Your board has finance, legal and accounting covered. Who's covering the customer?
Advisory board and non-executive roles for founder-led, family-owned and investor-backed companies in Asia-Pacific, bringing the commercial, customer and AI experience most growth boards are missing.
The problem
Look around your board table. There's probably an investor, someone who knows the numbers, someone who knows the law, and the founders. Every one of them is necessary.
Now ask who in that room has built demand in a market where nobody knew the name. Who has watched a customer base churn and known why before the data said so. Who has taken AI past the pilot and into how the business actually runs.
In most growth companies, that chair is empty. So those decisions get made by the executive team with nobody senior enough to challenge them, or they get deferred until a competitor forces the issue. Neither is governance.
What I bring to a board
Commercial growth, challenged properly. Whether the marketing and sales investment is paying off, where the growth is actually coming from, and which parts of the plan rest on hope. I have ran this inside global MNCs and built a consultancy to profitability in eight months.
Customer economics, not customer slides. Retention, trust and experience as commercial levers rather than brand sentiment. Most scaling businesses over-invest in acquisition and discover the cost of that too late.
AI adoption, from someone who has done it. The difference between an AI narrative for investors and AI that changes unit economics. What to fund, what to kill, and what questions to put to your executive team when the roadmap looks impressive in theory but you’re not sure whether it works in practice.
Scaling into regulated and complex markets. If your growth path runs through financial services, healthcare, insurance or a new Asia-Pacific market, I have operated inside those constraints for 26 years. Knowing where the walls are, saves expensive quarters.
Reputation and stakeholder risk. Crisis readiness, CSR and community partnership structures that stand up to scrutiny, drawn from chairing CSR and sponsorship programmes.
Three ways I serve boards
Fit
I take a limited number of appointments each year, which means being honest about where I add most value.
A good fit: founder-led or privately-owned businesses navigating their next stage of scale; investor-backed companies between Series A and pre-exit; organisations whose growth depends on brand, customer experience or AI adoption going right.
Not ideal: companies wanting a name on a website, boards that meet to approve rather than to decide, and anyone looking for executional marketing support instead of strategic advice.
What I’ll ask you
Three questions before any appointment, because they predict whether the seat will be useful:
What decision has your board deferred twice?
When management presents a plan, who in the room is expected to push back without valid reasons?
What would you want this seat to have changed twelve months from now?
If those questions are uncomfortable, that's usually a sign the seat is needed.
Start a conversation.
Tell me where the company is heading and what your board is missing. If I'm not the right fit, I'll say so and point you to someone who is.