In this episode, Dr. Barbara Hales, host of the Marketing Tips for Doctors podcast, invites Callum Laing to discuss the value of securing a board seat and how it can enhance professional growth, especially for doctors and other technical professionals.

Callum highlights how board involvement offers a unique opportunity to gain a holistic understanding of businesses, moving beyond technical expertise. He encourages professionals to explore board opportunities outside of their fields to gain fresh insights and avoid becoming unpaid consultants.

Callum outlines several key strategies for securing a board seat:

• Start Small with Advisory Boards: For newcomers, joining advisory boards of small businesses or startups provides valuable experience and credibility, which can serve as a stepping stone to larger board roles.


• Holistic Business Understanding: Serving on a board enables professionals to gain a comprehensive understanding of how a business operates as a whole, beyond their specialized field, ultimately making them more effective in their own roles.


• Asking the Right Questions: By joining boards outside one’s industry, professionals are encouraged to ask smarter, more insightful questions that challenge assumptions and drive better decision-making.


• Building a Network of Investors: Callum emphasizes the importance of developing a robust investor network, which is crucial for raising capital and connecting businesses to potential funding opportunities.


• Advisory Boards as Business Tools: Even small businesses can benefit from creating advisory boards to gain valuable insights, establish credibility, and unlock growth opportunities, as these boards can provide a competitive edge.

Callum also explains the legal responsibilities of becoming a board member and advises aspiring board directors to start with advisory roles to build experience before taking on the full legal responsibilities of being a director.

Key Takeaway:

“Joining a board forces you to look at the business as a whole, ask smart questions, and become a more valuable professional in any field.” – Callum Laing.

Connect with Callum Laing:

Website: boardroom-blueprint.com

Connect with Barbara Hales:

Twitter:   @DrBarbaraHales

Facebook:   facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist

Business website: www.TheMedicalStrategist.com

Show website:   www.MarketingTipsForDoctors.com

Email:   info@TheMedicalStrategist.com

YouTube: TheMedicalStrategist

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/barbarahales

Books:

Content Copy Made Easy

14 Tactics to Triple Sales

Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist

TRANSCRIPTION: (202)

Welcome and Introduction

Dr. Barbara Hales (00:02 ) Welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales, and we’re really fortunate today, because today we have none other than Callum Laing. He is a renowned entrepreneur, a board director, investor, and best-selling author with a passion for helping individuals reach their full potential. With a stellar record of building and scaling businesses across diverse industries, Callum brings a wealth of real-world directorship experience to the summit. His infectious enthusiasm, combined with a knack for simplifying complex concepts, ensures that attendees leave with actionable insights and strategies they can implement immediately. As a prolific author and thought leader, Callum’s wisdom has been regularly featured in the media and is sought out by business leaders around the world. Welcome to the show, Callum.

Callum’s Journey into Boardrooms

Callum Laing (01:09 ) Thank you, Barbara. Feel like I could have written that intro myself.

Dr. Barbara Hales (01:15 ) The first thing I wanted to know is, how did you get involved with boards? How did that become an interest for you?

Callum Laing (01:24 ) So it started off when I was a young entrepreneur, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, and I was not very good at it. I just wanted to learn, and I figured one great way to learn would be to sit on the board of other people’s companies so I could see what they were doing right and what they were doing wrong, and I could meet other smart people. The problem was, I didn’t know. I didn’t even know what a board was at that point. I just thought it would be something cool to get on and learn from. So I didn’t know what a board was. I didn’t really have the knowledge. I didn’t really have the people in my network who could help me get on that. And so I didn’t get onto boards until many years later. And then, when I got on lots of boards… So what happened was, my main business is mergers and acquisitions and taking companies public, and so I was sitting on a lot of the boards from companies that we were taking public. And I guess a lot of my… I had been when I wasn’t sitting on boards, I was quite enamored with boards.

When I sat on boards, I got quite frustrated with boards, and I saw a lot of challenges. I saw a lot of people on boards for the wrong reasons, just looking after their own self-interests, rather than all the stakeholders. And I saw a lot of very talented people not being able to get onto boards because they didn’t look the right way, the wrong gender, they didn’t have the right background, hadn’t gone to the right schools, didn’t know the right people, and so you just had a lot of talent missing from that pool, and that was very frustrating. And so as a member of several boards, I started implementing solutions to get more new people into that fold. And ultimately that became the business of the Veblen Director Program, which is training women, minorities, and first-timers on how to get their first board seats. And because once you’re on the board ladder, it’s actually relatively easy to move up the board ladder. It’s just getting on there in the first place, which is the challenge.

Why Professionals Should Consider Joining Boards

Dr. Barbara Hales (03:45 ) I do want to just stick in that. You know, I myself became involved with your program because I just found the whole idea of it very fascinating, and I am now sitting on a board. So, yeah, thank you. So I just wanted to let listeners know it does work. Why should doctors and health professionals consider going on boards? You know, they have their practice, they’re busy with what they’re doing. Why should they look outside their world and think, “Sitting on a board might make sense for me?” Why would it make sense?

Callum Laing (04:28 ) So, look, I don’t think it’s just the medical profession. I think lots of us, as we go through our careers, we get very insular and focused on just one narrow expert topic of expertise. And sort of the conventional wisdom is you just learn more and more about that piece, and I think some people, a lot of us, kind of have this idea that when we get older, and maybe when we near retirement, we’ll go and sit on a few boards. Yeah. And it’s a secondary income and a chance to have a bigger impact. I just encourage people to start that journey a lot sooner. And I think for any technical profession, sitting on the board of a company forces you to look holistically at how businesses work. And I think, you know, oftentimes as employees, we’re very focused on what we’re technically good at, like helping a patient get better, but we don’t necessarily understand the way that fits into the business. What is the business that we’re in? And I think when you sit on a board, you’re forced to have to understand a business from, you know, where’s the income coming in, where’s it going out? How does the flow work, rather than just being super focused on the individual technical elements. And I think that’s very useful.

I think you actually become much better at your job, whatever your job is, when you understand the business side of it. So I think from that perspective, it’s very good. We all say, one of the things you’ve heard me say many times is we encourage people to join boards of companies outside of their field of expertise. So if you’re a doctor, go and join the board of an IT company, or a food and beverage company, or something completely outside of it. Now that seems very counterintuitive, but there’s a couple of reasons for it. The first is that it forces you to ask more questions, and the best board directors are the ones that ask the smartest questions. And so oftentimes, when it’s in our industry, we sort of jump to assumptions. We know how we think it should be done, and we know how we’ve seen it be done. And so we just jump to those assumptions, whereas in a different industry, you kind of ask, “Well, why is it being done that way? That doesn’t make any sense to me,” and that can be quite useful. The other thing is that it stops you from being dragged in as a consultant.

So a director’s job, or whether that’s an advisory board position or an actual non-executive director, is to think about the business in a holistic manner and think about all the stakeholders, which can be the shareholders, the clients, the staff. But if you know that industry and that company is facing a p