Ask Christa! Do All Startups Need Advisors?

Hi everyone, and welcome to Ask Christa!, the place where you can ask questions about how to work through business challenges and workplace issues. I'm Christa Dhimo, and today's question is for founders or those thinking about starting up a company: do all businesses need advisors, even if I’m just starting up? And my answer is YES. Yes, you do.

But as with all things related to startups, who, when, and what kind depends on where you're at in your growth cycle and what you need. Some might say your early-day advisors should be those who can help you secure funding, but there’s so much you need to do before you’re ready to pitch, and THAT is why you need advisors even in the early days. By the way, later on as you grow, your Board of Directors become your advisors, so for this segment, I’m focused on the early stage start-ups—the “even if I’m just starting up?” businesses.

The best early advisors are those you trust the most who will hopefully give you an honest and supportive assessment of your idea, helping you work through a notion or concept, while being objective enough to truly dig into what you're looking to do, why you're looking to do it and for what purpose.

And that assessment piece is important: it's not just about honesty. If you're thinking about starting up a business, you can do that for sure, but know this: the best businesses start off quiet, thoughtful, attentive and focused with just enough discipline to get good work done as you take a concept and transform it into an eventual business model. This is when effective advisors come in. They can help you take that concept and form it into a description of how your business will meet an unmet need—how it will offer a service or product that doesn’t yet exist the way YOU envision your service or product, and how it will become a healthy business, a profitable business (and by the way—even not for profit organizations have to be profitable).

Advisors are there to help you build your strategy for setup, funding, creation, eventual launch, growth, and if needed, selling your business. Your advisors will and should change based on your needs and your business needs, and they should each have a specific strength to offer when it’s important for your business’s health. And for that reason, they should all be able to provide a solid assessment of where you and your business is, especially when you’re just starting up.

You see, advising is more than “giving advice.” It doesn’t matter much if you have those you trust around you they also don't have the ability to offer a supportive assessment too. Many times those we trust and go to with an idea for launching a business may give us honest feedback for our idea, but most people have a really hard time separating your idea from their own ideas. 

For example, we all know people who, if we were to say, "I have an idea for a business that opens mobile pop-up farmers markets for local farmers to sell to our community AND bring our community together. It’ll go into each town every weekend,” they will respond, "That's a great idea. Yeah, I thought of doing that, but then I thought about the effort in getting the contracts from local farmers, plus the logistics and the permits to sit in town squares, plus what happens if it rains during the days of the pop-ups and..." (more problems, more problems, more problems). You see, in that instance, the person is being honest and you can trust their honesty. But they’re not giving you a supportive assessment. They’re simply defending why they aren’t doing what you’re thinking of doing, and also listing for you many potential obstacles. It’s GOOD to think about obstacles, but in this example, the supportive assessment is lacking. 

That person might find those things to be too difficult to overcome, and that's why THEY decided not to pursue that type of business idea. Effective advisors focus on YOU, though. 

A supportive assessment would look like this: "That sounds really interesting. How far along are you in your thinking? How serious are you about doing this? What are you most concerned about? Who else have you talked to to help you determine how feasible this could be for you?" And of course, "How can I help?" 

That’s why you need an advisor, and that’s also what you should always look for in an advisor. Someone who knows what questions to ask, when to ask them, how to facilitate deeper thinking in the context of your success as an entrepreneur, as a founder, as a small business owner, as a growing business owner, you name it. So that's my answer. Yes—you need advisors if you're going to start a business AND those advisors are in service to you.

They should be present and accounted for as facilitators to how you're thinking through the various factors required for success based on who you are as a founder, the business you are thinking of launching, and the different aspects of business you may need to consider now versus later. You should receive advice that enables you to avoid common mistakes and leverage their learnings and experience and hopefully some expertise, but you do not need advisors who will tell you why they wouldn’t do what you’re doing, or share war stories that aren't relevant to your business, or tell you what you need to do. 

My goodness, over the years I’ve heard a lot of people espousing to be advisors say things like, "Okay, here's what you need to do." "Okay, here's what we're going to do." Avoid that. The moment you hear that, understand this, that is not the advisor who's going to help you. 

You need someone who's going to understand your business and get on the level of your context—to work with you, not manage you or your work and tell you how you should build your business. There are times when you're going to need some of that help, and you may ask, “How should I do this?” or a key advisor will offer recommendations—but that’s later when general business administration comes into play, and farther down the path, your eventual Board of Directors will support you with that, too. 

But in the early days, if you’re moving from concept to start-up, or as this question asked, “Just starting up,” you need and deserve someone who can reach into the depths of your mind and the depths of your soul and help extrapolate and help you articulate what it is you're looking to do. 

There are people who will either live their dream through you or try to replicate any past success they've had thinking that that's what you want and that's what worked for them, so that's what will work for you. And some of it might work. But when you're a founder, when you're an entrepreneur, you can find the general, common aspects of a business startup in books, websites, and various other resources. You don't need someone telling you how to manage the mechanics of starting a business. You need guidance, mentorship, and advisement from those who help you get to the heart of your business, who enable you to broaden your perspectives in a way that doesn't overwhelm you with scope. You need a safe space to test ideas, organize the hard aspects of startup businesses, like your key messages and talking points, what makes your business better than your competition, how it meets an unmet need such that everyone will want to have what you offer. 

It's really all about you, not your advisor. 

For your resources, I found an interesting article from growthmentor.com. from 2023 called “The Ultimate Guide to Startup Advisors.” Full disclosure: I'm not a member, nor do I know a lot about Growth Mentor and their team, but the article provides excellent perspective, and it's always worth looking into resources that talk about how they want to support startups if you're looking to found a business. 

I posted another interesting article called, “The ultimate guide to startup advisors: are they worth your time and equity?” It's interesting how both are ultimate guides—they are easy reads with depth, and I think you’ll find them useful. 

As always, keep asking questions! I'm here to support you and continue building our community. My hope is to gather my followers from a few different platforms and join them here, so please subscribe, follow, send in your questions in the comments or the podcast website AskChrista.com. That's Christa with a CH. 

And while you're there, join our mailing list to receive a weekly newsletter that offers additional quick tips and resources. I appreciate everyone's support. And if you have a question about business challenges and workplace issues, Ask Christa!

Additional Resources:

Ultimate guide to startup advisors: Are they worth your time & equity? | LinkedIn. (2023, September 1). https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ultimate-guide-startup-advisors-worth-your-time-equity-simon-ulrich-1c/

Wisbey, S. (2023, July 5). The Ultimate Guide to Startup Advisors. GrowthMentor. https://www.growthmentor.com/blog/startup-advisors/