What Does an Invigorate Advisor Look Like?

As a scaling business, you’ve no doubt been mired in the challenge of building a great team to run your business.

Indeed, according to Entrepreneur, the need for a scalable workforce is one of the top key trends shaping the future of work right now.

Whether it’s full-time resource, agencies or freelance consultants, you’ll have experienced first-hand how tricky it can be getting the right mix of skills together, and at the right time too!

So where do Advisors fit in?

And how can they strengthen your team even further to catapult your business to success?

Well first of all, it’s worth clarifying exactly what an Advisor does.

For the full lowdown, why not read this article on Demystifying Advisors.

In a nutshell, an Advisor is executive-level support who can provide your business with tactical support, is willing to roll up their sleeves, is a trusted confidant, believes in the business and leaders’ vision, and will support the advancement of the business by opening up networks and providing business exposure.

Now there are a lot of myths surrounding Advisors, including that they’re all old and expensive! For a more realistic take, be sure to read our mythbusting article over here.

At Invigorate, we obviously take the whole topic of Advisors very seriously. We understand that especially for scaleups, it’s important to find the right advisors. And that means ones who have ‘been there, done that’ and can actually make a difference to your organisation through experience and expertise.

The Best of the Scaleup Ecosystem

Our founder, Lauren, has spent extensive time studying the scaleup market.

From her work at Oliver Wyman and Gartner, to then launching the Invigorate Platform in 2018, Lauren has spoken with hundreds of founders and business leaders to understand the exact type of profile of Advisor that scaleups are looking for.

She held in-depth conversations with the first 200 Invigorate Advisors to get a real sense of what they’re looking for from the platform, as well as investors and VC’s to leverage their take on the scaleup ecosystem too.

From the ex-CMO of Amazon, to the Head of Growth at Trouva, from the ex-CCO of Github and Box, to the Head of Strategy at Google… the Advisor profile we’ve put together at Invigorate is one based on credentials, quality, expertise and experience. We only accept the best from a pool of very ‘hard-to-reach’ individuals!

How We Vet Our Advisors

Knowing that the average SME spends a total of 2,280 hours per year seeking and vetting specialists, this is time wasted for founding teams that could be better spent elsewhere.

That’s why we strictly vet all of our Advisors to take that headache away from you and your team and to make sure you get the best match through the platform.

Our Advisors are serial entrepreneurs, successful founders, high-growth business and corporate execs, and advisors to successful SMEs.

As a minimum, we expect our Advisors to have been:

1. A serial entrepreneur or successful founder of an exited business
2. An advisor to a successful SME
3. An advisor to or stakeholder in an investor-backed, growing business
4. The CXO at a successful SME
5. The CXO, Director or business head at a listed company

(More information can be found in our FAQ here).

But we don’t stop there! We also actively seek skills that not all Advisors have and that only come from having worked with a diverse set of scaleups and founders in the past.

We look for:

• Diversity of thought.
• Open-mindedness.
• A diverse pool across our entire Advisor network – be that through gender, race, or general background.

Put another way, our Advisors represent the best business minds in the UK right now.

Yes, they bring expertise and experience; but they also bring diversity of thought and the ability to see things from points of view you may not have considered.

What’s In It For the Advisors?

So you may be wondering, what’s in it for the Advisors?

Why have they joined the Invigorate Platform?

Our Advisors join for a number of different reasons, largely to do with the stage they are at in their own careers.

From having spoken with a number of them though, the key reasons are:

• The opportunity to work with some of the most ambitious and successful scaleups in the UK.
• The chance to share their experience, build portfolio careers and see growing businesses like yours accelerate their paths to success.
• The chance to advise on and direct key scaleup initiatives in exciting sectors such as Fintech and Healthtech.
• The ability to connect ambitious founders with other key people in their networks – from investors to sales leads, and everything in between!
• The fact that the Invigorate Platform accelerates engagements, meaning all parties can get on with the task in hand more quickly and more easily.

As a scaleup you’ll know that Advisors are nothing new – in fact, it’s the experience they’ve built up over many years that businesses like yours need to tap into.

But finding the right Advisor – someone who has been in your shoes and knows the pitfalls to avoid, and how to avoid them – is another ball game entirely, one that traditionally takes time, effort and resource.

With the Invigorate Platform, all of this hassle in finding the right Advisors is removed. We do the vetting to ensure our Advisors are of the highest calibre possible, so that you can connect with them quickly and easily through the platform and get on with the more important task of scaling your business.