEO of Flexpay, a FinTech startup that helps companies reduce false credit card declines by as much as 70% Flexpay pay has 30 employees, is based in Montreal, raised$6 million to date.
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Darryl, It's a pleasure having you here today.
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It's awesome to be here, Pablo.
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Thanks a lot for having me.
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The topic of today's episode is how to build a Board of Advisors and, Darryl, we've actually...
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so, full disclosure, Mistral is an investor in Flexpay.
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So, I know Darryl quite well.
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One of the very interesting things about your background was the experience you've had in creating companies.
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This is not your first rodeo.
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And yet when you launched Flexpay, you decided to build a Board of Advisors, something that, many people might think,"yeah, Board of Advisors, great if you are a first time founder, and you need help in a bunch of different places, but once you're a serial entrepreneur, you've done it a bunch of times, you just go at it." I would like to understand the why of it.
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Why did you decide in the first place that you wanted and needed a Board of Advisors?
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Well, I knew, from the previous businesses that I'd been in, that your network is really your net worth, as the cliché goes.
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There are people out there who are so smart and so gifted and so connected, they can literally just think their way out of a problem that you're in.
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History has taught us that success leaves clues.
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So, when you're able to connect them with people that have solved the big problems that you're going up against, it's a huge hack and shortcut.
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I've kind of always had an informal loose sort of group of mentors, but I never really put together an Advisory Board, which is a little bit more formal, maybe not as formal as a Board of Directors, but people that you actually have, they're compensated, they're incentivized for their specific role.
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Actually, one of my advisors and mentors and friends, Dan Martell, walked me through a framework of how to build a world-class Advisory Board, which I then used that framework to get him on my Advisory Board, which is a fun little hack.
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And he was like,"oh, I see what you're doing".
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And did you come to him with"hey, I need help with this"?
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Or was it, he's looking at you and saying,"Hey, you need to get a Board of Advisors together"?
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Where did the idea come from?
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I was absolutely the one driving it.
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I was the one who said,"Look, I know that this is going to be hugely valuable." We knew a lot about the problem that we were solving because we were scratching our own itch.
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We built the initial version of Flexpay for ourselves.
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So, we had a lot of boxes already checked off as far as product-market fit and basic functional tech stack that really gave everything when you do reporting and stuff.
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But there's a lot involved in building a world-class SaaS business, as you know, Pablo.
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I knew that there was going to be a network of people out there that could really help me, kind of as a massive accelerant.
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It becomes an unfair advantage.
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And that's really how Dan's framework started out, where he's…He asked me this really powerful question as part of this training on building Advisory Boards, where he's like,"Just imagine that your business was 10 X or even 50 X what it is today.
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Imagine you had 10 times more leads, 10 times more employees, and you're having that really great outcome, and exit, that perfect exit that you're looking forward to your business or whatever it is that you're trying to do.
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What are the eight things that you need that would make that an absolute foregone conclusion?
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If you had these eight things, world-class..."
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Why eight?
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It could be six, it could be 10...
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Because there's power in constraints, now there's power in constraints.
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And so, when you sit there, and you say,"Well, I can only come up with eight things." Eight is a big enough number that it's not the top two of the top three, but it's not 20 where you're getting lost in the leads.
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Got it.
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And in full transparency, I only filled seven of the boxes in the beginning because I was like,"I need to keep one free for the stuff that I don't know yet.
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I don't know what I don't know as I'm going to discover things as I scale this business".
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And so, I only filled that eighth position on the Advisory Board about two years into the business with an M&A guy, which is perfect.
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I hadn't really thought of M&A being one of these.
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So, what are the eight things that you need that if you had these eight things, it wo uld be an absolute for egone co nclusion, guaranteed that you're going to get that incredible outcome?
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Well, my business is in FinTech, I was like,"Well, I'm going to need real experts in Visa-MasterCard ecosystem.
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People that have built significant components of existing payments infrastructure, that will be a really valuable thing to have in my Advisory Board.
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I t h ought about world-class culture inside of the company.
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Who are the top companies that have absolutely incredible culture, and who are the people that craft that?
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I thought about deep networks and connections inside of payments, both on the issuing side and the acquiring side.
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People that have built and sold multiple SaaS businesses, people that have raised VC money and have put together everything involved with having a VC-backed business.
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How do you put together an ESOP?
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What are the percentages that you should be compensating, your executives?
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How do you value the options?
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What does vesting and unvesting look like?
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And what are your options and all that kind of stuff.
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In fact, that was one of the guys I had on my Advisory Board, he was a good friend of mine, who was a VC-backed FinTech business.
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And when it was time for me to put together and ESOP, and he's like"Absolutely 30 minutes." And then he's drinking out of a fire hose.
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And then he's sending me spreadsheets, here's everybody in my 300-person organization person organization and the people that are in the AESP and the people that aren't, and how to think about it, and how to structure it.
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It was incredible.
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Thirty-minute crash course.
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Then I looked like a complete professional to my Board and to the future investors, they come in, and they look at the way that we've structured things, and theyre like,"no red flags here, not even any yellow flags, everything just looks perfectly vanilla clean cut." So, I went through, and I labelled, here's all the things that I would need.
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Once you identify the eight buckets, then you're like,"Who are the people that check that?
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If I need world-class technical talent, maybe there's somebody at Facebook or at PayPal, that's built out a massive team of hundreds of engineers.
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That world-class talent in that.
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Well, then how do I go and find those people?" Dream really big.
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You don't say to yourself,"I don't know the head of technical talent or CTO at PayPal or Facebook.
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Well, maybe you know, somebody who does, or maybe you can find a way to reach out to them because, one thing that I've discovered is that there's a lot of people out there that are just really willing to be generous and help out.
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And if you say,"Hey, I'm a founder, co-founder, I'm getting started.
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I have a couple of questions", you'd be surprised how often people will give 15 minutes, 20 minutes of their time to point you in the right direction.
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That kind of becomes the Genesis of it.
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There are a few things that your Advisory Board doesn't do for you.
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One thing, you're not asking them ever to do things for you.
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Really, you're thinking about what's their focus, their area of expertise, what's their talent?
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Say you need to hire a lot of software developers, and you don't know how to hire them.
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Then one of your advisers better be someone who's built a huge software team, so you could write down maybe lead engineer at Google or Facebook.
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And then you're thinking about experience.
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What's the raw experience they have in achieving an outcome, a desired outcome, that you're looking for?
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And then how you interact with these people is really around three things.
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It's conversations, strategy, and connections.
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Conversations, not action.
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Strategy, not execution.
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And connections, is really the biggest part.
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What do you need to do, and who do you need in order to get it done?
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That can be, I've got a guy in my Advisory Board, who's a president of payments for a very large issuing bank, and anytime I have a problem, and he's like,"oh yes, I can introduce you to one of the top executives at Stripe.
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Oh yeah, well, I'll just get you on a call with my buddy over at PayPal", just because he provides the plumbing for all these people anyway.
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He's on a first name basis with all of them.
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Just the ability to get you down.
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I called up one of my advisors, next thing you know I'm sitting in Toronto at Visa Canada headquarters with 14 executives, talking about what is that Flexpay is doing and how we could better integrate into Visa's ecosystem.
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That stuff's absolutely invaluable, and it happens fast if you've got the right people.
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The first question I have is this, because look a lot of people might be looking at this and saying,"Yes, of course, having people that can help you out is great." But I have that informal thing happen kind of like you did before.
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What was behind that thinking of"You know what, this time, I'm going to make it formal"?
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Which probably means you have to give equity and all these other sorts of things.
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What drove that decision?
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Well, I think it was just because I understood the seriousness of what it was that I was undertaking.
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Now from day one, before we had a single dollar of revenue, I knew that if we did this right, easily be a billion dollar plus business.
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So, because this was significantly bigger stakes than all my earlier businesses.
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Yeah.
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The stakes were so much higher, and it was going to need to be world-class.
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I had a lot of experience in building great lifestyle businesses, nothing wrong with lifestyle businesses.
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They're growing like 1x, 2x a year, the throwing off nice dividends for the founders.
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I had 225 employees in one of my lifestyle businesses.
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They were significant businesses.
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It's a very different story when this is a huge problem in society.
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I think that I'm the right person, and I've got the right team to go solve it, but at very high stakes.
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And I put a lot of my own personal capital into starting a business as well.
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So, it really lit a fire under my butt to be,"Okay.
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I really need to stack the deck as heavily as possible in my favour, in order to really pull this off.
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How am I going to go do it?"
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So, the high-level question is, when you win, when you're at that 100x outcome, whatever it is, what does it look like, and what are the eight pieces you need?
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Do you just close your eyes and you brainstorm?
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What's that process?
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And you even said,"I left one out because I didn't know what I didn't know." And maybe at the beginning, you'd left four out and since then, you filled them up.
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I'm not sure of the sequence of how many filled right away, how many...
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I'm sure there are some things that are obvious to you right away.
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I mean, you're a founder today, you're like,"I don't have tech talent.
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Okay, cool.
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You need somebody that maybe can advise you on the tech side." But what's the process by which you go through and say,"these are the eight things that I need"?
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Where do you draw a line and say,"these are the four, and I'll figure out the other four later on."?
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So on.
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Because we talked about the power of constraints.
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Well, I can only pick eight, I better make them the most impactful eight.
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But then if you're saying"eight, well, it's more than three or four." It's it forces you to get into that dreaming phase, planning phase where you're separating yourself from reality today and saying,"well, I've got this really great outcome in the future." And so, yes, you start by saying,"these are the things that I need." Once you understand the things...
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and I literally just wrote them down in eight circles on a piece of paper, except the eighth one I left blank.
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I literally wrote down the things in circles on a piece of paper, and then I started writing in the names of who can check this box, who's the best person I know...
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or going in the right direction of being able to find somebody that c an help me to fill that box.
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And I just started filling them all in.
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And you might not have a name like Pablo, it might be head of software at Facebook or PayPal or something like that.
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Was there an example or two where you didn't know the person, you just knew the title and the role?
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Yeah.
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One of my boxes was somebody who really knows the guts of Visa-MasterCard infrastructure at a very deep level.
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And I had a couple of guys in my mind that I thought would be a good fit for it, but I wasn't sure they would really be a good fit.
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So, instead what I did is I called them up, and I called up some of the other people that I knew, and I said,"I'm really looking for somebody in your network, who you know, who's a complete genius level at this thing, building out significant components of Visa-MasterCard infrastructure.
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Who do you know?" I went to a trade show.
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It just so happened that around the time I was starting my business, there was Money 2020 happening in Vegas, which is all about FinTech and payments.
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And every single time I had an interaction with someone at Money, 2020, I would always insert this question at the very end and be like,"hey, I'm looking for somebody who's a complete...
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I'm not interested in hiring them, just to bounce ideas around once in a while, strategy, stuff like that, have conversations, get access to connections...
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who's really amazing at building out significant components of Visa-MasterCard infrastructure.
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And you just kept hearing the same names over and over again.
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People just started saying,"oh, well, do you know Corey?
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Oh, do you know Corey?" Another guy says,"oh, do you know Corey?
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Oh, you should probably talk to Corey." If you just keep hearing the same names over and over and over again, well, that's a pretty good sign that maybe this is the right guy that you should be talking to, or girl.
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And then I'm like,"oh, well, would you be able to make an intro?" And a couple of guys are like,"ah, I don't really know him personally, but this guy might know him.
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I can introduce you." You just start to follow the chain, next thing you know, you've got three or four people that are all talking to Corey about this guy Darryl starting Flexpay.
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And it's like,"well, I guess I better take his call, this is kind of interesting." And sure enough, Corey wasn't even the right guy, but he's like,"I've got the perfect guy for you." And every single one of my advisors, this is key, said,"I can do this, but I cannot commit to monthly meetings or quarterly meetings or anything like that.
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Call me anytime, email me anytime, ad hoc your stock, great." I know a lot of people...
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and Dan even recommends in his framework to set up a regular cadence of interacting with these people.
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I never did that.
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It's my bat phone, right.
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When I'm stuck in that particular thing, I got a bat phone for it and I just call them up, and I'm like,"Hey."
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And why not?
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Because I get the pros of doing the monthly meeting and having it on the books.
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Is there a reason why chose, let's do it, this ad hoc way?
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Six out of the original seven guys that I chose said it was a dealbreaker, that they could not accept the position if they had to put something in their calendar like that because they're so busy.
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And this was also something that I did.
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I didn't go get people that are semi-retired or professional Board people.
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I wanted people that are in the trenches executing, like CEO of a company, senior tech talent, people that are out there are in the trenches day to day with significant responsibilities.
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Because all of their experience is fresh.
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And if you say,"hey, I just need you once in a while" I call that guy a couple of times a year.
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And I'm flexible around his schedule, and we jump on a call, and it's 30 minutes of pure gold, and he just floods me with everything that I need to know for that specific thing that he's an expert in.
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And people love to talk about the things that they're experts in.
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There's plenty of crap that we know nothing about.
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But that one thing, you know it really deeply.
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And when it's a great question, specifically, a down the middle of the fairway of your expertise, they love just opening up and talking about it.
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It's super high value for everybody.
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And is that something you would recommend?
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Because it's true.
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A lot of people, first of all, the ones that are retired in a sense, easier to get.
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But the other piece, too, is a lot of people think of the Advisory Board is almost like a fundraising mechanism where it's just let's get stamps and credibility.
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And the guy who, or the girl who had this big role at a big firm, it doesn't matter if they're not in the game today, but they look good on a deck.
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Did you ever think about that side of it?
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A hundred percent.
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One of the people that I added onto my Board was kind of purely for that reason.
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Really, the only value I knew this person was going to bring was their connections, how many people they know and how many people know them.
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And just to be able to go around and say,"I've got that guy on my Advisory Board", everyone goes,"whoa, really?" It wasn't a huge amount of value add, but it's okay, just the name value alone.
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And there has actually been value because anytime I n eed a connection in a certain area, that g uy knows everybody in my space.
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H e's like,"I'll talk to this guy", sends an email, gets me on the phone, boom, off we go.
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That's okay.
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He was just there to check that one particular kind of box.
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I need a super connector with a super network of his own that's specific to my field that can get me out.
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And he's just the guy who does that.
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So, yes, definitely.
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I did that for one.
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For one.
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So, most of the people are in the game, they're way too busy for these monthly meetings.
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And that's almost a good sign because it means that they're super fresh and their information is not outdated, and it's fine.
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You have to work to get an hour or half an hour, but that half hour is so full of meat, that's really the idea.
00:16:24.919 --> 00:16:26.149
And I'm preparing like crazy.
00:16:26.150 --> 00:16:28.730
I'm making sure that my questions are really specific.
00:16:28.730 --> 00:16:29.690
I'm to the point.
00:16:29.691 --> 00:16:31.429
I'm respecting the time we have in the calendar.
00:16:31.431 --> 00:16:37.610
If possible, I'm trying to wrap the callup two minutes early, give people a little bit of time back in their calendar.
00:16:37.610 --> 00:16:39.289
I do all the work ahead of time.
00:16:39.500 --> 00:16:45.259
But again, they're there for a specific purpose, to help me solve a specific problem that I know that I need to solve.
00:16:45.260 --> 00:16:48.200
So, when I'm calling them, it's because I have that specific problem.
00:16:48.201 --> 00:16:50.720
I know exactly what it is, and I'm really tactical.
00:16:50.721 --> 00:16:52.240
And then a lot of times they're like,"ah, you know what?
00:16:52.179 --> 00:16:52.879
I'll have to think about that.
00:16:52.880 --> 00:16:59.899
I'll get back to you." And then I send a little follow-up email, maybe a few days later, and they're like,"oh yes, thanks for reminding me." And then a couple of days after that, it's here we go, boom, boom, boom.
00:17:00.379 --> 00:17:23.779
Would it make sense, I'm just thinking out loud, in the same way that you have one who's just more for the credibility angle, to have some that have more time where you do have a monthly meeting or two, and they become almost more like coaches- I don't know if I want to use that word because lately, it's got a pretty specific meaning- where it's not, I need this specific strategic or tactical advice, you reach out, it's just here's what's happened last month and whatever.
00:17:23.780 --> 00:17:26.089
Or was that just not something for you that was useful?
00:17:26.480 --> 00:17:26.690
Yeah.
00:17:26.480 --> 00:17:32.359
So, I have coaching calls with three other people.
00:17:32.361 --> 00:17:44.869
In fact, I had one just earlier today, but with investors, people that have actually put money in on the cap table, where I took that money from them because I thought they would really be able to give me good strategic advice.
00:17:44.990 --> 00:17:56.009
And now that they've put hard dollars in, they're more invested than the average person in my success because they've actually put dollars in harm's way potentially with me.
00:17:56.309 --> 00:18:04.170
For me and my business, I don't have a co-founder, so, it can get really lonely sometimes, and you need a sounding board, people to bounce ideas off of.
00:18:04.259 --> 00:18:07.650
And I actually even call it strategy call or coaching call.
00:18:07.651 --> 00:18:10.650
I even call it that in the calendar invite that I send out to them.
00:18:10.651 --> 00:18:12.450
Everybody knows what it is that we're doing.
00:18:12.451 --> 00:18:21.269
And it's usually pretty free-flowing, not really an agenda, but there's always stuff that comes up and there's always really great value add, but I don't do that with my Advisory Board.
00:18:21.270 --> 00:18:21.630
I could.
00:18:21.569 --> 00:18:24.509
There could be a guy on the Advisory Board who's playing that role.
00:18:24.510 --> 00:18:29.430
But for me, I absolutely got to have that and treasure and value it very, very highly.
00:18:29.431 --> 00:18:30.509
I really cherish it.
00:18:30.510 --> 00:18:32.460
But it's with investors on the cap table.
00:18:33.059 --> 00:18:38.730
Is there a sort of test, is there this period where you're figuring out both ways there's a fader?
00:18:38.730 --> 00:18:39.569
Or is it one call and done?
00:18:39.570 --> 00:18:50.279
I ask this because I remember once in my Gymtrack days met this person who had started a very similar company before, and that company had mediocre success.
00:18:50.280 --> 00:18:53.039
But I had this one call with them, and it was just amazing.
00:18:53.040 --> 00:18:56.519
This person was full of knowledge, and it was just so on point.
00:18:56.520 --> 00:19:00.650
And we talked to a few of our existing advisors, and they're like,"yes, it sounds great.
00:19:01.029 --> 00:19:04.829
Just make sure you..." because we're like,"we need to make this guy advisor yesterday.
00:19:05.161 --> 00:19:10.200
Make sure you spend some more time with him" because there are people who have an hour worth of content and that's it.
00:19:10.201 --> 00:19:13.650
And then the second hour or the third hour, there's not much more there.
00:19:13.651 --> 00:19:21.359
How did you go through that period, for those that were kind of net new to your Board that you didn't know before, of figuring out, yes, this is the person, and I'll offer them...
00:19:21.661 --> 00:19:22.799
we'll get into the details of what you offer them soon.
00:19:23.549 --> 00:19:25.289
That's a great question.
00:19:25.290 --> 00:19:35.880
And for me, it comes back to what I said earlier, where success leaves clues and working with people that are in the trenches right now, doing stuff.
00:19:35.881 --> 00:19:42.180
And so, since that was one of my primary filters, I think it really saved me a lot from having to vet people out.
00:19:42.181 --> 00:19:51.569
These were people that were already, that had been and currently are executing at a very high level in a role.
00:19:52.020 --> 00:19:57.990
Even if they're not the perfect fit, there's going to be some really good value there because they're not just sitting there saying...
00:19:57.990 --> 00:20:05.400
there's a lot of people that highly valuable the people that are semi-retired, and they love being on Boards, and they love sharing their advice.
00:20:06.030 --> 00:20:07.529
There can be really great value out of it.
00:20:07.530 --> 00:20:09.359
And that's fine if you want to go down that road.
00:20:09.359 --> 00:20:23.819
But for me, I just knew that if I put that filter of saying,"I'm only going to work with people that are actually working and building their own business and really moving the needle in a significant way in what they are doing day to day in their own job", I kind of don't need to worry as much.
00:20:23.820 --> 00:20:26.069
And it has worked really, really well for me.
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