It’s a match! — your startup’s perfect advisor.

The best help you can get is someone who genuinely cares and knows how to help you get what you don’t even know you want.
― Richie Norton

Since the time Heal was just as an idea in my mind, I have been fortunate enough to have met some incredible people along the way open to sharing their stories and journies in start-up success and lessons learned. One thing common among these stories that seemed blurry to me at that time was the role and positioning of an advisor. I understood the possibility of having the right motivated advisor can make or break a startup, but didn’t quite understand what it is that they do beyond the obvious — to advise. Are there tasks to be assigned? How much out of their way do they go to help, share knowledge, experience, and wisdom they already have? Do they do any research? Are they expected to open their Rolodex?

I read numerous articles suggesting that all the above needs to be done and even so far as to say agree to rules to keep and maintain the relationship professional. While I don’t disagree with a formal agreement, I can’t imagine all the rules of engagement to be signed & sealed. After all, I do believe an advisor deserves to have a stake in the company either in the form of equity or sometimes even consultation fees or a combination thereof and hence will benefit when providing the best help and support the startup needs. I am here to tell you I don’t buy into any of the rules needed to get an advisor and why you shouldn’t either. I always knew one thing, I didn’t just want to get an advisor, because it looked good for our company profile.

We finally put the final touches on our Heal pitch deck and ready to practice our pitch with friends and family, before we meet with investors. The only outsider feedback I got was with some guidance from my mentor. Initial feedback was more so to see if we are representing ourselves accurately & well. Is the value proposition clear? Heal is positioned in the health-care, mental health, and wellness space and we wanted to be clear that our science-based approach shows in the pitch.

On the flip side of things, I also felt the need to also speak to friends who are in the recovery/wellness industry and get their sense of how realistic we are in solving a real-world problem. Are we being delusional when we think of our potential $1.2B market share? Is our value proposition towards mental health, addiction, and wellness clear? Are we clear in showing the value proposition for the recovery center like we are in showing value proposition for the end-client? This is when I started getting more clarity on what an advisor can potentially do for Heal.

So, that’s when I started to dig some more & found a whole new world of portals, websites and paid community services where you can find advisors and even co-founders. Cofounders lab has a freemium model for finding advisors. GrowthMentor have a few mentors that “advertise” for free sessions with them. I tried out both and gave up right after filling out my profile. The advisor profiles were weak and there wasn’t an easy way to even see more than just their basic “about me” page. Micromentor seemed to offer a great value proposition of community building with no payment structure to help find an advisor. Easy on-boarding process, but once done, I was disappointed to find vendors selling services. After some weeding, I did find a few people to connect with, but not advisor ready. At one point I even thought it might be OK to pay a broker fee but only after confirming them as an advisor through an escrow service, provided they included contracts NDA’s and such as a part of the bundle but didn't find any that did this. They outright charge a monthly fee with no support or commitment towards outcome and seemed fishier than a fishy dating site.

So, disappointed I reverted to making connections the old fashioned way, through a myriad of networking events and contacting friends. A few events and weeks later, I ended up connecting to some folks who were also very passionate about working in more self-satisfying areas, like meditation, mindfulness, health, wellness, and more importantly passionate to help others like Heal succeed.

Eventually, these conversations made me believe that following hard and fast rules to find an advisor as suggested by many others online might not be the right way for us to look at an advisor.

I am sharing 8 guidelines I’ve followed so far that can also help you organically find an advisor.

Don’t confuse an advisor with a mentor — Mentors are focused on their mentee, while an advisor focus is the startup. Though there can be a fine line, make the difference clear, and operate with this difference in mind.

Get to know their working habits well — Even before you commit them to an advisory role, spend a few calls when getting them up-to-speed with your company goals to understand their modus operandi. Are they better responding on emails, do they prefer frequently scheduled calls, are they more ad-hoc. On one occasion a potential advisor preferred early AM calls and did his best work then, since I am an early riser myself, it felt like we were the only two members of an “early to rise” cult and bonded immediately on how we got more done in a day. These seemingly little things do matter in the long run as smooth communication just doesn’t happen, it has to be worked on consciously.

Assess beforehand how future disagreements are handled — go deep in understanding not only the intention of disagreements but also the constructive nature to resolve them to align with your startup vision. This can usually be gauged by both on issues such as direction. As much as you are looking for an advisor, the advisor is also interviewing you to see how well you respond to suggestions that might question your direction and sometimes motive.

Let them know you permit them to assist especially when you think you don’t need it — You might think you need an advisor when you need them. An advisor to your startup should feel like they have the permission and freedom to ask, speak and challenge decisions when they see fit for maximum alignment. This way they are not only there on an as you need bases, but they are there when they believe they need to be there as well.

Ability to address the varied set of situations and challenges — know that for an early-stage startup such as Heal, it might not be the best idea to have an advisor just for a very specific challenge. For example, while you might be in a situation where revenue growth may be a challenge today, but to estimate that is going to be your only challenge forever is a bit naive. A good advisor will be able to address a variety of challenges with the same balanced approach. This clearly shows the ability of both the startup and the advisor the ensure they read and align with upcoming challenges and situations before it turns into a serious roadblock. If there is misalignment these challenges serve a good way to realign and move with the best foot forward. Else what might end up happening is needing multiple advisors for different areas of expertise, which is not a bad thing, but know that you will also have to manage the dynamics of the advisors themselves, which is whole another can of worms for a small startup to deal with.

Expectations for doing work — don’t expect the advisor to come in to take action items. Every single advisor I know is advising multiple companies. They don’t have the time or patience to work with startup’s looking to pile work on them. So, knowing ahead of time that it’s up to the startup to do all the heavy lifting and use the advisor to help validate decisions made is in the best interest of the company. If you feel like you need your advisor to take on actual tasks, you have a gap in your company structure that needs to be addressed separately.

Giving credit where credit is due — Much like you want to share all your startup troubles, roadblocks, and tough decision points with your advisor, to help you get through them, you also want to be able to do post-mortem assessments of the success. Giving your advisor credit to your collaboration will want them to go further every single time in the future and also give you a moment to enjoy the fruits of your partnership.

Find someone to enjoy this journey with — While we realize there are going to be ups and downs in business, we are all clearly in for the ride as much as we are in for the success. So, find someone who you can weather the storms with the same level of enthusiasm as riding on your customer success story.

Despite the initial success of Heal this past year at the Wellness Retreat Recovery Center and other places, including taking the top honors of for the INNovative project by the SLO county, CA behavioral health department, I cannot tell you how many times I hear from both investors and potential advisors, that we are early and they want to work with more mature companies. On the flip side, I am happy to continue making these connections early, learn more about what ticks for Heal & better position ourselves to these expectant funding challenges early on.

So, like we are doing — start early, stay with the process of organically finding your advisor(s), work on your collaborative and complementary strengths, keep even your potential advisors informed on progress and struggles and you will be certain to find the land the advisor as soon as the time is right.