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(Photo credit: ell brown)

Advisors, like opinions, are plentiful and usually not very helpful. It is incredibly easy to give advice and exceedingly difficult to make it valuable. I think the problem isn't necessarily the advisors, but that almost no company understands how to build an advisory board and leverage their advisors to actually help them succeed. Most of the time advisors are merely brought in as validation of the idea and market or to occasionally do a call with the CEO.

I was no exception. When I first started Thinknear I quickly brought on advisors to help me juggle the prospect of raising VC funding, launching a product, building a team, and doing all of the other things that I had not done before, but which they had. My thinking was that by surrounding myself with experienced and talented advisors, I would have a better chance of succeeding. Bring them on and they will help. I quickly realized that I was completely wrong. I got almost nothing from our advisors for the first six months of the business. They cost me equity, but they really didn't help.

Our advisors were fantastic and really wanted to help. The problem wasn't them, it was me. My advisors were brought on at random, and furthermore, I failed to create structure and accountability. They would spend time with me, but they usually had no idea what was going on in my business, how they could help, or what I needed from them.

I decided to take a deep breath and try again.

The first thing I did was look at my needs and proactively figure out what holes I wanted to fill with advisors. With just a little introspection it became obvious that I needed help becoming a great CEO, I needed help on the sales side, and I needed AdTech domain expertise.

Knowing what I needed made the world of difference and helped me structure the right board. It wasn't about getting the big names, but about bringing on the people who could directly help me build a business. I already had an advisor who had been a startup founder and who could coach me into becoming a great CEO. I then added another advisor who is a master seller (and a Chief Revenue Officer by day) to become my guru for everything sales. Finally, I brought on the founder and CEO of one of the major players in AdTech to help with industry specific issues and to add domain expertise to my advisory board. I now felt that I had advisory support to help me overcome by biggest weaknesses.

Having identified advisors to help bridge my knowledge and skills gap, I began to create structure around our advisory program. I thought back on the structural failure of how I setup the program with our initial advisor and realized that up until then I had never articulated the areas I wanted him to help me with. Our arrangement had been so general that our conversations were ad-hoc and never focused on anything concrete. So as part of bringing on new advisors I made it abundantly clear what specific area I was bringing them on to help me with. I made them owners of helping me overcome a specific weaknesses (general management, sales, and AdTech inexperience).

I also realized that to truly give our advisors ownership and responsibility over one of my growth areas, I needed to hold them accountable. We drew up a contract with a two year vesting schedule, which means that they only got their equity if we kept them as advisors. We also stipulated in the contract that they had to meet or do a call with me every other week, and that they had to do an in person dinner or session once a quarter. I took these responsibilities seriously and had a standing call with each of them.

The final critical piece was to make sure they had a deep understanding of our business so they could provide real and meaningful advice. I sent them monthly updates and spent the first few minutes of everyone of our bi-weekly calls updating them on the good, the bad, and the ugly.

What happened next was unbelievable. Thinknear took off within months of creating the new advisory board and structure. My personal weaknesses as a CEO became strengths and with the help of my advisors I was able to supercharge our trajectory.

Advisors can be incredibly helpful resources whether you are managing a career or are a startup CEO. The lessons I learned are that you need to identify where you need the help, bring on advisors who can help you with those specific areas, hold them accountable, and provide them with detailed updates so they can jump right in and provide meaningful help.

Follow me on twitter: @eportnoy