Make Boards Work

Make Boards Work aspires to be the number one business podcast for all those who aim to take their board work to the next level.Manuel has been running a PE-backed roll-up in education. Capital was the easy part.He scaled from around 50 people to nearly 250 in two years. The deals weren't the bottleneck. The money wasn't either. The people were.

Make Boards Work aspires to be the number one business podcast for all those who aim to take their board work to the next level.We got into something Joanna does not usually talk about publicly. What it's actually like running a family business where the board is your cousins, your siblings, your parents, your uncles, and your in-laws.In a family board, the most important thing isn't the numbers.The most important thing is that everybody's happy. That's the good and the bad of it, all wrapped into one.We also talked about the other end of the spectrum - sitting on a venture-backed startup board where people shout at each other, the company almost runs out of money month to month, and everyone in the room has their own capital on the line.Two completely different worlds. Joanna has learned from both. And so can you:If you're in a family business, working with investors, or trying to figure out what a board should actually do for you, I think this one's worth a listen.

Make Boards Work aspires to be the number one business podcast for all those who aim to take their board work to the next level. Ritesh Doshi served on someone else's board for 7 years before he built his own.7 years in someone else's room, noticing what worked and what didn't.When he eventually resigned from that seat to focus on his business, he asked the person he'd been advising to join his own board instead.The board he then built around himself is the board he wished he had served on.We went deep on intentional composition, finite terms, skip-level access, and the question every family-business board should answer first.

We covered a lot of ground - what the Navy taught Chuck about running a company, why he builds his advisory boards specifically around his blind spots, and the difference between healthy ego and toxic ego in the boardroom.One thing we kept coming back to: the worst place to be as a CEO isn't uncertainty. It's being absolutely certain and absolutely wrong. That's where a good board earns its keep.

We got into something I don't think gets discussed enough, how governance actually works (and often doesn't) in family businesses. The unwritten rules. The baggage. The sibling who was bad at math now running finance. We also talked about what Stefan has come to believe is the crowning moment of entrepreneurship: knowing when to let go. When you're no longer the best owner.And a line Stefan emphasizes: sunlight is the best disinfectant. Conflicts of interest handled at the start are rarely a big deal. Handled late, they destroy trust.If you work with family businesses, sit on boards, or are thinking about bringing in outside capital, I think you'll find this one useful.

We talked about what actually happens inside boardrooms when things go wrong. The ego games. The power imbalances. The moments where trust breaks and nobody recovers.Henri shared a line he has been saying for years: there are only two ways to have a real voice on a board. As chairperson. Or as the one board member closest to the founder.Everything else is decoration.We also got into the prisoner's dilemma that plays out when a company is dying. Why investors send associates instead of partners, and what that really signals. And why IQ is massively overrated in the boardroom.