Every Company Your Size Has a Board. Yours Has You.

Aug 27

Ben Sorensen said something in a recent conversation that I have not been able to put down.

"There's no advisory board. You're tasked with all the big decisions and all the pressure, and nobody to bounce ideas off of."

Sit with that for a second, because it describes a structural gap that almost nobody names.

A company at your revenue in almost any other industry has a governance layer. A board. Investors who ask uncomfortable questions on a schedule. A leadership team with actual authority and actual accountability. Somebody whose job is to pressure test the founder before the founder acts.

Agencies have none of this by default. The founder is the strategy function, the review function, and the veto function, all at once. Which means every significant decision gets made exactly once, by one person, with no second read.

That is not a character flaw. It is an org chart problem.

What the missing layer actually costs

Three things, and none of them show up as a line item.

Decision latency. Without anyone to test a call against, decisions sit. Not because you are indecisive, but because there is no forcing function and no downside protection. A hire waits two quarters. A pricing change waits a year. The cost of a slow decision is invisible, which is precisely why it compounds.

Unreviewed decisions. Some percentage of your calls are wrong. That is true of every operator. In a company with a review layer, a portion of those get caught before they become expensive. In a company without one, all of them ship.

The spillover. Ben's line about this is the one that lands hardest with owners who have families: "I feel like I'm taking less stress home, because there's some resources for me to get insights and get ideas from."

Which is a polite way of describing what most owners actually have instead of an advisory board. It is their spouse, at 11pm, being asked to weigh in on a compensation structure they never agreed to care about. That is an unfair job to hand someone whose only stated goal that evening was watching television.

The trap that keeps the gap open

Ben was honest about the part most owners will not say out loud.

"I'm bad about thinking that I know it all from time to time. Being the smartest guy in the room is not where you want to be."

This is the mechanism. The same self-reliance that got the agency to $1M or $3M is the thing that prevents the next structure from getting built. You solved every problem yourself for a decade. Of course you default to solving the next one yourself. It has literally always worked.

Right up until the problems change category, and pattern matching from your own history stops being enough, because you only have one history.

Mark Bevington described the moment the gap closes: "Sometimes you don't see the solution in front of you until the person next to you identifies it. You're like, aha, that was dumb, why didn't I think of that?"

Notice what that is not. It is not new information. The solution was already in front of him. What was missing was a second set of eyes that had seen the pattern before.

What replaces it

You are probably not raising money and you are probably not appointing a formal board. Fine. The function still has to exist somewhere. It needs three properties:

People with no stake in your ego. Employees cannot do this. They are structurally incentivized to agree with you, and it is unreasonable to ask them not to be.

People who have run the play. Advice from someone who has not operated at your next stage is a guess with confidence attached.

Enough context to be useful. A one hour call with a stranger produces generic advice. The value shows up when someone knows your numbers, your team, and the last three things you tried.

Ben's version of this is a Slack channel he uses weekly. "Somebody on my team will have a question, or we'll have an idea about a problem we're trying to solve, and then I'll ask the group and get feedback."

Weekly. Not annually at a conference. That cadence is the point.