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Each session addresses one distinct aspect of moving into advisory, consulting, or board work. Together, they provide a complete picture of the landscape.
Before you can position yourself for advisory or board work, you need an accurate picture of what those roles actually involve. Most professionals have a vague sense of what advisors and board members do — but that vague sense is rarely accurate enough to be useful.
This session maps the structural differences between advisory, consulting, and board roles in concrete terms. How are advisors typically engaged and compensated. What does a board member's time commitment actually look like. How do consulting relationships begin, evolve, and end. What authority and influence do people in these roles actually have, and where does that authority stop.
The session also covers the differences between for-profit and nonprofit advisory and board work, because the dynamics differ in ways that matter for positioning. Understanding the landscape before you enter it changes the quality of every decision you make along the way.
The people who decide who fills advisory and board seats are not primarily evaluating credentials. They are evaluating fit, trust, and the specific kind of value a person brings to a particular context. Understanding how these evaluations actually work changes how you present yourself.
This session examines the decision-making process from the inside. How do boards identify potential members. Who influences advisory appointments and how. What signals do decision-makers use to assess whether someone is genuinely advisory-ready versus simply accomplished.
The session also addresses common positioning mistakes: the ways that professionals with strong operational backgrounds inadvertently signal the wrong things when they are trying to move into advisory work. Recognizing these patterns is the first step toward correcting them.
Advisory opportunities almost never come from cold outreach. They come from relationships that have developed over time — relationships where the other person has had enough experience of your thinking and your character to feel confident recommending or appointing you.
This session is about how to build those relationships deliberately and authentically. Not through transactional networking, but through a sustained pattern of genuine engagement with the people and organizations in your field who are most relevant to where you want to go.
The session covers how to identify the right relationships to invest in, how to engage with senior people without cold-pitching, and how to maintain relationships over time without making them feel like a campaign. The approaches covered here are slow by design — they are also considerably more durable.
The career narrative that served you well in employment contexts — focused on results, deliverables, and organizational impact — often does not translate directly into advisory positioning. The shift required is subtle but significant.
This session covers how to reframe your experience so it reads as advisory-ready. This is not about inventing a new identity or misrepresenting what you have done. It is about understanding which aspects of your background are most relevant to advisory contexts and how to surface those aspects in the way you write about yourself, talk about yourself, and show up in professional settings.
The session also covers the practical artifacts of positioning: how to update your professional biography, how to think about your online presence, and how to describe what you do when someone asks in a way that opens doors rather than closing them.
Reserve your place or reach out with questions about which session fits your current situation.