Most Irish founders think boards are for companies that have already made it. They're not. They're for companies that want to.
The problem is the word "board." It conjures polished non-executive directors, formal board packs, legal minutes, and fees that start at €30,000 a year before anyone says hello. For a founder running a €4M business with 25 people, that's not governance. It's overhead they can't justify yet.
But here's what gets missed in that conversation: there's a version of board-level thinking available to every scaleup in Ireland right now, at a fraction of the cost, with faster results and none of the governance theatre. It's called an advisory board. Most founders who have one wish they'd built it two years earlier.
What NEDs Actually Cost (and What You're Really Paying For)
A non-executive director brings accountability, legal obligation and formal oversight. For a company approaching institutional investment or preparing for an IPO, that matters enormously. For a scaleup at €2M to €10M revenue figuring out whether to hire their first head of sales, or whether to enter the UK market next year? It's often overkill.
A board-ready NED typically expects €20,000 to €40,000 annually for a handful of formal meetings plus ad hoc time. The better ones expect equity on top of that. They also carry fiduciary duties, which means they're not just advisors. They're legally responsible. That weight changes how they engage. They become cautious. They ask for more process. They protect themselves as much as they protect you, and that's a rational response to the role.
Advisory board members carry none of that weight. Which means they can be honest in a way formal directors often can't afford to be. That honesty is frequently the most valuable thing a founder needs.
According to Skillnet Ireland's Talent Landscape Report 2025, only 26% of Irish SMEs have a formal talent strategy, compared to 83% of larger enterprises. The gap isn't only in hiring. It's in access to the calibre of thinking that helps close it. An advisory board is the most cost-effective way to close that gap without the formality or cost of a full NED structure.
What an Advisory Board Actually Looks Like
An advisory board is informal by design. There are no minutes, no legal duties, no mandatory quorum. Instead, you build a small group of people, typically three to five, who agree to give you a few hours a quarter in exchange for something that matters to them: a small equity stake, a modest cash retainer, access to your network, or simply the satisfaction of helping a business they believe in.
The best advisory boards are built around specific gaps, not general seniority. If your big challenges over the next 18 months are entering the UK market, getting Series A ready and building a commercial function from scratch, you want one person who has sold into the UK from Ireland, one who has been through an Irish Series A, and one who has built a sales team at your revenue stage. Not three very impressive generalists who can speak to everything and nothing.
This is where most founders go wrong. They recruit the most impressive person they know, give them an advisor title, and then don't know what to ask them. The advisory board becomes a collection of LinkedIn endorsements rather than a functioning source of challenge and insight.
Read: What Enterprise Ireland Won't Tell You About Your Next Funding Round
How to Build One When Your Network Is Thin
The honest version of this conversation is that most founders build advisory boards from their existing network. Which means if your network is thin, so is your board. That's a real problem, and it's more common in Ireland than founders like to admit.
The good news is that Ireland's business ecosystem has narrow degrees of separation. Enterprise Ireland's competitive start and HPSU programmes both explicitly encourage early governance thinking, and the LEO network runs founder peer groups that regularly surface experienced operators who are open to advisory roles. MentorsWork, Skillnet Ireland's fully-funded mentoring programme, has supported over 3,000 Irish SMEs since 2020. Many of those mentors are exactly the kind of people you'd want on an advisory board, and the programme gives you a structured way to test the relationship before you formalise anything. Four fully-funded 90-minute sessions are available at zero cost, through mentorswork.ie.
The fractional executive community is another route many Irish founders overlook entirely. A fractional CFO or CMO working across five companies simultaneously carries the operational breadth of someone twice their years. They're also, by definition, comfortable with part-time, high-value engagement. That's precisely what an advisory board role requires.
Read: Why 200 Irish Founders Are Choosing Fractional Over Full-Time
Making the Advisory Board Work
The failure mode isn't recruiting the wrong people. It's recruiting the right people and then never using them properly.
Advisory board members go quiet when founders go quiet. If you only reach out during a crisis, you'll get crisis responses: reactive, cautious, incomplete. The founders who extract real value from their advisory boards treat their advisors like a board rather than a rolodex. They send a brief quarterly update before the meeting. They prepare specific questions. They ask for challenge, not validation.
The structure that tends to work well is a 90-minute call every quarter per advisor, with occasional informal exchanges in between. Not formal enough to be a burden, structured enough to be genuinely useful. Some founders run a single group call with all advisors present, which is good for alignment. Individual calls tend to generate more honest feedback, particularly on topics the founder is uncertain about.
The best advisory boards are built around specific gaps, not general seniority. Three people who have solved your exact problems are worth more than five impressive names.
Skillnet Ireland's Talent Landscape Report 2025 also found that 42% of Irish SMEs report difficulty recruiting staff with the necessary skillsets. An advisory board doesn't solve that directly. But it gives you access to people who have solved it before and can help you avoid the mistakes that make it worse, including the expensive hiring errors that tend to happen when a founder is operating without a sounding board.
Read: The Fractional Playbook: How to Brief, Onboard and Maximise a Part-Time Exec
Start Now, Not Later
You don't need to wait until you can afford a formal board to get board-level thinking. The challenge, the outside perspective, the experience that stops you repeating avoidable mistakes: all of that is available to you now, through an advisory board built around your actual growth challenges rather than what looks impressive on a website.
Start by writing down the three biggest decisions you'll face in the next 18 months. Then ask yourself: who has worked through each of those decisions before, and would they give you an honest hour? That list is the starting point for your advisory board.
If you're not sure which gaps to prioritise, or who in Ireland to recruit for the role, that's exactly the kind of question a fractional executive can answer quickly. Book a free 30-minute diagnostic call at agileexecutives.ie. We'll tell you exactly where a fractional exec or advisor would move the needle in your business right now.
Agile Executives. Ireland's trusted partner for scaling businesses.