If you want a great example of an advisory board in action check out the yesterday's Wall Street Journal Today Section B4 where there is an article called "Board of Advisers Can Help Steer Small Firms to Right Tack." To summarize, it is an article that discusses how a couple of entrepreneurs who had run the largest sailing school for 28 years finally decided that they needed some help and built an advisory board. They had built their company and knew everything there was to know about sailing, however, there was a lot about the business model itself that they were unsure of. Or as we like to tell our clients "they didn't know what they didn't know." They put together an outside advisory board with different business people with differing backgrounds such as marketing and management consulting. The creation of the board increased their profits by over 30%.

This is a very simplistic but very good example of how an advisory board, if utilized properly, can help a small company grow its revenues and profitability with very little cost. If you would like a copy of the article, feel free to contact us and we can fax you our copy.

Bob Arciniaga
Managing Partner
Advisory Board Architects