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In this episode, Dr. Barbara Hales, host of the Marketing Tips for Doctors podcast, invites Callum Laing to discuss the value of securing a board seat and how it can enhance professional growth, especially for doctors and other technical professionals.

Callum highlights how board involvement offers a unique opportunity to gain a holistic understanding of businesses, moving beyond technical expertise. He encourages professionals to explore board opportunities outside of their fields to gain fresh insights and avoid becoming unpaid consultants.

Callum outlines several key strategies for securing a board seat:

  • Start Small with Advisory Boards: For newcomers, joining advisory boards of small businesses or startups provides valuable experience and credibility, which can serve as a stepping stone to larger board roles.
  • Holistic Business Understanding: Serving on a board enables professionals to gain a comprehensive understanding of how a business operates as a whole, beyond their specialized field, ultimately making them more effective in their own roles.
  • Asking the Right Questions: By joining boards outside one’s industry, professionals are encouraged to ask smarter, more insightful questions that challenge assumptions and drive better decision-making.
  • Building a Network of Investors: Callum emphasizes the importance of developing a robust investor network, which is crucial for raising capital and connecting businesses to potential funding opportunities.
  • Advisory Boards as Business Tools: Even small businesses can benefit from creating advisory boards to gain valuable insights, establish credibility, and unlock growth opportunities, as these boards can provide a competitive edge.

Callum also explains the legal responsibilities of becoming a board member and advises aspiring board directors to start with advisory roles to build experience before taking on the full legal responsibilities of being a director.

Key Takeaway:
“Joining a board forces you to look at the business as a whole, ask smart questions, and become a more valuable professional in any field.” – Callum Laing.

Connect with Callum Laing:
Website: boardroom-blueprint.com

Connect with Barbara Hales:

Twitter:   @DrBarbaraHales
Facebook:   facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist
Business website: www.TheMedicalStrategist.com
Show website:   www.MarketingTipsForDoctors.com
Email:   info@TheMedicalStrategist.com

YouTube: TheMedicalStrategist
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/barbarahales

Books:
Content Copy Made Easy
14 Tactics to Triple Sales
Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist

 

TRANSCRIPTION: (202)

Welcome and Introduction

Dr. Barbara Hales (00:02) Welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales, and we’re really fortunate today, because today we have none other than Callum Laing. He is a renowned entrepreneur, a board director, investor, and best-selling author with a passion for helping individuals reach their full potential. With a stellar record of building and scaling businesses across diverse industries, Callum brings a wealth of real-world directorship experience to the summit. His infectious enthusiasm, combined with a knack for simplifying complex concepts, ensures that attendees leave with actionable insights and strategies they can implement immediately. As a prolific author and thought leader, Callum’s wisdom has been regularly featured in the media and is sought out by business leaders around the world. Welcome to the show, Callum.

Callum’s Journey into Boardrooms

Callum Laing (01:09) Thank you, Barbara. Feel like I could have written that intro myself.

Dr. Barbara Hales (01:15) The first thing I wanted to know is, how did you get involved with boards? How did that become an interest for you?

Callum Laing (01:24) So it started off when I was a young entrepreneur, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, and I was not very good at it. I just wanted to learn, and I figured one great way to learn would be to sit on the board of other people’s companies so I could see what they were doing right and what they were doing wrong, and I could meet other smart people. The problem was, I didn’t know. I didn’t even know what a board was at that point. I just thought it would be something cool to get on and learn from. So I didn’t know what a board was. I didn’t really have the knowledge. I didn’t really have the people in my network who could help me get on that. And so I didn’t get onto boards until many years later. And then, when I got on lots of boards… So what happened was, my main business is mergers and acquisitions and taking companies public, and so I was sitting on a lot of the boards from companies that we were taking public. And I guess a lot of my… I had been when I wasn’t sitting on boards, I was quite enamored with boards.

When I sat on boards, I got quite frustrated with boards, and I saw a lot of challenges. I saw a lot of people on boards for the wrong reasons, just looking after their own self-interests, rather than all the stakeholders. And I saw a lot of very talented people not being able to get onto boards because they didn’t look the right way, the wrong gender, they didn’t have the right background, hadn’t gone to the right schools, didn’t know the right people, and so you just had a lot of talent missing from that pool, and that was very frustrating. And so as a member of several boards, I started implementing solutions to get more new people into that fold. And ultimately that became the business of the Veblen Director Program, which is training women, minorities, and first-timers on how to get their first board seats. And because once you’re on the board ladder, it’s actually relatively easy to move up the board ladder. It’s just getting on there in the first place, which is the challenge.

Why Professionals Should Consider Joining Boards

Dr. Barbara Hales (03:45) I do want to just stick in that. You know, I myself became involved with your program because I just found the whole idea of it very fascinating, and I am now sitting on a board. So, yeah, thank you. So I just wanted to let listeners know it does work. Why should doctors and health professionals consider going on boards? You know, they have their practice, they’re busy with what they’re doing. Why should they look outside their world and think, “Sitting on a board might make sense for me?” Why would it make sense?

Callum Laing (04:28) So, look, I don’t think it’s just the medical profession. I think lots of us, as we go through our careers, we get very insular and focused on just one narrow expert topic of expertise. And sort of the conventional wisdom is you just learn more and more about that piece, and I think some people, a lot of us, kind of have this idea that when we get older, and maybe when we near retirement, we’ll go and sit on a few boards. Yeah. And it’s a secondary income and a chance to have a bigger impact. I just encourage people to start that journey a lot sooner. And I think for any technical profession, sitting on the board of a company forces you to look holistically at how businesses work. And I think, you know, oftentimes as employees, we’re very focused on what we’re technically good at, like helping a patient get better, but we don’t necessarily understand the way that fits into the business. What is the business that we’re in? And I think when you sit on a board, you’re forced to have to understand a business from, you know, where’s the income coming in, where’s it going out? How does the flow work, rather than just being super focused on the individual technical elements. And I think that’s very useful.

I think you actually become much better at your job, whatever your job is, when you understand the business side of it. So I think from that perspective, it’s very good. We all say, one of the things you’ve heard me say many times is we encourage people to join boards of companies outside of their field of expertise. So if you’re a doctor, go and join the board of an IT company, or a food and beverage company, or something completely outside of it. Now that seems very counterintuitive, but there’s a couple of reasons for it. The first is that it forces you to ask more questions, and the best board directors are the ones that ask the smartest questions. And so oftentimes, when it’s in our industry, we sort of jump to assumptions. We know how we think it should be done, and we know how we’ve seen it be done. And so we just jump to those assumptions, whereas in a different industry, you kind of ask, “Well, why is it being done that way? That doesn’t make any sense to me,” and that can be quite useful. The other thing is that it stops you from being dragged in as a consultant.

So a director’s job, or whether that’s an advisory board position or an actual non-executive director, is to think about the business in a holistic manner and think about all the stakeholders, which can be the shareholders, the clients, the staff. But if you know that industry and that company is facing a problem, because we’re generally all nice people, it’s very easy for us to say, “Well, hang on, look, I know how to fix this. Let me come in tomorrow and I can work with your team and fix it.” And suddenly, you’ve gone from being a non-executive director to being an employee or an unpaid consultant, often. And when you’re in an industry you don’t know, you can’t do that, and so it wouldn’t occur to you to do that. It would occur to you to say, “Well, who do we know between us that would be great to come in and solve that problem?” which is a much more constructive way of looking at it, rather than being an unpaid consultant, which is so common.

Advisory Board vs. Full Director Role

Dr. Barbara Hales (08:21) Sorry about that. Let me just turn that off.

Callum Laing (08:27) Is it doctors ringing in already to say, “Yeah, I want to join?”

Dr. Barbara Hales (08:32) Yeah. People weighing in now. What you said makes so much sense. Also, because I know doctors tend to be very nurturing, and they probably want to say, “Hang on. If I can help you, I will.” So having the advice where you’re in a board where you know you can’t do that helps everyone, really. For our listeners, could you explain the difference between an advisory board and being part of the board of directors? You know, what’s the difference, and when should someone want one over the other?

Callum Laing (09:19) Let me give some context. I think a lot of people, when they think about boards, they’re used to thinking about the boards of big companies. And if you look at traditional… this is something you’ve thought about in the past. If you looked at traditional training, it would all be about good corporate governance for an S&P 500 company, which is fascinating, but it’s completely irrelevant to 99.9% of all companies out there. Most companies in the world are small businesses, and so… and the majority of companies in the world don’t actually have a board. And yet, every successful company you can think of does have a board. So there’s a disconnect going on there. And I think, so a lot of people think they should apply for these big companies that have boards, but if you imagine, everyone that wants a board seat is all applying for the same very few jobs. And quite frankly, these companies never actually hire a random stranger, and it’s always people that they know, like, and trust. So the way that we work with the Veblen Director Program is you say, “Look, we need to get you on the board ladder.” And the way we do that is we’re going to start with something super low-key, super easy. You’re just going to find a small business, a startup, an early-stage business, could be a local pizzeria, it doesn’t really matter, and you’re going to create an advisory board, and we take the pressure right off. We say, basically, the way you position it to the founder is that myself and four or five other professionals from different industries, different countries will just have a virtual coffee with you once a month, chat about your business, hopefully introduce you to some interesting people, see if we can give you some ideas, see if we can stop you making some mistakes that we’ve done in the past. And that’s it. A couple of hours a month, maximum. And for individuals that are thinking about it, so for yourself, being able to say that you’re sitting on that advisory board is a great stepping stone. You can update your LinkedIn profile. Suddenly, your network is now looking at you in a completely different light than they were before. And that’s really important, because oftentimes your second and third board seat are going to come from people in your network, you just didn’t know that you’re now looking for those opportunities.

The Benefits of Advisory Boards for Small Businesses

Callum Laing (10:44) But for the companies, it’s really useful as well, because apart from, obviously, the knowledge and experience that you’ve got now, they’re learning how to think in terms of, “How do I answer to a board?” which, for entrepreneurs, especially young entrepreneurs, we’re not used to that. We don’t have that accountability, and so it’s quite valuable to have that accountability. It also makes us look as a business more mature. So clients would rather go and work with a company that has a board of advisors, so you kind of get the credibility that comes with that board of advisors. Investors would definitely prefer that there was a board of advisors, even staff as well. So yeah, for it’s really kind of a stepping stone, and then once you’re on it, there’s various other steps that you can take to get up to a full director. Now, a full director is where you do take on some legal responsibility. So we start with an advisory position. There’s no legal worries. If the company goes bust, it goes bust, you’re not responsible. When you’re a director, you do have a fiduciary duty, and so you want to get some practice. You want to have those training wheels of being a board member before you actually agree to take on the legal responsibilities. And normally there’s DNO insurance, which is directors and officers insurance, you should also be quite well compensated at that point for taking on that risk. But yeah, I tend to avoid it as even if you could, I wouldn’t make it my first board seat because it’s quite a big step up in terms of responsibilities and legal potential threats, especially in the U.S., which is more litigious than the rest of the world.

Starting with Advisory Boards for Small Businesses

Dr. Barbara Hales (13:39) Well, some people might think, you know, like, “I only have a small business,” but like, “Hang on here, if I had an advisory board, I can get somebody to come in. I don’t have to pay them. And they could tell me how to take the next step forward, what I’m doing wrong, what I’m doing right, and help me about that.” Does a business have to be a certain size before it makes sense to have an advisory board?

Callum Laing (14:06) No, so. And this is one of the things that we encourage all businesses. And this is even before I kind of… because I’m thinking about this as a business model, it was always my first bit of advice to entrepreneurs, is even before you get your first client, build an advisory board around you. So if I launch a new business, and I have a very unhealthy habit of launching new businesses when I get bored, the first thing that I do is I build an advisory board around me, and that advisory board saves me so much time and effort and energy because I bring in people that have experience in that industry, or that have experience with the clients that I want to get, and I can just bounce ideas off them. I say, “Look, hey, if I pitch this idea, what works, what doesn’t work?” So whatever size you’re at, even if you haven’t got your first customer. I think an advisory board is a useful tool to have, and I think it’s also good for business owners. If you’re ambitious and you want to grow your business, at some point, you’re going to have a board anyway. So learning how to regularly report to a board, learning how to utilize a board. And I think often people have this idea that board members are there to ruin their fun, and I think that’s born out of kind of the where boards originated conceptually was, if I’m a successful entrepreneur and I get to the end, or I want to step back from the day-to-day running of it, and I put an executive in charge to be the new CEO. I spent my life building this business. I’m terrified that CEO is going to make a stupid decision and destroy my life’s work, and so I put a board in to be a sounding board, and to kind of do some checks and balances and just make sure nothing bad happens. So that’s what happens in big companies, and that’s why a board… and I’ve been invited onto boards to maintain the status quo, which personally doesn’t interest me at all. When you’re starting out, you’re joining companies that are growing, and at that point, you don’t want to be a board member stopping them growing. You want to be helping them and helping the entrepreneur and making introductions and connecting them to potential partners and saying, “Hey, look, have you thought about this? And look, one of the companies I’m working with is doing this. I think you could apply that to yours,” and really helping that founder to grow, and that’s where you become super, super valuable. And, yeah, and ultimately, basically, as the size of the company grows, as the market cap goes, your compensation grows, grows with it, and it can be super lucrative as well.

How Advisory Boards Help with Fundraising

Dr. Barbara Hales (17:06) Let’s say I’m a small business. I have essentially no clientele, or maybe just like one or two. So I’m really hoping that my new advisory board is going to take me to that level. But if I were to look at people that have a tremendous amount of experience in all the facets that I need help with, but, you know, I really essentially have no return on investment, I’m just like fledgling, why would these people be interested in sitting on a board to a business that’s not really successful?

Callum Laing (17:49) Yeah, so it’s, there’s an element of managing expectations on both sides. So as an individual, if you decide that you want to be a board manager, a board director, you’re not going to go and join the board of Microsoft as your first role and earn millions of dollars. That’s not going to be the first step. You need to start lower down and get that experience and build up. On the flip side of that, if you’re a small business owner, you’re not going to be able to bring in Elon Musk and Richard Branson to sit on your advisory board. Doesn’t matter how nicely you ask, it’s just not going to happen. So on both sides, you’ve got people that want what they want out of the relationship, and so if you look at the Veblen Director Program, we’ve got these incredible people, and you’ve met lots of them. And so I think we’ve got nearly 300 people sitting on nearly 400 boards now. So, and they’re all driven, they’re ambitious, and yeah, a couple of years from now, they’re going to be sitting on much bigger boards, and so that’s an amazing network, but, but they’re looking for these opportunities, and I think Never underestimate why people will do this.

So when I was starting out, I had a tech startup, and I was trying to raise capital, and I knew the value of getting this advisory board around me, and so I went to middle managers in highly respected brands, so Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and what you just discover is that these companies are full of middle managers that are bored out of their minds during the day, like they’re very good at what they do, they’re very well paid, but they’re kind of, they’re all looking at entrepreneurs and wishing they could live their lives vicariously through you. And so when you say to them, “Hey, look, would you be interested in joining my advisory board?” It’s going to be like, “I’ll buy you a coffee once a month.” That’s all. For them, for you, you would think they would say no, but actually, to them, they can now update their LinkedIn profile and say, “Hey, I’m sitting on the board of such and such company.” They’ve now got something really interesting to talk about at the dinner parties, rather than project management software that they’ve got to upgrade. And so it suddenly becomes interesting, and when, as a small company, when you say you’ve got somebody from Microsoft, not me, from Yahoo, and somebody from Google on your board, the credibility you get from that, even if they were the janitors that I had, nobody asked me what roles they were in, it was just like, “Wow, you got Google on your board. Wow, that’s pretty impressive.” And I was actually able to raise capital at a 10x, so I was, I had been struggling to raise money at a million-dollar valuation. Once I had these board members on, nothing changed with the business, but I was able to raise money at a $10 million valuation just because I had the credibility of these, these big company brands around me.

Conclusion

Dr. Barbara Hales (21:03) I think that that whole suggestion is brilliant. I do. It’s not something that I might have considered. But you know, that is brilliant. So that segues to the next question. I see that you have a lot of experience in getting investors. How do you get investors?

Callum Laing (21:27) Yes, one of the things when we set up the Veblen Director Program, what I teach our members is how to get a board seat. But what I don’t want is to have added to the ineffective board members that are out there. There’s already plenty of those. So we want great board members. We want people that really know how to add value. But one of the things that happens, especially with smaller businesses, is they’re looking to raise capital, and very few people have experience of looking to raise capital. So I ended up launching another program called Guild Members, which is all about how you raise capital, and specifically how you build networks of investors. Because what most businesses do is they kind of go at it back to front, they build the business, and then they go out trying to find that one-in-a-million investor that is looking for a business like theirs. And so what we say to the Veblen members is start building a network of investors and figure out what investors are looking for, and then go and find that company. And that’s a much, much easier way to do it than the other way around. And so what happens is you kind of end up basically, for our Veblen members, they’re obviously connected to all the other Veblen members. They’re also connected to this network of capital raises, which means that when you’re talking to these bigger companies that will eventually want to talk to you, because you’ve now sitting on three or four boards, and you’re doing great stuff, and then you can say to them, “Well, look, I’m plugged in to directors on hundreds of boards all around the world. I’m also plugged into this capital-raising network.” So regardless of your background, you’re going to be of value to them just because of the connections that you have. And then everything else is a bonus on top of that.

Dr. Barbara Hales (23:34) Well, you have really opened up people’s eyes that may not have even considered this route, or they may have thought about it but thought, “I don’t know anything about this,” so you being the expert could take their hand and guide them through. How can people reach you?

Callum Laing (24:01) So I’m always around on LinkedIn as probably the easiest place, but for any of your listeners, if they go to boardroom-blueprint.com, they can download a free copy of my book. You can buy it on Amazon, but I don’t think Jeff needs any more money, so I’ll give you a free copy if you go to boardroom-blueprint.com, and you’ll get the audio and the digital book for free.

Dr. Barbara Hales (24:30) Excellent. Well, thank you so much for being with us today. This has really been a very exciting episode, and I’m sure others will find that to be the case too. This has been another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors with your host, Dr. Barbara Hales, and Callum Laing. Thank you very much.