(2022) 8 Ways To Get Most Value From Startup Advisors
If you think you may need a startup advisor to help you navigate your deepest challenges, this article provides 3 "filtering" topics so you can separate the great advisors from the good ones. Also, you'll find 5 practical tips on getting the most value out of your advisors time. 3 + 5 = 8 ways.
Everything written here is based on our customers experiences and advisors' tips on having effective advisory sessions. Enjoy.
Why We Wrote This
I’m a founder myself. I’ve built Sparrow from scratch. Our startup advisors help founders scale their revenue and bring in more customers - in 90 days. You get to learn directly from founders who’ve built, scaled and sold their own companies for millions.
When we started, the platform had nothing. It was hard. But I came through. I’m telling you this so you know that my guidelines below come from experience and also from talking with many advisors, business mentors, venture capitalists (also known as VCs) and the “aspiring” entrepreneurs. We’ve got fantastic testimonials on our homepage and wall of love.
The Three Topics to Discuss
Below are the top three topics you should discuss in complete honesty before formally agreeing to bring them on-board, so you're both on the same page. Do bear in mind, an “advisor” doesn’t always need equity in your company. Sometimes, advisors/mentors are reachable based on their availability and can provide stunning guidance for what you need. That’s precisely why I built Sparrow and I believe I can help you see things from a different, hands-on lens. Let’s dig in.
Topic 1: The startup advisor’s experience, background and track record
You need to understand how exactly their past relates to what exactly they’ll be helping you accomplish and solve your fundamental challenges. There are too many charlatans pretending to know things and ultimately providing garbage / generic advice to most founders, which really only wastes their time.
Don’t be scared of asking honest and tough advisors questions here because this will weed out the fakes from the real ones.
Generally, when you start your search by approaching a well-known incubator or accelerator, the mentors there are already vetted by that organization - but this shouldn’t stop you from asking tough questions to understand their past experience and how they did the things they claim they do on their LinkedIn or speeches.
Be sure to do your homework. Some advisors already put out a lot of content about what they love doing, dislike, etc. Be sure to read up their blogs, listen to their podcasts and get a good feel for how they are and what they do, before setting up your first 20-min call with them. If you are new to setting up startup calls and taking charge, this article may help.
Topic 2: The startup advisor’s incentive and how exactly they intend to help
I personally admire mentors who are open about why they want to help founders. Maybe it’s equity (i.e., shares of your company) or maybe they want to get paid by the hour for their time, or they just want to help because it makes them feel smart. Either way, you need to understand their personal and selfish reasons for helping you.
And then, you need to be clear-cut about HOW they’ll be helping to get closer to solve your fundamental challenges. Will they make intros to experts in your industry? Do they have subject matter expertise with hardware that’ll help you build out your product to MVP?
The better you understand your company advisor’s limitations and superpowers, the easier your relationship will be in the long run.
As mentioned, if you are approaching an online platform like Sparrow or an offline accelerator, it may be that you do not need to ask these questions as they’ve previously stated their reasons to said organization. So do your homework, be cognizant and get to the finish line.
Topic 3: The startup advisor’s quantified commitment and contract
You need to understand how often they’ll be helping you, how exactly they’ll be helping (last point) and the means of communication between yourselves. Are they agreeing to sit down with you and your team for 2 hours a week for x months? Or is this more of a pay-by-the-hour kind of relationship where you only bring him in when you need him on specific things? And is communication going to be over texting, email, Zoom - learn the facts, be extremely clear about YOUR expectations and get it all in writing (if appropriate).
This is where you decide if they prefer to receive cash compensation - or perhaps accepting equity might better align their incentives with yours!
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Below are four of our favourite tips to find the right advisor as your company grows.
Tip 1: Generalist vs. Specialist
As advisors join startups, they help startup founders navigate their space to find solutions (both short and long-term). And so we recommend evaluating your advisors just like you would evaluate your co-founders, as a high level of thoroughness is required to understand how they'll help.
Generalists: They tend to be "good" at solving multiple things from different angles. They usually have broad knowledge across many topics and expertise in a few. Early-stage startup founders may benefit the most from advisors like this, as they may not need depth-heavy expertise in a domain like B2B sales outreach, or A/B testing landing pages more higher conversion rates.
Specialists: These generally tend to be high profile advisors. Startups frequently target advisors of this calibre for their specific industry (e.g., deep tech) when they need their decades of experience to cut on learning time for building a niche product. Most advisors who are specialists generally have hands-on, tactical experience executing a certain kind of process.
At Sparrow, advisors like Mohammad are perfect for e-commerce startups who want help with paid media, SEO, Social Media Marketing, etc. The reason behind this is that he has been heavily involved in designing, launching and evaluating marketing campaigns to drive millions in dollars in revenue per month. Niche. Heavy expertise. Great impact. This is how you know you're with a specialist.
Tip 2: Strategic vs. Tactical Advice
A prospective advisor who will help you drive your company forward, can be well-equipped to either give you strategic high-level advice, tactical step-by-step guidance or both. Smart startup founders know the difference between both and consult the right advisors as needed.
Strategic advice scenario:
Challenge - Founder doesn't know how which channels are best for user acquisition.
Advisor: "I recommend you reach out to people posting on niche forums for your product, Reddit, specific Slack channels that fit the persona you're looking for. Try seeing what they post about, add some helpful value to what they're looking for and ask them to hop on a 10-min user interview call to understand if your product offerings are what they need.
Once you find a channel where you're getting most of your “beta users per hour spent", consider doubling down on that channel to find more of your ideal customers."-
You'll see here the business advisor gives general help on how to find a channel that works for acquiring users in the early days of your product. She doesn't dig too deep into the 'how' but rather the 'what' only.
Tactical advice scenario:
Challenge - Founder wants to learn how to find out what his website visitors do once they're on his website, and grab their email addresses.
Advisor - "Yeah I've been there before. I recommend installing HotJar and turning on their 'recording session' feature for all sessions. Free tier allows 100 sessions but that'll give you enough data to work with.As for grabbing email addresses, I recommend having a lead magnet. Ask yourself what's one thing your visitors come to your website for. Since you're selling a B2b SaaS for cybersecurity, maybe they can benefit from a 1-page PDF on the latest threats seen in the last year? You can use your SquareSpace marketing pop-up feature for grabbing their emails."
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Advisors generally have an idea of how to solve X. But a good advisor requires context on your challenges and provides high-level or detailed guidance based on what you need to move the needle forward.
Tip 3: Be organized as hell.
Have an agenda for every meeting. For your advisors to understand where you're at and how they can help you, they need to understand what exactly you'll be discussing on your startup calls. To simply this, Sparrow has collaborated with our advisors to build this template for you. Download it. Leverage it.
This also allows them to understand what kind of meeting they're having with you and will help them prepare well. Remember to balance the strategic from the tactical! This can be tricky.
Follow-up on previously discussed items - A good advisor may offer constructive feedback on your abilities (or lack of). But when most advisors notice that you're not providing feedback on their suggestions/ideas, they'll either think (a) they're not being helpful and you're too shy to admit it or (b) that you're lazy and don't want to execute on them. Both are bad.
We recommend having a log of the items discussed with your startup advisors and then following up with them - have clear expectations in place and explain why you decided not to pursue an item, how you're performing on an item, roadblocks faced, etc. Begin completing the items when you feel most appropriate!
Personally, we use Notion for this. Great tool. Easy navigation.
Tip 4: Be self-sufficient.
Your startup advisor questions may revolve around items that either (a) are not the best use of your advisors' time commitment or (b) may not be in their wheel-house of expertise. A prospective advisor cares about helping you but you shouldn't abuse this. Many advisors may lose their natural eagerness to guide you, if they feel you're looking to them to spoon-feed you. So don't be that guy.
"Individuals don't build great companies, teams do." - Investor Mark Suster
Ask yourself who else needs to be in the room - You might be founder/CEO spearheading the engagement, but that doesn't mean you can handle everything or look at things from different perspectives.
Perhaps you need your management team on the same call with the advisor? Or maybe, you just need your co-founder. It doesn't hurt to get a second person's opinion and them hearing the advice straight from the advisor might bring a different perspective.
Look at specific blogs/forums for help - Before discussing every issue you're having with your business mentor, check if anyone else on the internet has had your issue before. On Slacks, you're also able to msg smart founders and ask how they solved a specific issue. Keep the tough questions for your advisor - get the small, petty issues out of the way.
If you're part of an online community already, it's a huge benefit to just get on a 15-min call with someone who solved your problem before and gain clarity. Sparrow has a community for Slack and another for Facebook of smart founders, whichever you desire!
Tip 5: You can give feedback too.
Don't be afraid of giving your advisor feedback on how they've performing and if they're genuinely helping you. This may take 3-4 sessions over a course of 2 weeks to understand, but nevertheless it's extremely important to let them know, in order to avoid misaligned expectations.
Thinking: Do they have a thoughtful approach when trying to problem solve with you?
Depth & Usefulness: Are they actually helping you? Or just hand-waving obvious tactics that you could find online? Tough questions for sure!
Time: Are they sticking to their time commitment? Is it sufficient? Would you prefer spending less time talking with them and more time executing?
Money: So far, are you comfortable with a cash compensation setup or do you prefer if your advisors receive equity instead?
Goodbye and good luck!
I genuinely hope this helps. When I had 0 customers and 0 advisors on Sparrow, I had to convince advisors to join me even when I had nothing. That’s why, over time, I was able to harness my strength to (a) ask tough questions that help me understand the mentors better and (b) find ways to quantify the quality of their guidance over time. It took hours of pain, sadness and being lost. But I’m learning as I go, and I thought you’d love the few tips i found.
But often times, knowing the topics themselves won't get you to the finish line. Finding advisors to join startups is a delicate process and one must be careful when picking a potential advisor.
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