301: Marissa Levin — Build a Great Advisory Board

Scaling Up Business Podcast

Do you ever feel fear or anxiety over the unknown future ahead? How can you navigate through something when you don’t know what you don’t know? And more importantly, how can you scale if you’re not sure where you are in your growth stage? Today’s guest has some answers.

Marissa Levin has been an entrepreneur for over 25 years and is a globally-recognized growth strategist. In 1995, she launched her first business and grew it to $13 million in revenue. Her current venture, Successful Culture, is a leadership consulting organization that helps CEOs master the three most critical aspects of business growth: leadership development, strategy formulation and execution, and organizational culture assessment and improvement.

Building your first company can often feel like building a plane while you’re flying it. Every day, you’re just hoping you’re making the right decision to move forward. However, an advisory board can be the most compelling and effective strategic tool that leadership can use to get to their next level of growth. Why reinvent the wheel when you can leverage the knowledge of those before you?

When Marissa built her first company, one of the first things she began to do was ask for help and to find people who could teach her what she needed to learn. She knew she was flying blind. So many times, entrepreneurs are in the “I don’t know what I don't know” quadrant and are unable to prepare for pivots and upcoming disasters that a more seasoned entrepreneur can see miles away.

Interview Links:

Sponsored by: Bit.ly/clariontech

Successfulculture.com

Marissa on LinkedIn

Built to Scale: How Top Companies Create Breakthrough Growth through Exceptional Advisory Boards, by Marissa Levin

Resources:

Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.)

Bill on YouTube

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Scaling Up is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and our team for Gazelles Coaching, on how the fastest-growing companies succeed where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and a leading Gazelles Coach. Gazelles is the term we use for fast-growing companies.

We help leadership teams with 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Scaling Up for Gazelles companies is based on the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from Verne’s original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits).