Mike Dillard Talks With Chris Guerriero About Starting A Board…

HOW TO ATTRACT GAME-CHANGING ADVISORS TO YOUR BOARD

Mike Dillard: Welcome to the Mike Dillard podcast where we help entrepreneurs like you get the knowledge and skills that you need to bring your dreams to life. Well going today we’re going to talk about scaling your company now this is a topic that we discussed a few times here on the show because it’s one of the biggest challenges that any entrepreneur will face. One of the most valuable resources that you can have during this phase of the development of your business is a rock star board of advisors who have already been there and done that. Every great founder surrounds themselves with other great leaders who can bring their lifetime of experience, knowledge and relationships to the table, to help you make better decisions, avoid pitfalls and ultimately provide you with an unfair advantage that your competition does not have, but attracting and acquiring a team of high level advisors specially if you’re just getting started is easier said than done. Well, today we’re joined by Chris Guerriero, who is an incredibly successful entrepreneur and who also advises a handful of other large companies some of which to billions of dollars per year in revenue. Now basically he helps companies create the processes and the systems that they need to scale to the next level and today he’s going to teach you how to build a game changing board of advisors for your business just as I have done for mine. Yup, I have a board and you’re going to find out who’s on it here in today’s episode and how I win about building and attracting those individuals to my company. So without further ado, please help me welcome Chris Guerriero. Chris welcome to the podcast, it’s a pleasure to have you.

Chris Guerriero: Hey Mike, thank you so much for having me. This is going to be fun.

Mike Dillard: Yeah, absolutely so you and I had a chance to kind a connect a baby bath water a couple of years ago, with a bunch of other rock star entrepreneur out there which was a lot of fun up at the top of outer mountain one of my favorite venues ever for an event

Chris Guerriero: Right. Same here, one of the amazing views no matter which way you look out there, it’s tremendous.

Mike Dillard: Yeah I mean just and this cool little earths at the top of the mountain, definitely hard to beat but I really appreciate you coming on the show today because we’re going to talking about the topic that has always been a big passion of mine and because it’s going to be challenge for me personally and I know its challenge for a lot of other entrepreneurs out there as well which is how to scale and grow your business and you are one of the foremost experts on that I know you help consult with some fortunate 500 companies names that everybody listening to the show, unfortunately I can’t mentioned them because of the NDAs that you have. I’m aware who those companies are and the work that you do and so what an amazing opportunity to learn how to scale a business from you here today and when you and I are kind of prepping for the show, the premise that we have was that the people who are listening today have a 7 figure business that might have 1,2,3 employees customer service agents maybe a tech person but for the most part they build this business from home, they’re going like crazy and now they’re about to hit that inflection point where their ceiling of complexity is beyond what they can do personally and they need to start building a team . So without being kind of the overall 50 thousand foot view what we’re going to cover today, before we dive into that bring everybody up to speed on your story on your career

Chris Guerriero: Well, ok, well I don’t know how far back I should go, but yeah I’ll tell you a story in business as a personal fitness trainer and that was a, you know I’m not saying how long that was because I don’t want to deluge my age I don’t think, you know so I started as a personal fitness trainer in and I’ve never. I was sitting in college class and I designed my business card, my design what I wanted to do and I decided I was going to do this little personal training thing and I did it and it was a lot of fun but I always had a goal of helping the greatest number of people possible and that vision that mission kind of stuck with us with every company I build ever since that very first one and that personal training company didn’t last that long because I really couldn’t I hit that ceiling for the number of people that I could personally help. So I ended up designing this personal training company. We grew that within a year or so, we almost had a hundred in fifty personal training up and down the east coast and that helped me go from helping just a few people to help hundreds of people and however you know for anybody that’s listening who has ever started business using mostly independent contractors you learn a lesson very quickly and that’s if you don’t have your ducks in a row you lose your clients or your customers very quickly because independent contractors who do not handle properly tend to steal your business very usually so I ended up transforming that personal training company into a first health club and grew a chain of health clubs in the east coast throughout New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. That took me from being health conscious to the people to being a help to thousands of people which is really a great confidence boost, it was a great help for me and the company to grow to the next level. I sold that company after being in the business for over a decade. I sold it in 2004 and wrote my first book and took all the knowledge that I had in the health field. I decided I was going to use all these different marketing tactics that I had learned while I was developing these health clubs but I was going to use it online to sell these books and by doing that we were able to sell, well, most others what would you guess, probably sell five thousand or so copies of their books in their entire life most of others. We were able to sell over 60 thousand copies in the first 60 days, 399 hundred copies in the first year, we sold over a million copies of our books so far again using the exact same systems that we used to scale those health clubs the same systems that we use to scale the personal training company and on getting to similar systems when we talk a little but later on anyway I wrote that first book and I started to get contacted by several other companies saying you know I’m seeing your books everywhere and it is strange because back then back in 2003 in 2004 when that book was really being launched nobody was doing what we were doing online so to see an e-book everywhere was just crazy so we got contacted by several companies to help them spread their messages and you know pick brain on how are we doing this and I decided we we’re going to take that competency that I had and create as branding company and that branding company now helps political candidates to spread their message, it helps Hollywood producers to fill seats in movies. It helps companies to spread their message to millions of people really really quickly, it’s a great company but it’s again its using the exact same systems that we use to sell those books and that branding company ended up one of the companies that we ended up using to work with was a group of attorneys who were in the class action industry and we sat down with these guys and they said; jeez what you’re doing in this branding company to get the message out so quickly is like a decade ahead of where we are in this industry and after working with them a little bit we ended having this meeting they said how would you like to start this company with us it will be a class action noticing firm and our job will be to spread this message about this notices that are out there because for those of you don’t know what class action notices. If your company got forbid is ever picked with a class action you are mandated by a judge to tell everybody who might have seen your marketing in the past, that this are class action that gets you, it’s a horrible cut through crappy industry I’m not involved in our class section noticing firm is the good guy but we are mandated by this process into spread the word out this properly the right way. SO they said you want to start this company and now what that company is America’s largest internet based class action noticing firm so it works again it’s the exact same system to spread a message about the personal training (inaudible) message about the book describing message about the company now being used in a class action firm so since this has been happening we have.. I’ve been able to develop four-eight figure companies and a bunch of other seven figure companies all in different industries again the whole time staying inside that little box of mine which is my core competencies and I’m able to do this because my day kind of to goes like this from 9 to 9:30 , Emily who’s my assistant gives me my number, the numbers the key metrics that we need to know about for each one of the companies that I’m personally involve in and I look at those numbers and I take some notes on what I see happening just by looking at those metrics And then from 9:30 to 12:30 I’m in meetings with each one of the leadership teams and each one of the companies that I have my hands in and I’m pushing them forward we’re going over 3 or 4 main things and every single one of our meetings and then and after that so over with about from 12:30 to 3. I do what I’m good at because I’m an employee which one of the companies I have and I push things forward using my core competency and at 3:00 o’clock I’m out a here and I play with my kids, so that’s where we are.

Mike Dillard: Nice very cool, very cool, so what’s the secret sauce behind your system because you’ve been able to scale all of these companies that you’ve owned with helping scale these other companies, what’s the secret sauce here because this is a really big challenge for folks because at least at my experience these skills that allows you to go from 0 to a million dollars these essentially sales, sales and marketing but the skills that allows to go from 7 to the eight figures multiple 8 figures is completely different. It then gets into to people and team building and leadership

Chris Guerriero: Right

Mike Dillard: And it’s a starting over point for a lot of people which we’re so launch (inaudible) challenge cause now you going to take on two roles at once you going to keep the revenue and the marketing and the sales coming in and now you’ve got to stretch and acquire these new people skills and leadership skills.

Chris Guerriero: Yeah exactly so you basically just summed it up. It is a focus on scale what is you know, what is going to scale to a particular company because company that is not focus on scales literally leaving 5 10 20 Times revenue on the table and most entrepreneurs and CEOs they get stuck in doing things that eventually end up killing their scale so are the measuring the wrong things or they’re using the wrong kind of system or they’re aiming their message at the wrong audience or they’re not developing leadership teams inside their company or they’re not focused on themselves, you know developing themselves as a CEO, right we can go all over that stuff but measuring the wrong things, the first thing that I said so vital most people, most entrepreneurs don’t know what to measure so they are measuring the wrong things so they can’t win because their target is all wrong so let me give an example. Most companies look in increasing just revenue and looking increasing revenue just by a little bit each year were as real getting increasing market share, because when we control more market share add revenue scales for faster we attract that our talent and things become infinitely easier to grow.

Mike Dillard: Now if I’m a small business and you know let’s just say my net’s right, how do I possible measure market share.

Chris Guerriero: it’s simple you look at who’s your, I’m going to use a word that probably I shouldn’t be using who’s your enemy, right? So what we do is we a, so let me put you in a scenario where I’m starting this business, I want to know who the top 3 companies that I want to beat and if I could beat them, I’m going to be making a lot more revenue. Now it doesn’t have to be the 3 biggest kings pings out there because I don’t want to try to grow from 0 to a hundred million dollars because that is really difficult for almost everybody right .We want to grow from 0 to 1 million, or we want to grow from 0 to 3 million dollars, whatever, wherever we are we want to pick that next big level, find out who the top players out there the 3 companies and then you look at those 3 companies you say well what’s in the revenue, how many people do they have on their team, what media do they use to attract their traffic from. We look at somebody’s things and we develop a key group of numbers now we know what we have to beat in order to gain more market share and guaranteed if I pick Joe’s company and Joe’s company is doing ten million and I’m doing one million today, if I beat all those numbers that joe is already hitting then I’m going to take his market share and I’m going to win so and then we pick a new set of enemies.

Mike Dillard: Yeah I mean, you know without a company or the competition being public right we’re not going to have access to the revenue numbers.

Chris Guerriero: Well you get access to quite a lot.

Mike Dillard: Okay

Chris Guerriero: So it’s not definitely not public company but with the 10 15 minutes you can go online and you could make some pretty close estimates as to where the traffics coming from looking at some analytics or where you know using some of the free online tools . We could try to figure out whatever we can we look at we try to figure out everything that we can figure out or we go on linked in and we study their company on linked in or whatever the cases we look to get whatever metrics we can then we have a target to aim our focus at.

Mike Dillard: Yeah I mean a great, I think the easiest metrics that I can think of would be social media, you know the tech social media followings on Instagram YouTube subscribers, Facebook whatever maybe it is probably the easiest way to gage folks and obviously you can look at people’s traffic as well in google and see how many search results or how many visitors they are getting per month pretty easily and that’s a big indicator also, so once you know have identified those 3 leaders and your niche that you want to eventually surpass how do you do that

Chris Guerriero: you mean what’s next?

Mike Dillard: Yeah

Chris Guerriero: So we create a definition for what we believe market shares going to be and then you know base on those numbers that we just from those people so using the example that you gave which was terrific, if we put they’re Facebook followers if they’ve put their YouTube subscriber if we put all that kind of stuff into a formula and we say this is what I need this is where I need to grow to then we look at the people we need in our team where the processes or the systems that we need in order to get there and we have to remember 3 big things when we are doing this. Number 1 it’s far more about relationships than it is about sale. Because you can leverage relationships to make a million times more sales in any business in any industry no matter where you are starting from or no matter where you are right now. You could make so many more sales by leveraging your relationships then you can by just focusing on making more sales and when I’m talking about relationships we’re talking about prospects and customers and employees, vendors and metros you know huge and I’ll give you some examples with no money we we’re able to go out there and leverage radio so and I shouldn’t say no money, no money now , we did start with some money but we now have relationships with radio stations who air our commercials on remnant space time and they air our commercials for free and affiliate of theirs because we started with a small all radio stations that did not cause us much more money to put a commercial on we rung a commercial we found a way to make it more profitable which is not that hard to do. I mean we still have a meeting , we sat there and say hey listen every single time you run this commercial this is what we make and we actually open our affiliate program so they could see the link that they’re announcing on the air station every single time its generating blank number of inquiries its getting its generating blank number of sales, it generating blank amount back to an affiliate if we were paying an affiliate so now we have these relationship[s with radio stations across America who will literally air our stuff any single time they have empty space and we got money coming in from there. That’s a relationship and we’re not focused on sales we’re focused on developing that relationship and that relationship takes so long to develop but it is something where you give first and you really strive to over deliver in that gift to them. You got to prove, proof of concept with them and once you do it just keeps paying and I could on and on about relationships that we have nurtured that have turned into a catalyst for our growth. That is one of the big rules that we follow.

Mike Dillard: Yeah absolutely I mean relationships have the biggest ROI in the world and the interesting part about that is that it takes patience and the win you don’t when it’s going to come it’s going to be far of in the future but you’re one relationship away from a completely different life and many cases

Chris Guerriero: Right and Mike you know so think about this for a second, how many people do you believe your listeners may know without even knowing they know them who could literally blowup their company for them so the, we had client inside of a consulting firm one time who’s sister is an actress and literally they’ve never even thought to ask their sister to endorse their product but even if it’s your sister’s brother’s cousins nephew who you know with a week of work and a few phone calls and emails we can leverage each one of those relationships to get through to the person who might be able to help us in some way he/she performs open a up a door that we could’ve never gotten to.

Mike Dillard: Yeah yup that’s it I mean I use it 3 times this week. Hey guys I need help with the xyz who do you know, you know that’s a rocks star at that and a couple of emails came in from friends and I’m got able to introduce to some of the greatest people from the world when it comes to you know YouTube advertising and smart segmentation and all of the stuff that I’m kind of working on and all of those introductions were made possible from the existing relationships that I’ve had for years and without those I would have been sitting here googling things and you know spent a year probably going down the wrong road .

Chris Guerriero: Yeah and again its juts one of the 3 rules that I think everybody needs to live by but one of the most important decisions that I’ve ever made in business was to create a board of directors and that was when I had first sold my health clubs because I had no idea how to handle money like I was super good at growing companies super good at making money but not great at handling when it came in so I knew I needed a group of really smart dudes to help me with that and the great majority of those e people are still on board today but one of the smartest decision that you could make at any size company whether you just break in a million dollar right now or you have a five ten fifty million dollar wherever you are is if you don’t have a board of advisors right you don’t even have a board of directors because there’s a lot of legalities around that but board of advisors if you have a board of advisors that single tactic could help you create this group of minds that are geniuses at certain things and you could leverage them at any time you want to

Mike Dillard: Now let’s talk about how to form that right, let’s keep it up the board of adviser levels because there’s again there’s doesn’t have to be a lot of people work involve of there but if someone wanted to create that further business because I get asked a lot the time they will you become an advisor for my company you know you help us out I mean whatever *do concerns consulting and if someone wanted to form that for themselves they just getting started what does the process look like because you know it could be asking people to join your board for free it could be asking to join for you know consulting free or equity in the business there’s a lot of different ways to go about it. What do you usually see and what’s appropriate

Chris Guerriero: so I would never want a board of advisor that’s free, I need somebody, I need every single person there to come with a core competency that earns their position on the board and I need a way to keep them highly motivated on opening their role with (inaudible) for me and doing whatever it takes to help us grow now I am well aware that if somebody who’s on my board of advisors from whatever companies is not a partner so they’re not going to fully vested in working you know working 24 hours a day for us however if we are able to entice them somehow then it really creates that connection that is really necessary that get big momentum specially at the beginning stage so we offer equity to everybody on our board of advisors and again we have a board of directors for our main company but we have a board of advisors for many of our growing entities and the equity offer usually goes something like this, here’s a piece of paper that says exactly what I would need you to do this is what I would expect you to do if you’re eon my board of advisors here’s what exactly you could expect in return from the company for your work and the bullet points that say hey john if you’re going to be on my board this is what I expect from you. It’s going to say here’s a man of hours I expect for you to focus on the company each month and that might be you know 3 to 4 hours a month or It might be one meeting a month which is 4 hours long whatever it is it might be email contact as needed or you know 2 phone calls a month as needed whatever you feel is really great I need you to open up the road I need you to anybody to targets clients of hours I need you to reach out and at least send me one client a month whatever you believe is really important for them to bring to the table, put it and write it and also put it writing what you’re going to give to them in return for that the equity normally is a percentage of growth from the day they sign that agreement its ongoing so we personally we don’t ever cutoff per equity in most of our contracts, some of what we do well most of them goes like this; hey john if you’re going to join you’re going to sign in this on the date of signing we’re assuming that the revenue is that 0 because we’re already making 5 million dollars you don’t get anything making right now but form the day of signing any increase from that 5 million dollars you’re getting 1% equity or whatever the equity position is and if we end up selling then you get blank % equity in the exit as well because all big people that you’re going to invite to your advisory board are going to won big payout in case you sell and that’s great because they may bring the fire to the table or they may be able to bring a big lender to the table who brings you several million dollars help accelerate your growth. That makes sense?

Mike Dillard: Yeah absolutely, that’s great advise what would be appropriate for percentages of correct share in equity.

Chris Guerriero: Well so like I said, like in the example that I was just giving 1% is normal unless somebody’s a big player it’s a 1% equity and we just cut a deal and by the way I would not make standard across the board for every company nor will I make standard cross the board for every person I’m inviting on because if you came into my board you have you know this ungodly core competency that I know if we plug that into the company even on limited bandwidth like as an advisory board not even as a partner but we plug that in its going to accelerate my growth so much that its worth 10% to me or 8% to me whatever it is. I may be willing to do that it’s that big for me and I may say hey Mike you get 8% or everything from the day you sign the growth, from the day you sign to the day you exit if you decide you don’t want to be part of this anymore in four years you lose everything but during that four years every (inaudible) every quarter we’re cutting you a check for the growth of the company from the day you came on board and if we sell the company while you’re still on advisory board you 8% of that sale also so I will make the same equity for the exit as I am for the actual payment and here’s why I do this because I want them highly motivated to help walk me through the sale of the company, to help me deck these proposals that are coming across my desk or to bring people to the table who maybe a potential acquirer for the company .

Mike Dillard: and obviously you want to make sure that you know you have these agreements drafted by a really knowledgeable business attorney because you know because you want to have let’s just call it an exit clause in there is well if this individual let’s say doesn’t show or doesn’t provide the return that you we’re expecting you know from them right they’ve missed a few of the calls.

Chris Guerriero: We’ll they’re done.

Mike Dillard: Yeah

CHRIS GUERRIERO: Exactly if they do not do that so in the consulting program that I got when we were with very small number of clients but when we’re working with somebody we have the exact template that I personally use each time we start drafting these and we give them to our clients but with that said every single person to whoever answers into these anything that we ever help them to draft the they have to take to a really competent attorney so but lets’ talk about that for a second because competent attorneys are not a diamond dozen so if you have an attorney who’s really good at one thing you don’t want to assume they’re good at anything. There’s no such thing as a general business attorney in my opinion. I now they’re out there but I would never use them because a general business attorney, it’s like going to a doctor and asking the doctor if they would cut your leg open and fix your knee you won’t go to a doctor for that. You’d go to a surgeon for that, right a surgeon who knows how to cut. A doctor must have to give you drugs, a chiropractor who’s had a vacuum, a massage therapist knows how to massage your knee to make it better but you would go to the specialist that you need in order to get the result that you want so an attorney is pretty much like that, you want to go to attorney who’s familiar with contracts like this or if you’re acquiring a company you want to go to an attorney who just deals with acquisitions of the companies, if you’re selling the company you go to an attorney who’s just talks on selling the company. You could have a team of attorneys which you don’t want the same person doing kind of (inaudible) for all these kind of things

Mike Dillard: So which specific kind of attorney would you want to hire to put together some advisor agreements like these?

Chris Guerriero: I will be a contract attorney or business contract attorney.

Mike Dillard: Okay

Chris Guerriero: Yeah

Mike Dillard: Great, You know and I’ll just give you guys some real worlds of examples of this an actions so this is one of the primary ways that I’ll remarks as real opponent so he started up a friendship with Joe Rogan years ago and offer Joe a preferably significant piece of on it and you know Joe got his podcast. His big in the (inaudible) world obviously with the UFC and then all of a sudden you start seeing Joe and I wearing a t-shirt on his podcast on his YouTube anywhere and that single handedly is well blew up on it as a company, you got guys like Josh Bisoni from bio trust who has a hundred million dollars supplement company so josh now does advisory agreements for other food startups right food brands that are smaller (inaudible) they up and coming he’ll take their advisor position and as he starts to see the growth of those companies he might even make a pretty significant 6 or 7 figure investments in those businesses because he sees what’s going on the inside he sees the growth and he’s going to come in at an early round at a really good evaluation and buy a bigger piece of the company beyond the percentage he got as an advisor. So this is really a phenomenal way to leverage people’s relationships and by the way both of those who are individuals are advisors to my business. So Josh and Aubrey I went to them offer them a piece of equity in my business to become advisors on my board which they said to a couple of years ago so I’ve done the same thing and you could do that as well and I highly recommend that you keep people who have connections relationships or skillsets and knowledge that are completely different than what you have and you don’t want to go replace yourself with someone else who has the same skillset, want to find someone who maintain a piece., excuse me you want to find someone who has piece of your missing puzzle.

Chris Guerriero: Right so what , the easiest way to do that would be to develop a process org chart right, an organizational chart where you’re at the top and then every major piece of the puzzle is a box underneath you and this is not like a regular organizational chart because you’re not looking to fill these necessarily with employees but it would be your org chart for your future board of advisors that way you know beyond shadowa doubt what box you’re trying to fill so when somebody comes across your desk and there a rock store something if they don’t fill one of those boxes is the possibility that they’re not just right for you at a level that you are right now and when you’re looking to fill those boxes before you decide to put somebody’s name on there before you reach out to somebody you got to understand that you’re not looking for somebody’d who’s done it once, once is luck in business. Somebody could’ve developed an 8 9 figure company and they could’ve muscled their way through it and not learned duplicate able processes but if they did it twice great, if they’ve done it 3 or more times that’s called a track record and I want that person on my board of advisors.

Mike Dillard: Yeah absolutely what’s the best way to approach these people that will give you the highest chance for a response?

Chris Guerriero: Well so it depends on what your credibility is like have you already developed a decent size company if you have a platform or you know something like that if so then i would try to create that org chart so I know exactly the core competencies that I need in each one of those boxes and the I’ll find out what company is already have people in them that are super rock stars at those core competencies and then reach out via LinkedIn because on linked you’re going to be able to go to those companies you’re going to be able to see exactly who is a rock star in there that is doing blank, blank and blank and you could literally reach out and say; hey this is mike I’ve got you know this company and this is my success record so far and now we’re developing this new company but prior to building this new company prior that the actual launch we’re putting together a board of advisors and I’m looking for these qualities for one of the seats for my board of advisors you have them inside of the companies that you’re in right now, and I understand that likeminded people hang out with likeminded people so I’m wondering if you know somebody or if you’re (inaudible) like these yourself that actually have an equity board of advisors with this new company. If you are I would for you to reach out, if you have somebody in mind that you would refer to me I’d really appreciate this and if you do let’s jump on it quick 15 minute call and hash this out and see if there’s a fit between us. That would be one way of doing it. Number 2. Some of the best board of advisors people are friends of mine, like people who I have met because I’ve been in business for a long time and I have been around the block a lot and reaching to people that I know and I’ve been able to watch them grow their companies and watch them implement these core competencies in their own industries. Those are the people that I can just say; hey this is what I’m doing. And if they know me then they’ve watch me grow companies as well. So it’s a very easy, lets’ go have lunch and talk about this thing now we’re talking as friends

Mike Dillard: Yeah it’s just amazing how much easier things gets when you know the right people.

Chris Guerriero: Yeah.

Mike Dillard: I mean It really is , like I’ve been going down YouTube rabid whole last couple of months I’m interested in starting to do some paid YouTube advertising campaigns and there’s a couple of people that you can find. They are on google but you know one friend of mine I ask him who he knew, introduce me to the best performance YouTube consulting agency out there and essentially they run the entire campaign for you free and they only get paid on performance whether that’s the number of leads they generate for you or the number of sales they acquire and they’re the best in the business at what they do and that’s someone I would never even know existed without my circle of influence of people that I know. This can be really powerful. Now, Chris who do you say are the prime suspects to fill those seats and which roles right if you’re the founder and eventually you’re the acting CEO you’re primary gig right now is again bringing in revenue making sure that products and services are getting delivered, you’re wearing a lot of hats at once, is it someone with financial experience, is it someone in technologies is it someone in media and marketing. What are the primary roles that you would look to go first
Chris Guerriero: That’s a great question but it’s just going to be slightly different or depending on what we’re trying to grow so I’ll give you some generals if that’s ok’ with you

Mike Dillard: Yeah.

Chris Guerriero: Trying to be very specific and I would just caution if could listening you know don’t just take this and just say; oh I need this. it has to be personalized for you that otherwise it’s going to bring you on a wrong position but the leadership like one of the very first boxes that I want is somebody who understands how to locate and find leaders, had to locate them, had to onboard them properly, how to manage them properly so they stay motivated. I want somebody who is great with organization. I want somebody who is great with finance like you’ve said before. I want people on my board of advisors who are kick breaking ass at getting my message out to the right people so that might mean social it might mean somebody who is really great in offline media, like those are the things that I want. On my board of directors I have people who could help me spread my message, but I also have a guy in there who is just outstanding in understanding commercial real estate investment because again this is for me personally and I want to be able to understand, not just have to grow my company not just how to get my message out to the right people, not just how to help over deliver to the people once they come in to my company. But I need to know how to invest that money, I need to know where to put the money that’s coming in so that it’s not just flowing in and then flowing right back out. Most into the cash that comes into our company we reinvest in the company and we reinvest in the people in the company and we reinvest getting the message out to a greater size audience but there’s also a chunk that comes in that needs to go someplace else. So it’s got to go into an investment module That is going to help and to grow as well so because I’m growing myself cause each one of my company, one of my organizations is an asset in my portfolio to help me personally reach y goals with my family right so each company is funneling money to help me grow my retirement fund and also my kids funds and also you know the charity, the funding charity so I need investment modules to help manage my money. SO you have to try figure out what is your board of advisors meant for is it meant just to grow your company or is it meant to grow your company and you as a person.

Mike Dillard: Yeah that makes a lot of sense. Circling back again when it comes to approaching these individuals you know it’s one thing if you have this really good friendship or relationship with them already the trust is already there. They already know what you do they already know about your business and that’s really easy yes to say you know to get an answer to but for someone that you don’t know yet, that you don’t have an established relationship yet sit hi something where you want to have almost like a pitch deck prepared? As if you are going to go you know approach VCs for money but the same, they going to have the same concept questions so what the same type tons of information and so is that something you want to have prepared ahead of time if not, what should you have.
Chris Guerriero: Yeah we have a one page and one page is basically says what we have done at the past and that we’re growing right, and now what they can expect as being you know form us and what we would expect from them so its just a one pager and I keep it really short sweet because the great majority of people that you’re going to invite to this they have very limited mental bandwidth, on this kind of stuff they want to be involved, they want to give back , they want to be part of a growing entity but they do not have the mental bandwidth and if they did have the mental bandwidth to go through a whole slide deck then probably they may not be perfect for you. Right because if they have that much mental bandwidth extra then they are not running their own organization that are in trenches right now which is a blanket statement and might not be true because you may be able to find a retired person who did great things and now just wants to sit on your advisory board but I will say also that I would put the majority of effort into the first big name. like the first big player that I invite cause I going to get a name on there, somebody who other people would hear; oh they’re on your advisory board too, the you’re going to get a lot more people on board, you’ll have to rely less on your credibility.

Mike Dillard: You know that’s a great point so I did that with ever grow. So for those of you who are new Ever grow is hydroponic system that I was developing two years ago and the main person that I had as my primary target to get on the board was Peter De Amandis right form xprice because he was one of the people who originally inspire the idea of the product and I knew that if I could get peter on the board then every single doors open to me from that point fort. Hey by the way Peter de Amandis is on my board and has equity in the company would you be willing to take a phone call and he answers yes a hundred % of the time. So that why I pursue that and I pursued a relationship with Peter for probably six months I joined his abundance 360 organization I started mingling with people who had personal relationships with him and eventually ended up sitting next to him at diner at Austin when he was in town for (inaudible). Showed him a picture of the prototype and that was pretty much it, he said he would love to be an advisor on the board and sent him the paper work the next week and he was officially a part of the company

Chris Guerriero: Hey so, you put a lot of time to that relationship

Mike Dillard: Yeah

Chris Guerriero: Did it resulted to a greater (Inaudible) sales?

Mike Dillard: Well you know unfortunately it, that project got a head to pull a plug on it. I didn’t get it to launch but having him on the board of advisors. Opens so many doors and potential opportunities when it came to marketing that it was awesome. So it definitely worked but at the end of the day that business, you know unfortunately didn’t cross the finish line and I actually ended up investing in a competitor instead and that’s going really well so

Chris Guerriero: Okay so in the end one way or the other, the more time you spend getting the right people on your bus you know right relationships behind you everything else grows. Right many similar stories to yours. But Bob Proctor, Bob Proctor who is most people know the name Bob, I wanted bob to, I wanted to work with Bob. I wanted him to want to work with me and I ended up busting in my butt to get into one of his programs which was way more than I could afford at the time which was many years back and ended up getting into his program and sticking with updating him with a regular basis as to my growth since being in his program updated and updated and updated. That was one of the struggling in the health club industry in the early on and then eventually sold that company for over 17 million and updated him on that and thanked him for all the help that he gave me mentally to get through that and then we ended up becoming friends so that relationship ended turning us into friends and then that friendship ended up turning him and his company into a client that mine, in my consulting firm where I literally went it and helped their company, right. It was somebody who would never give me a second look, now a client and then and CEO of this company Sandy Galiger who is a tremendously great person was a client of mine as the time. I introduce them and helped them to create a relationship. Now she and Bob are partners. Though Now is not even called a proctor company it’s called a Proctor Galiger Compamy because they have literally partners on this. So that whole relationship that I invested so much time into over years of effort in today ended turning into something that now he’s on if you going to my website and you look at some these companies that I’ve worked with he’s on there he’s saying some great stuff about me which ended up converting into just a tremendous matter of revenue.

Mike Dillard: Yeah you brought up one of the single best strategies when it comes to approaching someone who’s on your target wish list. I was doing the same thing with Tony Robbins for a bit and , oh gosh who else was it, it was Tony and somebody else but I think it’s as Gary Vee but I was keeping them up to date on every grow as well, you know Tony’s one of his biggest passions if not his biggest passion is you know feeding homeless people, right that’s his biggest charity, his biggest mission every year and I’m like; hey I’m inventing a piece of hardware that will reduce food cause people by 90% and etc. etc. and you know that’s kind of in his wheel house and so I would just keep him up to date on the progress of the projects and send him photos of the prototype and things like that and was thinking of the exact same approach and the very long term long tale you know strategy when it came to building those relationships that’s a really good point. Well Chris, this has been an awesome call, this is the topic that we’ve talked about briefly over the years on the podcast but we’ve never taken a dive this deep into putting together a board of advisors and the nuggets you shared today are just awesome .
If someone wants to reach out to you and potentially hire you as a consultant for their business, maybe join their board, who do you look for what’s kind of a criteria that they need to have and how do they get in touch with you.

Chris Guerriero: While so it would be company that would be doing at least a few million dollars a year, we inside of our consulting program we have companies that are doing a few million dollars year all the way up to a few billion dollars a month so it will be somebody who already has momentum, somebody who already has some revenue coming in, somebody who already has a little bit of a team so we could go in there and we could help them with their team and their systems and their processes because when I, in my bench capital firm, my responsibility in that firm is that a once somebody goes (inaudible) of getting funded by us, I (inaudible) partner goes into each one of the companies and I look at their systems, look at the processes, their people , I look at their culture, I look at these things so we could restructure them for growth so that whatever were investing into that company were able to double that and get our money back within 3 or 5 years so that we can help them to grow but still leave them with enough money to continue to grow and after we’re done with that. So that’s my core competency going into a company and restructuring them for growth in slow changes, right no big changes cause big change usually crash a company and in our consulting firm it’s the exact same thing instead of owning you know giant share the company because we’ll go in there we’ll take majority shareholders and that would take 51% fi they are at the bench capital firm, in the consulting company people are literally just paying and I am going in there and I am helping them to make all the tweaks and we talk every single week to make sure that they are growing. Small changes every single week so that they are breaking through a lot of these obstacles at hold most companies back from scale. So yeah we’ve got, it’s called club 28 I’ve loved for anybody who believes that they would be a fit for something like that to just get in touch with us, so they go to the website chrisGuerriero.com they’ll be able to see a lot of the clients that we work with, they’ll be able to find out how to get in touch with me, to see if there’s a fit and fi they believe there’s a fit then we’ll setup a quick phone call to just jump on to see if theirs is a fit personality wise between us cause I don’t want to work with a my company that I don’t believe we’re going to have fun with (inaudible) as a company

Mike Dillard: Yeah, They don’t want that either. If there’s a clash of personalities nobody’s having fun for sure.

Chris Guerriero: No, definitely.

Mike Dillard: Awesome, well Chris thank you so much for the time today. Guys I’m going to put a link Chris’s website here on the podcast these episode go to Mikedillard.com/podcast to find this with links to Chris’s social media profiles his website and if you think its good fit call him up have a conversation and you know I can only imagine that you experience that he has been working with the growing companies and that connections that he has you know with those attorneys that you need with the media companies that you need in contacts that already there, that’s the value of having a board of advisors so I would reach out to him and see if we could go a good fit. Chris Thank you so much for joining us this was a real pleasure.

Chris Guerriero: Thanks Mike (inaudible).

Mike Dillard: Absolutely. Guys Thanks always for listening. We’ll see you next week. Take care.