205: Fitness, Finance, and Fun - How (and Why) You Need to Build a Personal Board of Directors

Hello. Hello. Hello. You are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. My name is Bjork Ostrom, and it is one of my great joys and privileges to be able to record this podcast and send it out each week to thousands of people around the world. That is such a great privilege. And wherever you are, whether you're in the car, whether you're at the gym, whether you're in your home, listening on your Amazon Echo or Google home, which is so cool that you can do that, did you know you can do that? You could just say whatever it is, device name, play the Food Blogger Pro podcast and it'll play for you. Quick little tip there for you. But wherever you are, whatever you are doing, we really appreciate you tuning in to this podcast. If you've been following along in real time, you know that we are in the middle of a little series here. We're calling it the Project Series. And the idea with this is that we. We're taking a step back from the interviews which we traditionally do on this podcast. And if you follow along, you know that the interview series that we do is essentially me having conversations with other entrepreneurs or experts and trying to gather as much valuable information as we can from them so that you can apply that to what you're doing. That is the purpose and the hope for these interviews is to extract as much helpful information in an interview with an expert. So you can take that and apply it to what you're doing. But we're doing a little series here. We're taking a step back from the interviews to do a series about things that are happening with the businesses that we are working on. So it's less of an interview. It's less of a conversation and more of kind of an example of if you and I were to sit down across from each other and you were to say, hey, what's some of the stuff you're working on, Bjork? What are some of the things that you're doing or some of the things that you've been thinking about as it relates to your businesses? And we've done that for the past three episodes. This will be the fourth and final episode in the project series. And this one is a little bit different in that it kind of applies to business, but it's also maybe in the category of personal improvement. And what I'm going to be talking about today is a concept that I have been thinking about for the last kind of year and a half. And it's something that I think is really valuable for it could be anybody but especially people who have a lot going on running a business, maybe you have a family, maybe you have a full time job and you're trying to do your side hustle, or you're just juggling a lot of balls in the air and trying to figure out how to do that well. And the concept is personal board of directors. And for a personal board of directors, it's something that I've been thinking about, like I said, for a few years and really starting to get into a rhythm in terms of understanding how that works and how that applies to me. Now, before we get into the specifics of what that looks like to have and to form a personal board of directors, I wanted to talk about what a board of directors is for those of you that aren't familiar. So a board of directors is something that you'll see public companies or nonprofits, they'll have a board of directors. And the idea with the board of directors is that the CEO or the president of the organization reports to the board. So the idea with the board of directors is it's kind of like they're the boss for the boss, right? So you usually think of the CEO as the ultimate authority. Well, you usually. There's a group above them that is truly the ultimate authority, and that is the board of directors. Now, there's a lot of nuance to how that can work and how that can apply. And sometimes the CEO or the president is on the board of directors and you can get kind of in depth with it and can be kind of complicated. But the basic idea is that the board of directors is helping to guide and inform and weigh in on the decisions that the company's making and the CEO is making. And for instance, actually in my life is I'm on the board of directors for the Children's Shelter of Cebu, which is an incredible orphanage in the in Cebu City, Philippines. Lindsay and I actually lived and worked there for a year. Lindsay posted it about about it on Pinch of Yam. And you can go back and read some of those posts to see what that experience was like. When we got back, I knew I wanted to stay involved and so I joined the board of directors. That board of directors for the Children's Shelter of Cebu is made up of individuals with lots of different backgrounds and areas of expertise. And I learned that as I joined the board and started to understand the background of each member on the board and how intentional the president was in building out that board. So for instance, we have somebody who is an HR expert. They really understand the, the Nuances and the difficult decisions and the choices that you have to make. When it comes to hr, we have somebody who's a finance and fundraising guru. So somebody who works at a college, and they work in the finance department, and they do fundraising and development. And that is a really critical role for a nonprofit. We have somebody on the board who has that background. We have somebody who's an attorney, and so they understand law and legal matters. Somebody who understands digital media. That's me. That's what my role on the organization is, understanding digital media and helping to craft strategy as it relates to the website and advertising online and social media. And there's pastor, who is Filipino, and so he understands cultural norms in the Philippines and can weigh in on that. And what I learned is on this board, it's a really healthy board of directors, because, number one, everybody's invested in the success of the organization. And number two, everybody has a different area of expertise that they can help out with, that they can weigh in on. And you can see that conversationally. As we start to have different conversations, like when we're talking about the banquet and we're wondering, hey, how do we stream this banquet live so people who are all around the world can watch it? Well, that conversation kind of the eyeballs around the table. Everybody slowly kind of looks to me, because that's an area that I understand and we have a background in. There also might be questions about cultural norms. Like, as we're having conversations around what the norms would be if we made a change or implemented a new strategy. We'd look to the Filipino on the board, and he would say, hey, here's kind of what you can expect and what some expectations should be from the organization and how communication is distributed throughout the company, or maybe we're doing a capital campaign, they'd look to the fundraising guru. That's where the question would come in for the person who understands finances and fundraising for a capital campaign. So the idea here is, you know, everybody has this specific role, and everybody's invested in the success of the organization. And I was thinking about the structure of this board, and I thought, gosh, this works really well to have all of these experts and weighing in on how to be successful for this, in this case, the nonprofit, but it could be a public company. And then I thought to myself, I wish this was true for me. I wish I had people in my life that I could go to whenever I had a specific problem. So instead of me doing research and digging into all of the background on something and all of the stuff that comes along with trying to figure out an issue. If I had somebody that I could go to and I knew who that was, that would be awesome. And I saw that power in the nonprofit board that I was a part of, and I thought, I would really like this personally. And that's where the idea for the personal board of directors came in. And the basic idea is that it's really similar to what a regular board would be. You have different people filling different roles. And the biggest difference is that, as I've explained this to people, usually people are like, gosh, that's awesome. I love that idea. I want to do something very similar. And then they're like, so do you get together and sit around a table with these people? And that's the biggest difference. So in my mind, it's a board of directors. They're all sitting around the table, but in actuality, we never actually all get together at the same time. That would be really cool if you did. But this is instead more of a virtual board in the sense that these are seats that I want to be filled, but we're never actually getting together in person. So that's an important disclaimer here for the personal board of directors. That actually really simplifies how you. How it looks to have one of these, to form one of these, is that they don't even actually need to know that they're a part of your personal board of directors. It's just you envisioning this and using it as a structure to complete your board of directors. So I'm going to talk through each of the people that I have on my board of directors and talk about how we meet and why it's an important role. So the first and the. Maybe one of the easiest one for people to understand is a financial advisor. So there's really two people on the personal board of directors, my personal board of directors who fill this role. One is. Is Ben. And what Ben does is he is a true financial advisor. So he is somebody who is weighing in on investment decisions. He's helping us understand healthcare. So that's one of the things, if you are an entrepreneur, you know that you have to figure out how to go and get your own healthcare and get that set up. And so, you know, especially as it became more complicated for us, we have our daughter Solvi, and Lindsay and I need healthcare. And so he helps us understand that and make some decisions on that. So that's a great example of when I reached out to Ben, I said, hey, Ben, we need to Figure out healthcare. Can you help us figure out the most strategic way to get healthcare? Should it be an hsa, should it be a non HSA plan, a family plan? And as an interesting side note, what it ended up being, what was most helpful for us is Lindsey and I each actually have our own plan. And then Solvi is on my plan. So Ben helped us figure out the most strategic way to go about setting that up in terms of terms of the amount that we'd be paying for a premium as well as the expected expenses we'd have related to healthcare. So that's an example of how we work with Ben. Now Ben also helps us understand investment decisions. So 401k or an IRA, these, these investments that you are making, I'm interested in that. I love that. But I also know that I'm not spending as much time as Ben is understanding how to structure these and to put these things in place. Life insurance would be another example. Now an important note here for us. We decided to work with somebody who is a fee only financial advisor and they're also fiduciary. And those are two important points because there are some financial advisors who get paid a commission if they sell you a certain product. And the hard part with that is that introduces, that automatically introduces a little bit of a interest for them in selling you a certain thing instead of the thing that's going to be the best, the pure best decision for you. So we knew that we wanted to pay somebody in a really easy to understand, simple way where there wouldn't be any conflict in terms of how investment decisions would be made. So we have. You can jot that down if you don't know what that means. It's a fee only fiduciary advisor. And there's lots of sites online now that are popping up that help you find fee only advisors. So it would be kind of a fee only database. And what that means is they're not getting a commission when they recommend you a product, which is a really good thing. The second financial advisor that we have in the board of directors is somebody who helps us with taxes. So if Ben is more of the growth side, investments and health insurance and life insurance. Joni, who we work with, is more of the looking back side. So Ben is looking forward and with Joni, we're looking back and we're saying how can we be strategic about the taxes and how can we go about having really clean books and accounting for our businesses? And so Joni fills the role of the taxes within her business and she's a cpa, which means that she's a certified public accountant. And so she is. Has all the credentials you need to weigh in on these decisions. And as you can imagine, with a few different businesses and Lindsey and I both working, there's a lot of tax considerations. And as much as I love taxes, it's really helpful to have somebody who's an expert weighing in on those questions that we have. On my personal board of directors, Ben fills a seat, Joni fills a seat. And the way that I interact with them is when questions come up, I email them and we'll have a back and forth or I have a little note area within things, which is the to do app that I use, and there's a little project area for them. And whenever I have a question, I just create a little task in there. And then with each Ben. For both Ben and Joni, I meet with them once a month and we just jump on a call and it's either a phone call or a zoom meeting video call. And we just work through our questions. And that's been really helpful to have that on a recurring basis. Just knowing that I can put these questions away, that I don't have to find an answer to them on my own right away, but then I can bring them up when we have a conversation in our once a month scheduled call. Now, for you, it might not require once a month. Maybe it could be once a quarter, once every six months. It depends on your situation. For example, Ben was saying, traditionally when he does meetings with people, it's once every six months. So it's something that's not as frequent. But because Ben is also weighing in on some of the company decisions that we have, like reviewing to make sure everything is set up right with our 401k and reviewing monthly books and building Excel growth sheets for the businesses, it makes sense for us to to meet once a month. So with both Ben and Joni in the financial advisor position, we're meeting once a month. The next seat on the personal board of directors is a seat where somebody weighs in on fitness and health. And one of the things that I noticed as a recurring theme with a lot of the people that I talked to that were running a business or had a busy life is that health and fitness came up as a recurring thing, like a recurring issue that they felt like was always in the back of their head. And in noting that I thought, I want to be intentional to not get 10 years down the line, 15 years down the line to get to a point where I'VE worked really hard and found success in certain areas. Maybe that's business, family, maybe that's intellectual, like reading things like that, but have neglected health. And for me, that's an easy thing to do. Like, I would rather sit and read than I would go for a walk or go for a run or workout. Just. That's my natural bend is to it. It's not to go out and walk and run and exercise, although when I do it, I love it. Lindsay's different that way. She would love to go for a walk. She would love to be out and about. And that's not my natural bend. So I knew I needed somebody in that role to help motivate me to do that. And that person for me is Kirk. And Kirk is a personal trainer. He's really into Spartan and these extreme races that you do. And what the relationship looks like with Kirk right now is once a week, I give him a recap. I say, hey, Kirk, here's what I've done this week, fitness wise. Here's my. I send them along a little like eating log and say, here's the stuff that I had to eat this week. So it's an accountability measure for me to say, I know that I'm gonna have to report this stuff back to Kirk, and that keeps me accountable to eat as healthy as possible and to work out. Now, the funny thing is, these past few weeks have been terrible. I've prioritized work. I haven't worked out, I haven't eaten healthy. And that burden weighs on me. And that's good because that's why I have this person on my personal board of directors. That's why I have Kirk in my personal board of directors. So I actually said, kirk, the wheels have fallen off. I need some help. I'm gonna schedule a time to come in and work out with you once a week. And that was something that I was doing for a long time. I stopped doing that because I felt like I had really locked it in. And then it kind of went the opposite way. So I need to readjust and start to go in a little bit. And it's an example of why this seat on the board of directors is helpful, is because if I didn't have that, I wouldn't have anybody keeping me accountable. And chances are that would continue to go to unhealthy. Like, I would continue to not eat well, and I would continue to not work out, because again, that's not my natural bend. That's not the thing that I naturally want to do. And so Having Kirk keep me accountable has been really helpful. So it's a really important seat on my personal board of directors. The next seat is a business coach. Now this is wouldn't be true if you don't have a business, but for everybody listening to this podcast, in some way, you probably are doing businessing. Now a business coach is going to usually be somebody who is expensive to hire, expensive to work with. So what I would encourage you to do, to think strategically about this. And with all of these, as a side note, there might be people that you know that would be able to fill these seats in a non paying position. They'd be able to do pro bono work. And I would encourage you to think about that in a tiered way. So maybe you have somebody in your family who is really interested in personal finance and if that's an area that you want to focus on and have on your personal board of directors, you could ask them and say, can you meet me once every three months to help me understand my personal finances better? And if that person is a friend or a family member, my guess is that they would be willing out of the kindness of their heart to meet with you and to help you out and to weigh in on it so you don't have to have all of these positions be paid positions. And the same could be true for business coach. You might have somebody in your life that is an expert or has background in business and they'd be able to meet with you. That was something actually when I was younger, so it was maybe 10 years ago, I knew I was interested in business. What I did is I just asked everybody that I knew that was a business person if I could meet with them and have lunch with them. And so there was countless people that I met with that I just went in and said, hey, here are the questions that I have about business. Can you tell me your story? Can you tell me a little bit of your background? And that was really helpful to. And some of those conversations I still remember today, people saying like, hey, I feel like when I got into business I was over leveraged, I had too much debt and that was a regret that I had. There was one person who I was getting together with. It was a friend's dad who had been a really successful businessman and he thought I was going to sell him Amway product. Which was like, even that was a learning in experience and how to communicate clearly and say like, I just literally want to learn as much as I can and would love to buy you lunch. I promise I'm not trying to sell you Amway. And I don't think he was convinced until the end. And he was like, still, you're not going to sell me anything. I was like, no, I just wanted to have a conversation with you about business. But those were really helpful. And so maybe you view it not as an individual person, but you say that seat on my board of directors is going to be multiple people. There's going to be one person each month that's going to play the role of advisor as it relates to businesses. For me, what that looks like right now. For a while it was an individual business coach. I worked with somebody named Kevin to help weigh in on the business decisions that I had and to kind of help me reflect each week on some of the bigger questions that I had related to business. I've since switched that and now have a friend named Ryan who had built a company and sold it and now he has a company called GEXP Collaborative. And it's actually they, they do growth and then one of the things that they do is exit planning, which that's an area we're not interested in. We're still really early in our business life and want to grow and hold businesses. But Ryan has an expertise and a really good network in business growth. And so I've been working with Ryan and Brandon, his partner, and we do monthly calls and I come to them and say, hey, here are some of the business related questions that I have and some of the issues that we're working through and we can talk through those. Or a lot of times they'll connect me with somebody who they know is an expert in that specific category. So an example would be we're trying to find somebody who can kind of play the role of, of CFO in the work that we're doing, which is somebody who would be the person that would keep a really close eye and kind of do projections and growth as it relates to finances. And I didn't know, hey, what would that look like? How would we work with somebody in this way? And they said, well, transactional. A transactional CFO would maybe be a good person to connect with, which means somebody who's dedicating a few hours each week to help you out with some of that stuff. But it's not a full time person within the organization. We're much too small to have somebody playing that role full time. But we do need somebody that can help out with that and make some of those decisions. So each month I meet with Ryan and Brandon and we talk through any of the business related decisions that we have. We also I'll shoot off texts or I'll do monthly meetings. And that's been a really, really helpful position for me to have on the board of directors, somebody to weigh in on business decisions. And again, that can look different depending on where you are in the life cycle of your business. And what I remember thinking through and doing early on was I had kind of these virtual advisors. And so these were podcasts that I listened to, courses that I took, and those were the people that played the role of advisor early on. But now that the businesses we have are a little bit more established, we can have a budget to have somebody help play that role. And for us, that is Ryan and Brandon. So those are the most active roles that we have right now on our personal board of directors. There's the financial advisors, both Ben and Joni, Fitness with Kirk, business coach with Ryan and Brandon. And then this last one is a really important one as well. That is the spiritual board seat. And I had this thought maybe a year ago where I thought, man, I am thinking a lot about the next year, the next five years, the next 10 years. But I don't think a lot about what's going to happen when I die. And that's inevitable. It's all going to happen for us. And the reality is, with this podcast, people have a very large representation in terms of what spiritual means for them or what faith means for them. But for all of us, we all have one thing in common, and that is we're going to die someday. And it's important, I realized for me, it's important to make time and space to think about what that means. Like, at the very least, I should be spending at least as much time thinking about that as I do thinking about investments or business growth. And that wasn't the case. And so for me, it was really important to say on this board of directors, I want to make sure that it's not just about business or taxes or even fitness. All of these things that are for the next year important, for the next five years important, for the next 15 years important. But what does that look like when, you know, if I could project life down the line and what does it look like when I'm 70? Will I look back and say I was really glad that, you know, I focused on these things specifically? Or would I have said, I wish I made some space to contemplate what things look like when I'm at the end of my life or after you die, which is weird to say out loud and weird to think about. But it's one thing that we all have in common that's going to happen for us. And so for me, that was something that was really important to make space on this personal board of directors and make space in my life to think about some of the greater questions as it relates to faith and spirituality. So I connected with Kurt, who is a retired pastor and somebody that is a close family friend. And I said, kurt, can I get together with you once every six weeks? I'll drive to you, and I would love to just ask you the things that I feel like are the hard questions that I'm processing through that I'm struggling with, the questions about life that are those big, important, and for me, kind of murky questions as it relates to spirituality and faith and making space for that. And before I would maybe have those questions, they would kind of be bouncing around in my head. I would maybe think about them, but I never made space to actually talk through those and have a conversation with somebody about them. And that's been a really great thing. And it's hard in. In a day to. To set aside three hours to do that by the time that travel and have those conversations. But what I find is that it's refreshing to step back and say, hey, this is an important thing, and it's not important today. It's not important. You know, short term, there's other things that are more important to move on. But this is something that I want to make sure that is a part of my life and that I think is important. And so the spiritual seat on the board of directors is a really important one for me. And with that, I meet with Kurt. And Kurt is. I meet with him every six weeks or so, and that's in person. And I feel like that's been really helpful to meet up in person and to talk through some of those bigger questions that I have in life. And he is a great person for that. So a little recap here. The different seats on the board of directors. There's financial advisor, and that's Ben and Joni. There is fitness with Kirk, a business coach. There is also spiritual, and then there's a few little bonus ones that aren't currently a part of what I would view as my active board of directors, but one that I think will need eventually or that I have kind of in my back pocket or that I'm working on. And the additional ones that I've thought about here is a counselor or therapist, and this hasn't been true yet. But I know that there will be a time in my life, at some point where I will need somebody in my life in the role of a counselor or therapist. And I actually have that person. I have their contact information, and I have that available. And the idea here is, I think there inevitably will be times in life where you are met with something that is really difficult to unwind, or it could be anxiety or depression. There's a laundry list of things that it could be. Maybe it's related to marriage or relationships. And there will be times where you need somebody to help you unwind those really complicated things. And I know the same will be true for me. And so I want to have this as a seat on my personal board of directors. Now, it might not always be filled, but there will be times where I know that I'll need that help. So I think it's important to think about for me personally, and that might be true for you, too. There might be. This might be a season where you would need somebody to play that role and to be on your personal board of directors in that capacity. So I wanted to acknowledge that and say that that's a really important piece of it. And then the other one is fun or social. And this is the one that I'm going to end on, because this is, I think, kind of a fun one and lighthearted and yet really hard to do sometimes. And what I've found is I am a reactive, not proactive, social person, meaning very rarely do I initiate fun, social things. Like if a friend reaches out and says, hey, do you want to do this on Saturday night? Go to a Twins baseball game, Right? Twins are best team in baseball right now. It's super fun. The weather's great in Minnesota, but I haven't had that thought to reach out to friends and to do that. And in this season of life, I've felt that more and more as an important piece, is just making time for social and making time for fun things. And Lindsay and I do fun things. We go out with our daughter Solvi, and it's a blast. But I'm not great at doing that with friends. And what I found is that if I'm not proactive about it, if I'm only reactive, that stuff will come up, but it won't be as helpful as a intentional, consistent time with friends. And the example I'd like to give as the ideal is what Lindsay has done. And she has a dinner club, and these are some of her nearest and dearest friends. And they know each other so well, and It's a structured, consistent thing where they get together. I don't know how often it is once every month, once every two months. And they have dinner together. And I've looked at that and how well that has served that group of friends and what a supportive group that is and how healthy that is. And I've realized, oh, gosh, I'm really bad at doing that, and I'm worse because of it. And what you see is any studies that come out on happiness or joy or satisfaction in life, the recurring theme is those that are happiest and experience the most satisfaction in life have the closest and strongest ties to friends and family. And that, in my belief, isn't something that will just happen naturally. Sometimes it does. But for me, at least, that has to be something that's intentional, that is scheduled, that I make a point to do. And so it's not an individual person on the board of directors, but it's more of a shared seat that is an important one. It's the social seat, saying, I want to prioritize spending time with family, spending time with friends, doing fun things, and making a point of doing that on a consistent basis. And so who are those two, three, four friends that I can consistently get together with and get to know really well and make a point of forming even stronger bonds with? And I know who those people are, and they're incredible people in my life, but I'm not proactive in getting together with them. So that's my additional seat that is currently unfilled that I want to make a point to do more of. So that is a recap. The personal board of directors. There isn't an official structure. There's not any way that you have to go about doing it, and there's not any way that you know any rules informing this board of directors. It's more conceptually thinking about yourself as maybe a company or a nonprofit and saying, if I were to be a successful company, if I were to be a successful nonprofit or organization, if I viewed myself kind of from above, who would I want to fill the seats to be? Advisors or influencers or people weighing in on the decisions in my life. And for me, these are the people. The outline that I've given is the group of people that I've decided I want to be weighing in on my life, and that will constantly change and adjust. But for you, who is that? Who are those people that you want to be weighing in on your life, and what are those categories that you want them to be weighing in on you could even draw it out and say, here's the virtual table and here are the people that I want to be sitting at that table. So this is the last series, the last podcast in the series that we're doing. This one is about personal board of directors. We're gonna be starting back up with some interviews and next week, but we wanted to just take a step back and say, here's some of the things that we want to share with you that's happening behind the scenes, or some of the things that we think might be helpful for you as a business owner and as a person in general. We'd love to hear your feedback. If you have any ideas of other things that you'd be curious about or want us to talk about at any time, you can drop us an email podcastoodbloggerpro.com like I've said many times, it's one of the great joys that we have in recording this podcast and producing it and publishing it. And I would like to give a shout out to Alexa, who does so much work in making these happen each and every week, and she is a doer of many things as it relates to the podcast in Food Blogger Pro. So wherever you are, if you could do a little golf clap for Alexa to helping for all the work that she does in helping make this podcast possible. Thank you for listening. We so appreciate you and love doing this podcast and we will be back to our normal scheduled interviews next week. Until then, make it a great week. Thanks guys. See ya.