How to Become a Board Member — Ebook (EPUB)

For operators who want a seat on a private-equity board, and want to be asked back.

A first board seat rarely comes from an application. A sponsor’s people call someone they’ve watched do one hard thing well. Bill Canady, a CEO who has spent three decades running companies for private-equity owners, shows you how to become that person. Then he shows you how to do the job well enough that the next call comes too.

How to Become a Board Member covers both. Part Six is the search for the first seat. The fifteen chapters before it are the seat itself: the first meeting, the reporting contract, the committees, the covenant scare, the change of chief executive, the add-on and the sale.

Learn to:

• Write the one line a sponsor’s people can repeat about you, and put it on a one-page seat profile.
• Work a director association instead of just paying its dues, and know what each one costs and pays back.
• Go where private equity does its deals, with something useful to offer before you ask.
• Count the days a seat really takes, and run every offer through six ways to say no.
• Find the Board’s Number in your first month, and keep the board on it to the sale.

Follow Leah Sutter, an independent director, through five years on the board of Hovland Fire & Safety, from the first call to a $576 million sale at 3.05 times the money, and then to her next seat. Hovland, its owners and its people are invented, and its numbers are teaching illustrations. Fifty-seven instruments, from the seat profile to the conflict register, are ready to use. Each is a working page in the companion Field Guide.

The board owns the number. The CEO runs the company.

Digital ebook (EPUB). After checkout, BookFunnel emails your download link and reading-device instructions. No physical book is shipped. The companion Field Guide is sold separately.