Dominic Joseph - Boards for founders: how boards add the most value to high-growth companies

🎙️ You can listen to the full podcast interview with Dominic Joseph on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube.

Dominic Joseph co-founded Captify, the world’s second largest independent holder of search data, after Google. Now a plural NED and Chair of tech scale-ups, Dominic is also founding partner at Creative Capital Ventures Group, a growth consultancy for post Series-A companies. Tune in to his discussion with Nurole CEO Oliver Cummings to hear his thoughts on:

• When and why did you first have a board at Captify? (2:15)
• How did you set your first board up? (4:00)
• What kind of value did board members bring individually versus as a group? (4:41)
• What was the balance between presentation and discussion in your interactions with the board? (6:26)
• Where did the board add most value to you as CEO? (7:22)
• What do you think about annual budget setting and tracking versus a more agile approach? (12:07)
• What touch points did you have with board members between formal meetings? (14:53)
• Which board members did you rely on for what? (16:09)
• What value did you get from being challenged in the boardroom? (19:49)
• What advice would you give to founders thinking about board composition? (21:35)
• Did you have a former CEO on your board? (23:45)
• Did you work with coaches? (25:58)
• What tools can board members use to help founders in growth journeys? (27:56)
• How can founders get the most from investor-directors? (30:14)
• How can investor-directors add most value to founders? (32:45)
• ⚡The Lightning Round ⚡(34:30)   

** This manuscript has been generated by AI and contains inaccuracies**

Oliver Cummings: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to another episode of Enter the Boardroom with Neuro, the business podcast that brings the boardroom to you. I'm your host Oliver Cummings, CEO of Neuroll, the board search specialist and market leader bringing science to the art of board hiring. Before we get into the interview, I want to let you know about the Neuroll board community.

One of my favorite elements is the Neuroll mastermind. a safe haven for board members to discuss challenges and opportunities with peers. As an observer, I've been struck by how valuable it is to just listen to these discussions, which often make me more aware of my own blind spots as a board member. It was this realization that catalyzed the launch of the New Rob Board Community Discussion Forum, where members can seek advice and share experiences on pressing challenges and opportunities openly or anonymously.

I always loved the idea of being able to tap into the hive mind of the New Rob Board Community. and get its best thinking of tapping into its network to open stubbornly closed doors. Well, now you can. Recent popular discussions [00:01:00] include how to reconcile CEO board differences about a chair candidate. How do I manage conflicts of interest as I go plural?

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As well as discussion threads, you'll benefit from smart online networking, one to one career guidance with our headhunters, third party board roles, mastermind groups, and Q& As with senior board members. Head to community. newroll. com to find out more. Today's guest, Dominic Joseph, is co founder of Captify, the world's second largest independent holder of search data, after Google.

Dominic was CEO of Captify from 2011 to 2023, taking the business through Series A and B, launching in the US, and ultimately exiting to US private equity. Now, he remains a board member at Capitify, founder of Pivotal, a growth consultancy for [00:02:00] post Series A companies, and a board member of a number of tech oriented firms, Patient Master, Vyde, and Planet.

Fans, where he is chair. Dolek, a huge welcome and thank you so much for joining us today. 

Dominic Joseph: Thanks Oliver, lovely to be here. Thank you, uh, for the invite and great to see all the work that you guys are doing. 

Oliver Cummings: You've been through an amazing journey and the full founder journey of launching, scaling, and successfully exiting.

When and why did you first have a board at Captify? 

Dominic Joseph: We started to assemble one probably when we were starting to think about our Series A fundraise back in 2012. we were probably about a year into driving revenue and realised that we needed to have a few people around us to help us with the raise. A lot of companies tend to think that they, they don't need a board until investment has come in, but I actually don't think that's right.

I think really as your company is starting to generate revenue, you then start to have investment decisions that are going to shape the future of the business. Whether you're going to be investing in different product lines or different territories or setting the budget for the next [00:03:00] year or setting the budget or forecast.

for a fundraise, that's exactly when you should be using a board, in my opinion, to help give confidence to the CEO and optionality to the CEO and how you position those different versions that you could go down. So for me, it's just as soon as there starts to be real optionality with the roots, that's when it's good time to do it.

So we started to put together, we brought in a chairman at that point who was a seasoned CEO and a media veteran who knew lots of people. And, uh, and then we had him on the deck. And so I wouldn't say it was really a fun formed board at that point, but it was a starting to take shape. And then once our series A went through, we had a couple of people from the series A investors, the panoramic VC on the board.

And that's when it became really formal. 

Oliver Cummings: When you say a form board, lots of founders I talked to speak with some trepidation about the idea of having a board and thinking about all the. pain that it entails. What was your setup there? 

Dominic Joseph: Uh, I'm always surprised by that. I've had a, you're right, I've had a couple of founders who are really hesitant to put a board [00:04:00] together.

One in particular. And look, I don't think having a board at the early stage of the company means that it's going to create a whole load of work. This should be information that's already at your fingertips, really. So you should have a plan for next year. You should have a budget to get there. You should be able to reel off what's in the pipeline and what's in the room.

Reporting of the last couple of months. So this is, this information shouldn't be too hard to pull together. And obviously if you've got people around you on your board that appreciate that you're a, it's all hands on deck and you're probably covering a lot of different jobs at the same time as a early stage CEO, then it shouldn't be too much additional work.

It really is there to help the CEO in the early stages. And then obviously as the company gets bigger and there's more work needed to prepare for the board meeting, but typically you'll also have a CFO at that point who will be helping put it together. 

Oliver Cummings: What one of the things that I found with my own advisory board is that often it's easier to get value out of them on a one to one basis rather than bringing them all together in a group where sometimes it can feel like you're herding cats.

I've definitely learned how to get more value out of that group dynamic and when to use it. What was your [00:05:00] approach there to when to get everybody together and have a group versus using the board members on a one to one basis?

Dominic Joseph: I think group decisioning is important for the sort of formality of, okay, we're going down this route.

I think you can certainly have one on one sessions with the specific board members as to, or advisors or strategic advisors as to their specific skill sets. Any kind of big product decision, any kind of major hiring plan decisions, any, you know, Budgeting decisions for the year ahead, I think needs to be run through on a collective with the board.

I'm a big fan of information being sent in advance, well in advance. And I think that's a really common thing that everyone struggles with. So that the board meeting can really be focused around a couple of key discussion points rather than reporting. So it's helpful if that information can be sent out well in advance.

Everyone can have time to digest, understand the numbers, maybe think a few questions back and forth privately to the CEO. And I think that stops things getting called out and singled out and rabbit holes going down that are not important to everybody else. And then three or four, [00:06:00] maybe sometimes even one or two big discussion points that can then, you can then use that collective well to get some sort of agreement on.

And actually it is not a hindrance to the CEO. Confidence in the decision making that they haven't done this on their own. And they can say, Oh, this is what I think is the right thing to do. But it's good to frame each is going to put the discussion points out with a framing of each one so that you can then everybody can then base it on as much data as possible and go in there and make that decision together.

Oliver Cummings: When would you present in a board environment as opposed to having a discussion? I often think, what is the point of presenting in a boardroom? You could just record it and do a better job of recording, send it round, people can listen to it earlier. Versus using the magic of having people sparking off each other in real time for those discussions. What was your mix of presentation versus discussion? How did you think about that? 

Dominic Joseph: It's usually always a presentation in my experience, it just needs to be thought through if it's some information. I think you don't need to go through every single page, but it's certainly a sort of top line summary, uh, to, [00:07:00] to explain the thinking behind each avenue you might be going down or each option you might be looking at, and then it gives a chance for people to question things, create those answers, which provide a bit of context around the topic.

So, yeah. Typically, I would spend a lot of time preparing a presentation with maybe my chief product officer or my chief financial officer or other individuals, knowing that I framed it well and make it available to questions on the fly. 

Oliver Cummings: Where did the board add most value for you as CEO? Can you talk through the journey, the different sort of critical junctures in the journey of where you felt the board really came into its own?

Dominic Joseph: I think the board works pretty well generally and on agreeing on the key topics to go down. I think the board works well when the CEO is challenged in a constructive way rather than people just throwing their weight around in a room. And I was, I've been very fortunate at Cat5 that I haven't really ever had that through the different shapes of the boards over the years.

The individuals on the board and the collective of the board have generally been productive, supportive, engaging, and positive in the way that they've approached things. The things, and certainly we had [00:08:00] some tensions over time with key investment decisions when I was to expand into the U S there was some pushback and it took longer than I assumed it was going to be a, an immediate agreement from everybody.

And it was, there was pushback and had to go away and work those models harder and really think through the. The downside, for example, they would say things that, yeah, this is all great. I can see that there's potential here, but you haven't really planned out for what happens if things go really well.

And you plan for a downside, you frame that there's a potential downside to move to the U. S. and expand into the U. S., but you haven't actually properly planned out what happens if things go well and it sucks all your resource into launching and scaling that operation over in the U. S. And the cashflow demands that are going to be needed if you do take huge amounts of orders from the U.

S., et cetera. So there was things like that, which at first I resisted and I thought, oh, God, this is making us too slow. I would need to be quicker. I used to just go and that's obviously my sort of, maybe my entrepreneurial instinct that we just, just go and attack the opportunity straight away. But it probably only set us back by three or four months, maybe six months as we worked through the options in, in much more detail.

And of course it ends up being somewhere [00:09:00] in between the two. It was neither their version or my version. It was somewhere in between. I don't think it held us back in the business and it just gave us a more thorough approach to how we expanded there. 

Oliver Cummings: Okay, so the board helped there with thinking about your geographic expansion and how to avoid, I suppose, known pitfalls that they had come across before.

What are the other critical areas that you felt you got a lot of value from? 

Dominic Joseph: Obviously personnel issues, reorging the company, hiring plans, were all things that have been discussed and worked through bit by bit. I think one of the things I did actually like about the private equity approach compared to the European VCs was the PE firm.

We'd always have at the end of the board meeting, an extra session with just me on my own. And actually a lot of the senior leadership team would all leave the room. And, and that was always a really interesting session. I often take half an hour, sometimes might take an hour and they might say, how are you coping?

Or it might be things about the leadership team and the structure of it and the workload that people have and the way things are flowing through. And I think that was quite a good experience because it firstly [00:10:00] makes you feel like it's quite interesting because you don't know what they're going to ask you in that session.

So you're just speaking on the fly about things. And I think it was supportive. I felt like it was a really personally supportive way to engage me at the end of a board meeting. So I think I would probably take that on to doing that now with companies that I'm on the board of or chair of over the next few years.

To be able to get it, obviously you've got to have a big enough company really for that to be really worthwhile. For example, one of the companies I'm working in is very early stage at the moment, I have plenty of one on one with time with the CEI, so I don't really need that kind of session for that, but only as the company is bigger and you have an exec team of all the different C suite and ranks that exist there.

But yeah, I think other examples, like the first. Three, four months of the year is budgeting. It's almost always all around budgeting. Then you get to halfway through the year and all the debates around that and pay rises and getting that all signed off. And is it going to be 4%? This is what the board always pushes for.

Is it going to be the 9 percent that your team is all demanding? And then it's working out the conversation plans for everybody and agreeing all of those. And then it's how does that feed through to the goals of the [00:11:00] company? And so there's a lot of, I'd say the first six months is a lot of housekeeping as you work through the budget and all the mechanics of it.

that exist and flow through into that budget. H2 tends to be a case of, okay, how are we doing against the budget that we've set and then start to make adjustments as and when it's needed. It can be that you've grown faster than the budget and you need to accelerate certain areas and work through the different options there.

It could be that things have come up, client stuff. It could be that there's international things. And then as you start to build towards Q4, you start to really think about next year, start to plan for next year. The board is an engaging. Things throughout the whole year as the company gets more and more mature.

In the UK it tends to be a monthly board meeting. In the U S it's a quarterly board meeting with almost, well, weekly CEO updates, where you might have one or two topics that you discuss on a weekly basis. I much prefer a quarterly board meeting with a weekly cash up. Once the, once the company's at a certain stage, a monthly board meeting is fine.

Just so cadence wise. But I do prefer the bigger quarterly board meetings with some really meaty decisions that are going to be made. And then just more and more of a regular top up on information. So it depends on the [00:12:00] cadence of the board meetings and how you have that structured as to how information might flow, but that gives you an idea of the types of topics that we've been working through throughout the year.

Oliver Cummings: It feels to me that there are two sorts of organizations and boards. One, where they take the approach that you outlined there, where you have an annual budget setting process and then track that through. And another which seems to be more on the rise, which is a more agile approach, where there is no budget as such, constantly making decisions on a monthly, weekly basis. How did that set up that you had work for you and did you explore a more agile approach? 

Dominic Joseph: I think it depends. So earlier stage companies that are, that have one revenue line or have one territory they're working with, small amount of teams, I think you could definitely keep it agile and the various of my companies we do that.

We, we, on a, on a, almost on a monthly basis, we'll decide investment decisions. When you have a bigger company and many revenue streams, international teams, I think that's almost impossible to do because you need to give your leaders and managers, okay, [00:13:00] you can hire, they start hiring a scope. They start that hiring plan that takes many months of work, drawing up the specs, going through all the interviewing.

And so to then start moving things around, I think would be very difficult for them to manage. So I think, for example, a marketing budget would typically be done twice a year. And that's because there is a sequence of events that are going to happen and you can't play around with that too much because once they've committed, there's probably five, six months of work to lead up to those things.

Engineering talent, again, slightly different, very difficult to play around with that too much throughout the year because projects start, teams, engineers have very specific skill sets. Again, you can't really play around with that. Once you've hired that team, you can't transfer those skills into another team.

We'd want to change the product to being more from a more front end focusing or a low latency database thing, a complete different engineers. So again, tricky to muck around with a budget. And so typically budgets will be fixed and then everybody will go and work on those. And then throughout the six months, we'll have to assess how we're doing against revenue.

And if there's big variation on that, then we might have to review it fast. But [00:14:00] in my mind as CEO and certainly with the CFO and with the board, we'd have already prepared downside triggers or levers that we'll pull to pull back throughout that six month period before we do a re forecast or a re budget so that we can keep some control if we absolutely need to, if things have taken a turn for the worse.

And of course, in the last four years, I don't think we're going to be tested more on budgeting, agile budgeting, changing things around throughout the year as we've had COVID. Brexit, actually Brexit, COVID, everything that's happened ever since it's been a constant process. And I think the probably finance teams need to be slightly bigger than before.

I think it becomes too much of a bottleneck going through the CFO all the time. And the CFO really needs to start bringing in people into all of these discussions, into all of these decisions as soon as possible, because otherwise it becomes a CEO, a CFO bottleneck, which can be damaging to how fast the company can move and respond to things as they come up.

Certainly been a learning in the last few years. 

Oliver Cummings: You talk there about the meetings that you have in between the formal board meetings. How would [00:15:00] you use those and what other touch points did you have with board members outside of those meetings? 

Dominic Joseph: So I think it's really helpful for the CEO to have a relationship with board members where they can have a call separately to the board meeting and get advice.

Um, as a senior, I think it's helpful to reach out to board members, get their thoughts in advance, pick their brains, know how they're going to be thinking as you bring these things up into the board meeting and bring them on side. And I think dropping bombs in a board meeting where people are hearing it for the first time never works well.

I would avoid from avoid doing that at all costs. And that of course you learn over the years to manage expectations. You to, to eke out bad news in advance on an individual basis, if you can, because people start to behave differently, if they're in a pack and can get the worst behaviors out of everyone on the board, in my opinion.

So, yeah, I think one on one chats, maybe each week with a phone call, half an hour. I used to have, um, regular phone calls with individuals. They'd phone me up and say, yeah, what's going on? I've got this way of driving business here. It can be this partnership or it could be this productive stuff to helping [00:16:00] in the working of the business.

And then at that point, it could be that, how it could be that I'd asked. the board member. I'm going to be bringing this up in the next board meeting. How do you think would be a good way to frame that? 

Oliver Cummings: A previous guest, Kathy Turner, advised those looking for board roles to think about which member of the executive would call them as they were thinking about how to position themselves as board members.

How did you think about your board and who did you call for what? 

Dominic Joseph: So, typically you always have a couple of people on the board who from the VCs are investors. They acquired over time. So you might not have such a relationship with them to call for things that, you know, that are going on in the business day to day, but I probably wish I'd done that a little bit sooner, even with them.

The time the board was starts to become more comprised of people who have specific expertise that you're bringing in. So it could be your chairman. Who's my chairman of cap five with someone called Tom Rogers, who founded NBC universal. He was a media Titans. CEO of Teva at the time, and Teva was really a leader and pioneer in digital advertising and television.

And Tom would be a great person to get [00:17:00] advice behind the scenes on narrative stuff, things within the business that we wouldn't even bring to the board. So the board wasn't even aware of things that we were working on together. He would critique the sales decks. He would critique the narrative. He would test how we pitch things.

He would test, and he was. Very challenging, incredibly supportive to me as a CEO, if I needed to ask him for advice on things. But then in the board meeting, he would, excuse the term, he would bring my balls in front of everyone, but knowing that I could handle it and he would test me and he would test me on how, he would often ask the same question over and over again because he wasn't happy with the answer.

And over time I started to learn the words and how he, how he was thinking. And I think it was just a really good experience for me to be out of my comfort zone. And even with somebody that I'd been getting advice with from, from privately, I don't think he was inflexing his muscles and it's all in front of the rest of the world.

And it's not like him at all to do that. I think it was just him making me having to think about these things and position them in a way where it was going to cut through across the important people in the business. Uh, and the, uh, borders. Private company is still private from the rest of the business.

And you can be out of your comfort zone and you can make some mistakes. And I think that's [00:18:00] okay before you communicate to the rest of the company and you made those decisions privately. So yeah, I think having a challenging chairman is a good thing because ultimately the chair these days, I do not believe is just there for governance.

The chair is there to steer, is this thing, is this whole thing heading in the right direction? Are we adding the right value to the ecosystem that we're working in? And, uh, and do we have the right setup in place to go and attack it? Do we need to think about how we're making our major decisions for the year ahead?

And then really the CEO is on the ground to make that happen. And then around that structure, that core access there, and also you've got to Chairman, the CEO, and the C C F O, I think those three are really the axis of the core running of the business. And then around that, you'll have your other board members with private equity firm, since they owned the company, a more prominent member of the P family was really looking after the deal.

And it was very involved, became the chairman, ultimately he was really an, almost like an executive chairman, really making a lot of the decisions day to day and working closely with the CEO to execute in the business on the big things that the business and [00:19:00] certainly anything to do with finances do with decks or things that are raised on the business, et cetera.

And it kept fine. The last couple of years, we've certainly had some fantastic expertise on the board coming from a relevant companies in the space. Complimentary. We have somebody who is more on the corp dev side. We have understanding all the different types of biz dev partnerships in the, in the ecosystem.

And we have somebody who's really sector specific, who can, who actually did due diligence on the company during the process, massive information from things that are going on across the rest of the ecosystem. the ecosystem in the industry and really understanding the nuances that you might know when you're in the lower levels in the business.

So I do believe it's great to have that core access to that access together at the chair, the CEO and the CFO working well, presenting everything in the right way, and then having this sort of sector expertise or whatever type of expertise you might need to plug the gaps that you might have in your senior team or in the rest of the board.

Oliver Cummings: It's interesting the way you talk about the way Tom operated in the board, because I suppose the conventional approach is that the chair is your biggest challenger in private and your biggest supporter in [00:20:00] the boardroom. What do you think you got out of him being so so challenging in the boardroom because I could imagine some CEOs might wilt under that sort of public challenge from the person who in private is helping them. Was he able to do that because he just built so much trust and psychological safety with you outside of the boardroom? 

Dominic Joseph: I think it's unfair to say that he was so challenging in the boardroom. I think that he was just somebody working at his level. He's just going to be challenging about decisions. If he's not quite satisfied that the information has been put through him at all the levels that needs to be, I think he was challenging outside the boardroom and in the boardroom.

And I think he was supportive to me in both sides as well. So I think it was a fantastic chair and somebody that I would highly recommend. I think he could have been used. In the negotiation of the exit of the company as well. And I think that would have been another weapon that he had. He was a fierce negotiator having done deals over his lifetime and done so many of these things over time.

And I personally did watch him go through various rounds of [00:21:00] negotiation on behalf of the company. And then when we went through the PE process, he was really excluded from that because. There was just too many cooks at that point because then you had the VCs, you had the bankers now coming in and there was almost too many cooks to really spearhead and quarterback that process.

So he had to take a bit of a backseat and it could have been, perhaps it would have been a better route for him to have him lead it, which he might be more accustomed to do. And then after the exit happened, they didn't want to have an external chair because they wanted to have themselves as chair. So that did change the shape of the board.

Oliver Cummings: So for a founder listening to this, thinking about how to build their board, you've touched on there, I think the importance of having a good chair, the importance of having sector experts. It sounds like you felt perhaps you could have made more of some of the investor direct. And leverage them or certainly one of the complaints I hear most from founders saying what value do they add and actually they don't understand the sector of the industry, but to my mind, at least they're missing that [00:22:00] actually they're in the market talking to a load of people.

You can leverage them for certainly for benchmarking across different players for fundraising, all of that sort of stuff. What else would you advise a founder thinking about building their board to put into the mix of that composition? 

Dominic Joseph: Whether it's your chair or whether it's somebody else, I think it's really good to have a friendly wingman that you can really bounce ideas off.

Being a CEO is a pretty learned place and that's because everyone else is reporting into you and I ended up being a very close friend of the CFO. We've been through a lot of decisions together, but even then, it's very helpful to have somebody that can really be a wingman. And, Perhaps that's not necessary as you become a more of a post series A, post series B company or a mid sized company, maybe that's not the role of a chairman as such.

You know, it could be, it could be that you have a slightly more hands on person there. It might be someone who's a strategic advisor rather than board member as well. I think often those two things get blurred, but certainly having somebody there as a wingman to help, uh, give perspective on things, learnings from things that happen over time.

[00:23:00] Frameworks that you might have used in your people strategy. It can be anything around the different channels that you, that you oversee as a CEOs, we all have the same channels, ultimately. And that's what I'm spending a lot of my time on now. My preference now is to be a wingman, really, to a CEO, rather than.

Just turning up to a board meeting and not really know the worth that I can bring is having just done 12 years as a CEO is understanding what goes into that and the things that are going to come up as you go through the decision making and as you go through the scaling and the hiring and the restructuring and the, all the things that go on.

So the value, the real value I can create is exceptional for me is there's different to an investor ultimately is having just done it firsthand and being able to have those behind the curtain conversations that the real things that are going to happen. 

Oliver Cummings: Yeah, so I think Brian Halligan, HubSpot founder who said being CEO is overrated and has written some brilliant stuff on the uniqueness of the role.

I often think actually having someone who's been a CEO on the board is critical and I have been on boards where there hasn't been a CEO and I think that it [00:24:00] doesn't work. You miss something for all those reasons. Did you have someone who played that role for you? 

Dominic Joseph: I wasn't on the board. I had an advisor.

He was incredibly important to how I steered my decision making. Had a number of big decisions of closing down offices that were performing well. Like, you know, it was somebody that I would, I would go and see from those things off, off the record. So, yeah, I look, I think when I speak to CEOs, often when I start talking about the feelings of being trapped in the company, the, the sleepless nights, The, uh, the stresses, the pain that you guys really, I think it often really resonates with people, but they're quite shocked that somebody else has been and felt that same thing too.

They think it's just them. It is a savage job. If you're growing a company, it's the one thing being a CEO of a company and getting a bit of revenue in, and it's maybe even a lifestyle thing, but if you've taken VCs on board and you're growing and you need to hit these numbers every year and you can need to keep scaling and growing, it is a really difficult job, and there's, there's The risk element of starting a company, but then there's the risk element of huge decisions that come as you grow the company and the pressure that's [00:25:00] associated.

That is, it's huge. And of course you take it on your shoulders behind the scenes. I think one of the things I found very difficult being a CEO as well, I was always expected to be every time you walk in a room, everyone's looking at your reactions to things that is exhausting over time, always having to be a positive.

leader when you've just dealt with monumental problems, like in the meeting before. And now we're having to switch it on all the time. It's exhausting. And that becomes a lonely place. And of course, when you get home, you don't even want to talk about it with your wife or your friends or whatever, because you just want to have a break from it all.

So it creates that your private life is often separate from it. And then your work life, you're isolated with that as well. So I think it's incredibly valuable to have a strategic advisor, at least. That can be there to support through those things. When I say support is just having somebody to vent to about and to just tune a fat with them because it's got to be somebody who understands that game.

The guy I have is an ex CEO of British Airways. And so I knew that he'd been through all these things and so many things I came out with, he'd say things like, I had this scenario and this is what happened. And it's great to have that to fall back on. 

Oliver Cummings: Did you have a [00:26:00] coach? It sounds like that person played more of a mental role. Did you have a coach as well? 

Dominic Joseph: Yeah, I had coaches for different things. So I had a coach to help with really the feelings of stress and anxiety that would go on around certain topics, for example, or things that I was working very closely with a co founder. We got on extremely well. Throughout the whole cycle of the business.

But of course, there's going to be moments where there was tensions around certain things. And I worked with a particular coach that was very good at helping me navigate those things so that it would stop them becoming an argument. Not that we ever argued, but I think we both used coaches at those tense times.

I think we even used the same coach at the same time there, which I think was really helpful. Separately, obviously. And really helpful to navigate things that were difficult decisions. And we ended up aligned on everything. So that was a really successful use case. And he was a kind of coach that would get the answers out of yourself.

And because I've started being a CEO at 26, I didn't really know what the right way to do things were. I'm learning on the job all the way through the whole journey. I had another coach later on who I just wanted to be told. [00:27:00] This is how you do it. And that was the different skill sets of the other coach that I'd had.

So this guy was great. He, he'd say things to me, things. So when was the last time you told your exec team what you expected them to do? And I'd say things like, yeah, well, I've never told them that. Why not go tell them that? And I'd go and tell them, this is what I expect from you guys. And it was amazing what response I would get from that.

And it just gave me the confidence that that was cool to say that kind of thing. And it would just be around just different types of coaches for different things. And of course, then it's also helpful to have a coach that can come in and help the team, uh, collective teams. So we typically use the global leadership team, which is 17 or 18 people in total across the world.

We come together for our size. So that's very handy to have somebody there to get the best out of the team. It's difficult for you as the CEO to always be doing that, get the team working as well as possible, focused on the right goals and use that. We use coaches quite effectively for that. I think recommendations from other ones that, you know, people have said have really made a difference to them is probably the way to go.

Oliver Cummings: Supporting. a CEO through that growth [00:28:00] journey is I think one of the most valuable and difficult things board members can do and it's quite difficult to know how best to do that and I think helping them find coaches, mentors is often a really good way of not getting too involved yourself as a non executive and maintaining that independence but actually helping them.

As you think now in your own role as a board member of the toolkit that you have available to you, supporting CEOs. For someone listening to this who's a board member, what would be the best tools that you would advise them to have in their armory as they think about supporting a CEO through that journey?

Dominic Joseph: I think if you can't position yourself as a generalist and I think probably most people who are senior generalists in some capacity, right, because if you've been a CEO in the past, you can actually become a generalist because you've, you know, you've done so many different roles, but I think it's honing in on where you really, you are a special source of where you really can add value and trying to make sure that the CEO.

And ultimately it's going to be down to the CEO. If the CEO really believes that [00:29:00] there's somebody here who's adding a huge amount of value to them and to the company, then they're going to be on the board or they're going to be an advisor. So I think it's being clear, you don't have to necessarily say it to the CEO, but be clear yourself of how you add value and how you're going to go about.

Demonstrating that to the CEO and helping them in that area of value. For example, I can give advice on goal setting and actually I can give quite detailed advice on goal setting because I've been through so much pain myself on how to communicate that to the team. But then there could well be somebody who's better than that at me.

And that's, so I wouldn't say that's necessarily my special source, but it's something that, you know, I can help with. I want to spend my time on things that I can really help with, where I can really bring something that they're not going to get from everybody else. And I didn't. Find those things in yourself so that you can communicate them well to them and then do that on a regular basis.

That's probably the number one thing I think that I love. I personally love the big investment decisions and that's the bit that you really need to get into behind the scenes away from the board with someone. So they're going to let you into all of that information. [00:30:00] And once you've got down that rabbit hole and you've got that trust, then it's a beautiful thing.

But I think it's difficult to let somebody into that. When you're having a lot of internal discussions around it all the time, you've got to have somebody who's going to grasp it quick and have the good for you. You're really going to open up all the information in the business to them. 

Oliver Cummings: Going back to an investor directors for a founder listening to this, what advice would you give them to get more out of investor directors?

Dominic Joseph: I think it's really useful to try and have investment directors bringing information from what they're seeing elsewhere in the portfolio. Real honest information for how they've been handling things, what hasn't, hasn't worked well. So having investors on boards generally that have relevant portfolio, where you can pick out that information and know that they've got a good understanding of these sectors, I think it is incredibly beneficial.

I've certainly been on boards where there is investors there who have no idea about the sector and the questions they're asking are off the mark. And it's a bit of a waste of time for everybody and often can start to throw their weight around a little bit to try and prove their worth. If people [00:31:00] are content with the value that they give people, they tend to not behave badly, maybe say slightly less and, and be really meaningful on the stuff you say, rather than feeling like you've got to compensate.

So trying to have people that are clear about the value they bring. And then with investors, yeah, I think it's those things. I think it's understanding of portfolio from experiences, other companies, what they're hearing on the ground, what they're right now, obviously everyone's talking about AI and actually investors are great people.

He's a great people. It's a Speak to you about that kind of thing, because they'll have seen so much stuff comes through and even ask them to have a look at your materials is just cutting through compared to the strength of a VC might have over you as a founder is that just the sheer volume of stuff they've had to go through and look at and pass through and working out whether what you're doing is just the same as this stuff they've said no to and seen a million times before.

I think it's quite helpful to understand. But then of course, things like if COVID happens, our investors were very helpful. This is what all the companies are doing. This is how we should. attack this problem, for example, right now, over the last couple of years [00:32:00] with debt, there's been an extraordinary situation that happened globally with debt prices going so high suddenly out of nowhere, everyone's cash getting depleted very quickly.

And that again, could be a very helpful time to be using their experience of how to negotiate with the bank, for example, and how to restructure your deal. So there's many useful things I think you can get from investors and being clear about what you want from them. It might not be helpful to debate with investors Items on a product road so much what they will be looking for is okay.

What is this capacity velocity of this going to give us over this? And is there any risk for, if we don't do this, those are the sort of high level discussions you should have with investors, but debating what is on the product roadmap for the sake of that could be useless exercise. 

Oliver Cummings: And what about for investor directors listening to this? What advice. Would you give to them to be better directors or would it be your advice? 

Dominic Joseph: I don't know because I've never had bad investor directors. We've had each time lead from the VC and then an observer [00:33:00] working underneath them. With Smedvig Capital, who are my Series B investors, we had the CEO of Smedvig and we also had the principal who led the deal and an observer.

All of them were great because they were different characters. I've always found that the observers tend to understand the details because behind the scenes, we might've worked with them on some models and et cetera, and gone back and forth. So they tend to be smart and understand the numbers. I absolutely loved working with the CEO of the firm because he would not get involved at all in any of the minutiae, but he would be fantastic about how we're going to figure out.

frame of this scenario to a member of staff or to another investor or an acquirer that's come in and this is how we should handle that. And then you'd have like the principal who's working with us much more on the kind of regular decision making in the business. So I've only really ever had positive experiences from the different dynamics that we've had from the different investor directors.

I've been on boards where I've seen some others go in, as I mentioned earlier, where it has an added value. The number one thing I would say is if the data has been. Sent to you in advance a week [00:34:00] before, and you've got a chance to call the CEO and say, what's going on here? Uh, here. I would suggest doing that privately first, because it's just not going to help in a group setting, putting the CEO under pressure.

He or she then gets very defensive and you don't get the best out of the scenario. So I'm a big fan of trying to make the calls beforehand, understand the information first, and then getting to the meeting to go, this is the scenario. Let's all work together on solving it. 

Oliver Cummings: So no bombs. 

Dominic Joseph: I would say so, if possible.

Takes time. 

Oliver Cummings: Dom, time has flown by, which means it's time to go to the lightning round, where I'm going to say a short statement and ask you for a short response, if you're ready. Yep, go for it. So, first up, best book every board member should read, and why? 

Dominic Joseph: I don't have any books as such that I think board member, I've never thought about what books board members should read generally, but I only one that for my leadership team that everybody always had to read is the five dysfunctions of a team.

I'm sure you've heard that many times before, but there's some points in there that I do really agree with, which is if we're going to do something, then we're all going to commit to it [00:35:00] and get behind it. So I think that's an important lesson to learn, even if you don't agree with it, but we've all decided this is what we're going to do.

Let's all get behind it. 

Oliver Cummings: Bordering behavior that irritates 

Dominic Joseph: you most? Not remembering things that we've discussed last time and then bringing it up as if it's a new topic each time. So that's probably a pretty bad one. People who are on their phones, not really listening to the conversation and coming halfway through.

People have done weeks, if not a month plus of work for it. So those are probably the two worst behaviors. Most valuable board ritual. I think having the materials out well in advance has to be the number one thing. Second thing would be minutes or work through properly and actions that are properly worked through.

I think we were so bad at this for so long and ended up getting a little bit better at it, made it up. The world's longest list of minutes we've nothing ever got to work through. So yeah, I think it is important to get the protocol right, but again, I think it does depend on the stage of business. It's super early stage companies.

I don't think it's the most important thing, but having the actions followed up and then repeated at [00:36:00] the start is always good practice. Favorite quote. Cavalry ain't coming. Most significant professional insight. You'll always be remembered 

Oliver Cummings: by the worst thing that you did. Worst professional insight you ever received.

I think I've really had any, I can't really say that I have anything. What have you changed your mind on 

Dominic Joseph: about boards over time? I used to try and impress the board as the CEO and it ended up being the opposite, which is actually the board was there to help me and so treat, treating their board like a team of people that can help you as CEO.

be as effective as you can possibly be. So, yeah, the evolution from being intimidated by it to embracing the help that was there. 

Oliver Cummings: And finally, three things our listeners should take away from this podcast if they take nothing else. I 

Dominic Joseph: think 

Oliver Cummings: it's 

Dominic Joseph: to assemble a team of people around you on the board that can really get the best out of you in the business.

Not just for the sake of being there on the board. So how can you plug those specific needs that you might have? So that'd be the first thing. Second thing, I think, have some sort of wingman around you to help you with a lot of the hard [00:37:00] decisions that's going to go on there, understands the tough stuff that you're going through.

And then I think the third thing would be just framing a couple of big topics, being really well prepared, well in advance, get ahead of the tough stuff. in advance and and have productive solution focused discussions with your board team. So that's probably the three things, the three big learnings I've taken away over the years.

Oliver Cummings: Dom, that has been so rich and I can see this being hugely helpful to founders, board members and investor directors alike. I think my favorite line was your no bombs. That's going to stick with me for a while. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your incredible experience and wisdom. Thanks Oliver.

Thank you very much. Great to speak to you all. If you found this conversation interesting and would like to be involved in similar discussions, join the New Role board community. Community membership gives you access to 24 hour discussion threads on boardroom challenges and opportunities like those we've been discussing, smart online networking events, one to one career sessions with our headhunters, third party board roles, mastermind groups, and Q& As with senior board members.

Head to community. [00:38:00] newrole. com to find out more.

🎙️ You can listen to the full podcast interview with Dominic Joseph on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube.