Adam Torres and Callum Laing discuss serving on boards.
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Show Notes:
What does it take to get your first board seat? In this episode, Adam Torres and Callum Laing, Founder of Veblen Director Programmme, explore serving on boards and how entrepreneurs can start boards for their companies.
About Callum Laing
Callum Laing is the Founder of the Veblen Director Programme and a Partner at Unity Group. With over 25 years of entrepreneurial experience, Callum has founded and grown companies across various countries and industries, focusing on helping small businesses access capital markets for the past decade. Since joining Unity Group, he has completed over 100 M&A transactions, with most reaching public markets.
Callum is also the author of four business books, including the bestsellers ‘Progressive Partnerships – The Future of Business,’ ‘Agglomerate – From Idea to IPO in 12 months,’ and ‘Entrepreneurial Investing.’ His latest book, ‘Boardroom Blueprint,’ offers valuable insights into securing board positions.
Based in Singapore, Callum is regularly featured in media and as a public speaker at global events. He has held positions as High Commissioner to Singapore for the World Business Angel Forum and Ambassador to DealGateway.com. Callum resides in Singapore with his wife and two daughters.
About Veblen Director Programme
The Veblen Director Program is designed to get you that elusive first Director position and to provide you with an enviable global network of other Directors that you can call on at will for the rest of your career. If you are accepted on the Veblen course you will be assigned your own personal Board of Directors for one year with the specific outcome of getting you your first board seat.
You will have a clear 10 year strategy to leverage that first position into your dream, Tier 1 NED position. You will understand the current weaknesses and requirements of tens of thousands of public Boards around the world and will have the tools to go in there and deliver real value on day 1 of your appointment.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today we have Callum Lang on the line. He’s founder of the Veblen Director Program.
Callum, welcome to the show. Thanks, Adam. Looking forward to it. All right. So, you were referred over to us from Cameron and who was part of the, the program and that we’re going to get into. So, the Veblen Director Program, and he was on his path, and I know up to this point, I know he has some experience.
Secured some board seats. So pretty exciting stuff and I want to get more into the program and really like what it entails, like who it’s right for that kind of thing. And also what people that participate can expect, but just to get us kicked off here, like, in terms , I see the term founder here.
Were you always an entrepreneur? Like, how’d all that begin for you? Yeah, I’ve always been an entrepreneur, so I kind of grew up in a fairly poor neighborhood. So constantly just kind of hustling and I think my first business was washing cars in the local neighborhood and then graduated to selling ice cream to local restaurants and, bars and things.
So yeah, I’ve always been doing that. My first grown up. Job was a first grown up company was a recruitment company selling IP engineers to telcos at the height of the dot com boom, which was sort of late nineties. I was still early twenties at the time. Yeah. And that was very much a case of right place, right time.
I thought I was very, very clever until the bubble burst and I discovered I wasn’t nearly as clever as I thought I was, but yeah, by, by then I was hooked. Man, , that’s one of those life lessons right there. Gotta, hey, it is what it is as they say, yeah. So you’re progressing through, you’re always an entrepreneur, your overhead was much lower when you’re washing cars.
I was talking to somebody about that the other day. I was like, man, when I was a little kid and I didn’t have any employees, my pockets were fat, like. I’m like, all this overhead and stuff. It gets you. I was like, I was like the good old days, they’re dying laughing. They just bought like a Christmas tree farm of all things.
And then we’re talking about the numbers and what that looks like. So we’re going through it and I’m like, man, all this, so they’re still going going back in time. But so now you’re progressing. You’re an entrepreneur. You’re getting more serious. You had your success. com bubble happens.
What happens next? Where do you go next? Yeah. So basically from, from there, I just , kept starting building businesses. I moved out to Asia. So when, when I was doing the. com space, I was kind of looking at the big macro trends and obviously tech was a huge one that I’d made a bet on. One of the other ones that really stuck out, stuck out to me was it was the largest transfer of wealth in history was going from West to East.
So as a young entrepreneur. Kind of made more sense to be on the receiving end of that equation. So I moved out to Asia and I’ve been in Asia for the last 20 plus years, 24 years or something. And I’ve just built building numerous businesses and then. About 10 years ago, with my business partner, we started grouping companies together and taking them public.
And so with various public holding companies around the world and, and we find not in the tech space, but in the sort of the old economy, the. The small businesses actually make up 50 percent of the world’s GDP. We find those companies, but where the founder still wants to keep control. So we put them into a public hold code, but we leave the founder in control.
So it’s their brand. It’s their hiring and firing. It’s their culture. But now when they go and pitch for business, they’re a global PLC. So they can win much bigger contracts. It comes to competing for talent. It’s not really a level playing field, small businesses against big corporates. But now if you’re part of a group of companies in a PLC, you’ve got sister companies, you’ve got stock options.
You can suddenly kind of level the playing field. So we’ve been doing that for about 10 years. I like to think we’ve made every possible mistake along the way, several, several times but having, having a lot of success with that. And it was kind of during that process. That we’ve taken a hundred plus companies public over the last eight or nine years.
And just by nature of doing that, I ended up sitting on a lot of boards. Boards were always kind of like a mystery to me. I remember as an employee in a big company, everything grinds to a halt once a quarter because there’s a board meeting and Everyone’s running around, oh, I’ve got to get everything ready for the board.
And they’re kind of like these mythical creatures that fly in and have a board meeting and espouse wisdom and ruin all your plans and then fly off again. And then I started sitting on boards and not only what did I find it slightly underwhelming I realized that there was quite a few people.
We’re on boards for the wrong reasons. It was all about that kind of personal wealth rather than actually helping stakeholders. And there was a lot of very, very talented people that weren’t getting board seats because they were the wrong gender. They didn’t look the right way. They hadn’t gone to the right schools.
They weren’t well connected. It really was very evident what a small club it is. And as an entrepreneur kind of seeing talent overlooked is always frustrating. And so. I learned a few hacks and tricks about how you can get into board seats and get that valuable board experience because no, no one will hire you on a board unless you’ve got board experience.
So it’s kind of right back to the beginning of your career again, when you can’t get a job because you haven’t got work experience and you can’t get a job because they won’t give you a job. You kind of have that at the other end of the equation with boards as well. So I set up the Veblen direct program nearly two years ago and.
It was really kind of to help women, minorities, first timers to get onto the bottom of the board ladder. And then you can escalate very, very quickly. And, and I think in the last year, more than 200 members have got more than 300 board seats. Wow. So it’s yeah, it’s really, really impressive. And obviously that’s, I’m not going to lie.
That’s an incredibly valuable network for me to, to work with. I have people like Cameron that is sitting on awesome boards and yeah, it’s just really exciting. And I think also because I come from an entrepreneurial background, a lot of our clients are executives and managers that that sort of want to go up this This career path, but I’m also a huge believer that entrepreneurs, not only should they be sitting on somebody else’s board, but every entrepreneur should have their own board.
Even just if it’s a board of advisors, even if you’re just at the ideation stage, you haven’t even sold your first product, get a board of advisors around you. It doesn’t need to cost you anything. But it’s so important to have people to bounce ideas off and and then I think every entrepreneur should sit on another board.
And whenever I say this, entrepreneurs always kind of say, well, look, I’m already doing 24 hours a day, right? How can I think about somebody else’s company? But my answer to that is a, you learn so much when we’re in our own business. We know the whole thing’s held together with chicken wire and masking tape, right?
Everybody else’s business looks really smooth and efficient and functioning and great. So when you go and sit on the board of another company, you realize that all companies are a little bit. Broken and so, but they’ve probably fixed things that you haven’t yet fixed and you’ve probably fixed things that they haven’t yet.
And that’s very valuable. And I also think there is no better networking than the, the networking of sitting on a board and meet incredible people. It gives you huge credibility. So if you think about your early clients, early staff, early investors, if they’re just joining. Your company and you’re a startup.
Well, there’s a big, big risk with that, but if you’re a startup, but you’re also sitting on the boards of two or three other companies, you’ve clearly got credibility and experience and contacts. And so it just makes you a safer, safer bet. So yeah, I’m kind of a big. Passionate advocate for not only setting up their own boards, but sitting on other boards, much earlier in the process.
Yeah. What do you think some of the reasons are for your, high level of success with, people that have gone through your program, actually obtaining board seats? Like, what do you think that comes from? So I think it’s just an awareness of the game and explaining the game to people.
So I think if, if you decided I want to join the board of a company, What you’ll probably do is go to a recruitment site or LinkedIn and start looking for board seats. There are 330 million companies in the world, less than 1 percent of them have an active, actual board, active functioning board. And so if you’re applying for a board seat on one of those.
There’s that’s a tiny number of board seats amongst this huge population. Not only that, boards will never hire strangers. They just don’t do it. As speaking sort, from experience, we hire the person we want to hire. And then if HR makes us put out a job advert, we put out a job advert. But even that I’d say 99 percent of job ads for board seats are just recruitment companies fishing for CVs.
One of our first rules is never apply for a board seat, create a board seat. It’s much, much easier to go and find a company that doesn’t yet have a board seat. A board and help them create a board. We sort of have a sequential step that we take all of our members through.
They join a small advisory board. They leverage that to go and create an advisory board for another company. They leverage that an apprentice on a publicly listed company board, and then they leverage that apprenticeship to get an actual board seat. Now all the way through, you can be earning money from, from doing these as Even as an unpaid advisor, you can make a lot of money by doing introductions helping companies to raise capital, helping them to meet new clients.
So there’s, some of our members are making hundreds of thousands of dollars in their first year even in unpaid advisory positions. So. Yeah, it can be quite, quite lucrative as well. Yeah. That’s interesting. Why do you think some few companies actually have active boards?
Like that’s an interesting stat that you bring up. Yeah. Look, I kind of stumbled upon it as a young entrepreneur I didn’t even have the terminology to call it an advisory board. What I used to do was just find more experienced entrepreneurs than me, take them out drunk and try and learn their secrets.
The good old fashioned way. I got you. And then we call that an advisory board and it looks much better on LinkedIn. Yeah.
There’s an element of truth to all that, but oh, no, for sure. But I think a lot of us tend to think a board is something that you do when you’re much, much. Bigger and it’s gonna be expensive, and, and you’ve got people holding you back in some way or constraining you. And, and that’s not what a board should be, especially in the early stages.
Mm-Hmm. . So I was basically using advisory boards and , not oftentimes the advice isn’t always great. So if I go and find somebody that’s. A board middle manager and I say, Hey, would you like to join my advisory board now for a board middle manager at Microsoft? That’s great.
Because all of them dream of being entrepreneurs, but they haven’t. Made the leap yet. So they can live vicariously for you. They’re more than happy to do it for free. Plus they get to meet your other advisors as well. And now you can go and tell everyone that you’ve got someone from Microsoft on your board.
Like, that’s a huge credibility boost. It could be the janitor at Microsoft. It doesn’t really matter. You can leverage it. I think people kind of overcomplicate it. They think it has to be very expensive. They think you have to get these people with loads of board experience. You don’t, you’re learning and, and that’s kind of, you just want to get on the bottom of the ladder.
And, and I think also entrepreneurs, if you have ambitions of becoming a big Ultimately, every single successful company, you can think of has an active functioning board. The sooner you can get the hang of working with a board, the better it is. There’s clearly some value to it. Otherwise, these successful companies wouldn’t do it.
, I think , there’s lots of reasons why it’s good to start sooner rather. Mm-Hmm. Than later. Mm-Hmm. , what do you think like as some of the entrepreneurs that are, listening to this now, they’re gonna be thinking about, okay. Well, first thing, one thing that you mentioned to me that I never considered, which is by participating in the boards, you get to see, , how other.
Board members are operating. You get to see how other companies are. You get to like that a different level of networking with different board members. So that in itself is a benefit for sure. . Now when they start, they look back and they start thinking about their own company, they’re like, okay, like, as you obviously you’re taking that learning, you have different things that you can apply, you have different, like, and that’s the whole point, right?
Or part of the point I should say. So as you start. Climbing up that board ladder, like what can that look like? Cause that’s interesting too. So you start off, I like the way you said it at the bottom. Like we just got to get, we got to get in the game. I don’t know if you said at the bottom, but we got, it’s like, put me in the game coach.
So now you’re in the game. What can that look like as those that really, cause I’m guessing there’s two, Maybe there’s two, maybe there’s more different categories, but some start. And then they’re like, okay, this is what I thought it was. This is amazing. I want to go further and further and further.
Some are like, okay, this was a great experience, but maybe I don’t want to go further. I want to stay at a certain level. Possibly there’s going to be a couple of those, but what does it look like for those that want to continue to rise up the ranks? Like, what does that, that journey look like? Yeah. Can it look like, or can it look like.
No, no, you’re, you’re right. And it’s a very good observation because , if you going up the ladder, if you say I want, my goal is I want to be on the board of SpaceX. Yeah. You don’t start by applying for. If you had to apply, you’re not getting it. That’s a good one. You’re not getting there.
Go ahead. Yeah. And in fact, like if you. Really wanted to get onto a board of a big company like that. Your best bet is getting onto a board of a company that would be bought by them. And then negotiating a board seat as part of the settlement. But look , the, sort of the natural progression is you start with small companies, you move to mid tier companies and then you kind of go into publicly listed.
Companies and small micro micro, small caps, meet caps and big caps, large caps. What we do find is a lot of people start in the private space and just having so much fun. Like, I’ll give you an example. One of our one of our members as you’re based in the U. S. , he actually reached out to me and he was, I saw a webinar I did.
He reached out to me. He said, look, this sounds amazing, but I’m in my seventies. Am I too old for this? And he was, had been a successful entrepreneur. He’s now retired. And I said, no, no, look, it’d be great. Within joining, within the first three months of joining us, he was sitting on the boards of three small companies, two of them were in Europe.
One was in Asia. Is he too smug? Is he too over that? Yeah, right. They’ve roped him in. You better bring all that knowledge into this company. Exactly. The smart people that were running those companies knew. Go ahead. Continue. Yeah, I get it. I see. No, no, no. But what was interesting? , so he was having a great time.
They were getting huge value from it. What he decided to do. To add more value was he started blogging about it on LinkedIn. So he started talking about his experiences, how he’s adding value, what he was learning as he went through the process. An S and P 500 company saw his blog, reached out to him and said, Hey, could we talk to you about joining our board?
Now it wasn’t the, it wasn’t the main board. It was a second tier, like these big companies have that. They offered him, they had an interview with him. They offered him a board position, 160, 000 us a year. And he, he turned it down because he was having so much fun with the small private companies. He’s like, I don’t want the headache of big companies.
It’s a great observation from you. Like some people will decide that they just want to stay at that level. But look, I think we did a survey recently of our members and said like, why, why, what’s your primary reason for joining a board? And actually, the number one thing that came up was they wanted to make a bigger impact and, if you’re a small business owner, there’s a limit to what you can do.
If you’re an employee, there’s a limit to how you can sit on a board. It gives you that, that extra leverage. Obviously it can be incredibly lucrative. The top board members are earning millions of dollars in, in compensation for what is ultimately a part time role. But I think actually even beyond the salaries that the, the opportunities that you get, , the strategic conversations that you have, again, I think that’s another thing for entrepreneurs.
We’re so in the business. Often we can’t see the wood for the trees because we’re just. in it and fighting fires. And when you force yourself to come out of that environment, sit on a board of another company where you’re not allowed, like as a director, you’re not supposed to go in and fiddle with it.
It’s, it’s Moses in fingers out as the expression that we use., you have to think strategically about somebody else’s business. And when you do that, it kind of forces you to put on a different pair of glasses, see the world in a different way. And then you go back to your own company and go, why am I doing it like that?
Like, that makes no sense at all. But because you were so close to it, you couldn’t see it previously. So. Yeah, there’s a lot of different benefits that people get out of it, and it really kind of, you can take it as far as you want to go. Well, Callum, this has been a lot of fun having you on the show today and getting to know more about Veblen director program and why you started it and really how you’re helping companies out there and, and get board members and also, and having people become board members themselves.
So a lot, a lot of different like benefits here. And you’re right. That is an insane network you have which is amazing. That being said, for the people that are listening or watching this, if they want to learn more, cause they maybe want to, put their hat in the ring for their first board seat, or try to start figuring this out and get more in the weeds on this, how do people get more information, how do they connect?
Yeah. So probably the easiest thing to do. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, mention this podcast and I’ll accept your connection. Or go to Veblen directors. com and we’ve got a. Video they can watch, they can get a free copy of my book, Order and Blueprint. They can speak to one of the teams, see whether it would be right for them.
If you’ve got a company and you’d like some Veblen trained board advisors, it doesn’t cost anything. You feel free to apply and we’ll send you amazing individuals and you can see whether you want them to join your, your board. Awesome. And , for everybody listening to this, just so you know, we’ll put the links to all, to Veblen director program in the, in the show notes, so you can just click on the link and head right on over.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or that follow button. We have many more mission based individuals coming up on the line and we don’t want you to miss a thing. So again, hit that subscribe or follow and Callum again, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Really appreciate it. Adam, it’s been a pleasure. It’s been fun.