Sandra Booker Built a 6-Person AI Board of Directors & Here's How to Replicate It

Monica Froese [00:00:01]:
Welcome back to the Empowered Business Podcast. I’m your host, Monica Froese, and I’ve got something a little different for you this week. Back in June, I hosted a live session during AI Exposed, my AI summit, and I sat down with Sandra Booker, who works as a fractional COO for online service providers. And what Sandra built is honestly one of the coolest AI use cases I’ve seen all year, her own AI advisory board. She’s got 6 board members inside Claude, each one modeled after a real business mind, each with their own expertise, their own personality, and their own job to do when she’s making a big decision in her business. One of them is basically there to remind her that she needs to actually sell things and make money. Another one exists purely to challenge her so that AI just doesn’t tell her what she wants to hear. We sat in on one of her real board meetings live.

Monica Froese [00:00:53]:
working through whether she should relaunch one of her programs. So you’re going to hear exactly how this works step by step and how you could build your own version of it, even if it’s just you running your business solo. This was recorded live, so it’s a little less polished than my usual episodes, but the content was so good I wanted to bring it to you here too. Let’s get into it. Welcome to AI Exposed. I’m super excited to have you here.

Sandra Booker [00:01:18]:
I am so excited to be here. It’s going to be so good.

Monica Froese [00:01:21]:
Can you tell us what exactly you’re going to be showing us today? Yes.

Sandra Booker [00:01:26]:
So I am going to be showing you my AI advisory board, which is a group of 6 very specific personalities that help me pressure test every single decision that I face in my business.

Monica Froese [00:01:45]:
I feel like as soon as I get off of this call, I don’t have another call today and I’m probably going to do this because I’m in the midst of coming up with my next big thing. And, you know, with Claude all morning about it and I’m like, but I don’t, I don’t know if it’s pushing back on me. It’s just agreeing with me. And I’m guessing that this is to overcome that and it has specialized knowledge.

Sandra Booker [00:02:08]:
Yeah, it’s to, to overcome that. But it is really hard to overcome that because it’s just ingrained in AI. To be sycophantic, to be overly agreeable because they want it to be a happy experience so that people use it more. So it is something that you have to sometimes remind it, like, stop doing that. But yes, it pushes back on you. And also it gives you really distinct perspectives that you personally need in your business, the, the, to cover the weak spots that you might have.

Monica Froese [00:02:43]:
Right. Okay. I already have so many questions, but before we dive into the mechanics behind this and what it— how you actually go about making your AI advisory board, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your business and what you do? Yeah.

Sandra Booker [00:02:56]:
So I work as a fractional COO for online service providers, people who are outwardly successful. They have a product or a service. They know how to make money. They just can’t figure out how to scale it. And it’s typically because they’re missing foundational systems in their business. So mostly I have some clients I work with regularly, but mostly I go into people’s businesses. I do a deep dive audit of all of their systems. Even if you think you don’t have a system, you are running a system.

Sandra Booker [00:03:31]:
It’s just probably not a good one. So I highlight what is the system you’re currently running on, your processes, your people, your tools, all of that. And I highlight where the friction is, like, what is the actual underlying cause and help you fix it.

Monica Froese [00:03:48]:
And how long have you been doing this for?

Sandra Booker [00:03:50]:
I’ve been doing it for about 14 years, but I’ve officially moved as a, like, branded as a fractional CEO about 2 years ago.

Monica Froese [00:04:01]:
And when did you embrace AI for it?

Sandra Booker [00:04:04]:
I’ve been using AI since basically since ChatGPT was publicly released, I started using AI for me and my business personally, and really started playing with it hard this year. Now that, now that the agents are coming along a little bit better now.

Monica Froese [00:04:28]:
So I tell everyone, I listen to that every day, like it is, and it just seems like it happened overnight that all of a sudden it became something that maybe like really techie people got, and now it’s like you don’t really have to have a tech background to get AI to do things for you.

Sandra Booker [00:04:42]:
Exactly. Yeah.

Monica Froese [00:04:43]:
And I’m going to guess your AI advisory board, is it made up of Skills? Claude Skills?

Sandra Booker [00:04:49]:
Yeah.

Monica Froese [00:04:50]:
Okay. So that being said then, was it ever custom GPT-based at all before Skills became a thing?

Sandra Booker [00:04:58]:
No, I tried building out a version for like as a custom GPT last year. And it just wasn’t great. So I kind of abandoned that idea for a while. And then, yeah, it was back in February this year that I went, oh yeah, like, you know, now maybe I can, I can do something like that. And I’ve not looked back since.

Monica Froese [00:05:22]:
So before we jump into the AI Advisory Board, what were you using AI for prior to this to help your clients?

Sandra Booker [00:05:30]:
So prior to this, what I was mostly using AI for to help my clients was doing some research, doing analysis of large datasets, things like that. Did not have any real automated, like, AI-powered automations in there. So it was mostly me running like in the chat window saying, hey, can you assess this data and can you do all of this stuff for it?

Monica Froese [00:06:04]:
Now the system that you have set up, once you have the skills created, and I’m assuming you’re going to explain to us how you would go about creating these skills unique to your own business, you can run, you can run it in just the regular Claude chat, right? You don’t even need Cowork for this. Correct.

Sandra Booker [00:06:20]:
Correct.

Monica Froese [00:06:21]:
Okay. All right. So talk to us about Who, who, all right, are we gonna call them who? Are we gonna call them bots?

Sandra Booker [00:06:27]:
I don’t know.

Monica Froese [00:06:28]:
Who makes up this AI advisory board?

Sandra Booker [00:06:32]:
So my advisory board specifically has 6 people in it. And those people are based off of real people out in the world. Yeah. And so that I could get the personality and like what their their— how they would talk, their expertise, but also how they would talk to me and, you know, where they might agree and where they would disagree with me. So, and most of them are people I’ve not heard of.

Monica Froese [00:07:08]:
Interesting.

Sandra Booker [00:07:09]:
So one of them is somebody named David Baker and acts as my chair. So positioning, strategic direction, like architecting the business, that kind of thing. Then there is Blair Enns. Blair Enns, he is my Chief Revenue Officer. So he’s the one that reminds me that I actually have to, you know, sell things and make money and do things. His focus is pricing and proposals and sales conversations, revenue offer structure, that kind of thing. I have Dori Clark, who is Chief Marketing Officer. So helping with visibility, authority, content, thought leadership, all of that fun stuff.

Sandra Booker [00:07:58]:
And then Mike, I always pronounce his name wrong, Mike Michalowicz. And he is my CFO. So he’s the one that’s like talking to me about profit.

Monica Froese [00:08:10]:
Yeah.

Sandra Booker [00:08:10]:
So profitability, cash flow. All that. And then Daniel Priestley, who is my, uh, Chief Intellectual Property Officer. So he’s the one that reminds me that everything I do can be packaged up into a framework and that, um, he helps me productize my methodologies and see where there’s a scalable offer and make sure that I’m You know, thinking about my IP as IP.

Monica Froese [00:08:42]:
So if some of these people you didn’t even know before they became the backbone of these agents, uh, how did you determine who was going to be who you were going to model each agent after?

Sandra Booker [00:08:55]:
So the way I did it was I started having a conversation with Claude, and the first thing is I gave Claude all of the information about my business, about, you know, what I do, who I do it for, what are my offerings, what are my price points, what’s my profitability, like all of the information about the business and what are my goals are and all of that. Then I gave it everything about me. So the results of every personality test I’ve ever taken. So like my StrengthsFinders, my DiSC assessment, my Human Design, my Enneagram, all of that. And I told it a little bit about Um, me as a person. Um, so extremely introverted, social anxiety, um, all of these things. Uh, and then I said, based off of what you know about the business and me and what my expertise is and where I’m trying to get to, what roles do I— should I consider having if I was to create an advisory board? What roles should I consider having? So first I figured out what roles I should have.

Monica Froese [00:10:04]:
Okay.

Sandra Booker [00:10:06]:
And it asked me a few questions and then it said, okay, I recommend these, these roles. And then from there, I said, okay, great. And then who out in the real world, or if not in the real world, like what type of knowledge and skills and personality should these people have? And it recommended 2 or 3 people per role. And then I just picked of those, and some of them I might have been like, oh, that person, but also with a little bit of this person. So I would— I had some of them are amalgamations of a couple of different people or a couple of different personality traits. But, but yeah, I just had Claude kind of do all of the research, and then I just kind of picked. OK. And then at one point in time, I added an extra person beyond the ones I just mentioned because during a board meeting, they gave me some advice.

Sandra Booker [00:11:08]:
And I was just like, this goes against my nature as an introvert. And so I realized I was missing that kind of person who has that knowledge. So now I have like a chief human strategy officer kind of person who is— who knows all about being an introvert and, um, neurodivergence and all of that stuff and can speak to that and help me implement— like, help me figure out how to implement the advice the, the rest of the board might be giving me. So if my goal was to give the AI a really structured funnel to go down, to have when it’s talking about, um, you know, my finances or my revenue or whatever. So I had it create a skill that just talked about, in general, the type of knowledge this person has, the type of expertise they have, what their guardrails are, like the lane that they stay in. Already looked up some main frameworks, but like frameworks from that person, but also just general business frameworks. Like these are the frameworks that I use in my business. What are the other ones should I be thinking about? And then also, how should these interact with the other board members?

Monica Froese [00:12:31]:
Okay.

Sandra Booker [00:12:31]:
So who, who is keeping who on their toes? You know, who is shoring up whose weak side, that kind of thing. So yeah, it was very simplistic in that way because I didn’t want to try and recreate somebody else in my business. I just am trying to create guardrails to allow the AI to work within it.

Monica Froese [00:13:01]:
Okay. So are each of these roles its own skill or they sit in a boardroom skill?

Sandra Booker [00:13:07]:
So they’re each their own skill. So each, every single one of them is their own skill. And then I have a board meeting skill that tells that I can run to bring all of them in. And it tells the system, like, how to run a board meeting. Like, we start with an agenda and then we— they ask me questions about topic 1, and then we— then they give me their insights on topic 1, and then so on and so forth until the agenda is done.

Monica Froese [00:13:39]:
Okay.

Sandra Booker [00:13:40]:
And then I put them all together into a project just so that I have all of my chats in one spot.

Monica Froese [00:13:47]:
So I want to see the behind the scenes. I want to see how this works. And I think that will help a lot. Like, when we see it, I feel like it will connect a lot of dots because it seems a little abstract right now. But seeing it actually, like, we’re going to go through a boardroom meeting, right?

Sandra Booker [00:14:04]:
Yeah, we’ll go through a boardroom meeting. Yeah, let’s do it. Awesome. Yeah, and they are each individual skills because also sometimes I have— I want to have a conversation and I don’t need everybody in there. Or sometimes there, there might just be— oops, there might just be one person that I need to talk to. Okay, so Claude. Whether to relaunch my Scale Society program. So Scale Society is my group program.

Sandra Booker [00:14:30]:
I tend to relaunch it once a year. And help me figure out, is this worth my time doing right now? The last time I asked it this, it told me no. So we’ll see.

Monica Froese [00:14:42]:
Well, that, that would be very fascinating then to see if we arrive at a different conclusion. Yeah.

Sandra Booker [00:14:46]:
Well, it told me no for a different time period. So now I’m gonna— I’m asking for, is this something I should be doing in the fall? So the first thing it’s gonna do is— so in my project instructions, I have— I tell it to reference Google Drive. I have my headquarters in Google Drive. My original board, I will say, was I did build it out in Cowork, and I liked it in Cowork because it was easier for it to keep my master docs updated. But it was obviously I did not like that I couldn’t access it from my other computers.

Monica Froese [00:15:25]:
So that was annoying.

Sandra Booker [00:15:26]:
Yeah.

Monica Froese [00:15:26]:
That is, that is definitely a limitation of CoWork that I hope they figure out how to fix.

Sandra Booker [00:15:31]:
Yeah, it’s really annoying. So what’s happening here is that the chair is just saying what it is that we’re trying to talk about today. So he’s reiterating the question, and he’s just saying, okay, so we were going to try for an April thing. We decided not to do it. Then each of my people ask a question. You can set it up so that they, you know, one question is asked and then answered and more of a conversation, but you eat up way more tokens that way. So I just have them all ask me their initial questions, and then I’ll just go through and, and answer them. So we decided not to do the April launch.

Sandra Booker [00:16:19]:
And when I’m talking about Scaled Society, I want it to relaunch in its existing form, but maybe with some edits, maybe bringing in some AI into it. This is not gonna be the best board meeting because I’m doing this live. But, and then Blair is asking me, like, what’s the primary reason you want to run Scaled Society in August specifically? And it is a nice little boost of revenue, and I haven’t done it in a year, and I want to do it. Dory is asking me, you know, who you’re selling Skill Society to in August. Has the audience shifted? My audience has not shifted at all, though I do have quite a few new people on my list. I have more than 1,000 new people on the list. So it’s a fresher audience to sell to, people who haven’t heard of it yet. And then Mike’s asking me, what does August launch actually cost you in time and money? So the cost of running Scale Society is very, very low.

Sandra Booker [00:17:29]:
It might cost me maybe $2,400 in total of hours. Daniel’s asking me, has the program format itself been The constraint on enrollment? No, the program— the constraint on enrollment was the lack of new people in my list. So I hadn’t been doing list building for quite a long time. So people had seen the offer quite a lot, which resulted in not having as many people enroll the last couple of times I ran it. And then Dr. Nalini, She’s the— my chief human strategy person. So then she’s just asking me, like, do you have the capacity to basically do this? Yes, I have the capacity to do it. I’m excited to do it.

Sandra Booker [00:18:22]:
I push back. And then it’ll say, like, where the board agrees and then where the board disagrees. So I can see where people—

Monica Froese [00:18:31]:
Blair versus everyone else.

Sandra Booker [00:18:33]:
Yeah. And then the chair comes in and he says, okay, so based off of all of that, here’s what we’d recommend doing. So, you know, make a list of everything you want to change. Think about Blair’s thoughts and then figure out the one next step. So then at the end it says, hey, are we good to hand it off to the secretary? And I’ll say, yep, hand it to the secretary.

Monica Froese [00:19:01]:
And this is another skill that’s going to be called in.

Sandra Booker [00:19:03]:
Yeah, the secretary is another skill and document the decisions that we’ve made. It’ll highlight any questions that might still be existing. It highlights all the action items. And then when I’m ready, it will put it— put any action items into ClickUp, all of my decisions into my decision space in ClickUp.

Monica Froese [00:19:28]:
Okay.

Sandra Booker [00:19:29]:
So that I have a record of it. And then I will usually have it update the master docs as well. But sometimes it’ll— in this, it sometimes struggles to update the Google Drive.

Monica Froese [00:19:41]:
Well, I will say one thing that already this solves for me. I mean, it solves a lot because I really— I do think I need to design something for there to be more pushback, especially when I’m making big decisions like I’m trying to make. literally right before this call. Um, so that— but then also, I don’t know if you experienced this, I just was talking to a few people about this, that Claude, uh, search is awful. Like, it’s so hard to recall conversations that maybe you had like a month ago.

Sandra Booker [00:20:14]:
Mm-hmm.

Monica Froese [00:20:14]:
And I don’t do a good job at, once I make a decision, like bringing it somewhere and putting it somewhere that’s easily accessible. Because I think the reason I don’t, even if it’s a little bit of an annoyance, is I work a lot in projects. So, you know, it will update memory and stuff like that. But that’s really a good idea once you make these big decisions to pull it into like a central repository.

Sandra Booker [00:20:41]:
Yeah, yeah. And I pull it into that central repository because you’re right, the search on Claude is terrible. But ClickUp, like, I use ClickUp and it has the ClickUp brain, which is really good because I can ask a question in ClickUp and it will look at all of my notes and it’ll go, oh, based off of this meeting back here, I think this. And it’s just, I find it way easier to find information and access it and ask questions about it and all of that. So.

Monica Froese [00:21:14]:
Okay. So My tactical brain’s coming in now because I get the strategy. Like, I get why we’d want this. It makes perfect sense to me. But my brain is like— and maybe this is— does your freebie cover— does it actually tell us what to do to create this on our own?

Sandra Booker [00:21:33]:
Yeah, it walks you through, said, on how to do it and tells you that it has to be skills and all that. Yeah.

Monica Froese [00:21:40]:
Like, at the end of the day, what am I ending up with? Like, to do this properly, how many skills do I have? And how many things am I— how many other tools am I calling in to make this happen?

Sandra Booker [00:21:53]:
So, the skills you have is 1 for each board member. So that could be 3 to 5 or 3 to 6. I would not have more than 6 people on your board. And So that’s one skill for each of them. And then you have your board secretary skill. And you have your board meeting skill. And those are the only skills. And then you have the only tools that I use now because it’s in Google Drive and it’s in a chat.

Sandra Booker [00:22:31]:
So they— it accesses the Google Drive.

Monica Froese [00:22:33]:
Okay.

Sandra Booker [00:22:34]:
connector and my ClickUp connector.

Monica Froese [00:22:37]:
Okay, so skill, they’re all their own skill, but all your conversations are in a project and then you have project instructions that tell it what to, how to function. But what are your project instructions?

Sandra Booker [00:22:52]:
Yeah, so the project instructions, I’ll show you because the board meeting tells them how to run the meeting. But I don’t always call a board an official board meeting. I might just pop into the chat and start asking questions. So the board instructions are telling it you are the board. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So you are, you know, the chair’s desk of Sandra Booker’s AI Advisory Board. So it tells it like it is the board. Load this context first.

Sandra Booker [00:23:27]:
These are all the source of, you know, source of truth. There’s extra reference files here that you can access as needed. The board should always challenge Sandra’s assumptions and ideas, should never be sycophantic. When I name an advisor, so it just tells it like, if I start the board, like if I’m just naming an advisor, you can talk to that advisor. Otherwise, just bring in whoever needs to be brought in.

Monica Froese [00:23:51]:
Okay.

Sandra Booker [00:23:52]:
It has a quick overview of each of the people. And then, and then it mentions for a full board meeting, you bring in everybody, and then it says how to, how to route the person. So like, if I’m like, hey, ask David this, what would Blair think? Pull Nalini in. It’s just invoking the single advisor. So it’s just giving it overview of that. It goes over the meeting protocol again. For them. This is technically in the skill, but I want it to— even when I’m talking just as a regular chat, I want it to ask me questions first instead of just giving me advice.

Sandra Booker [00:24:31]:
So I put the meetings there too. And then like, I don’t want handholding. I want directness, sharp questions, honest pushback. Don’t overexplain. If I’ve already made a decision and we’ve talked about the decision, Don’t keep reopening it because early on, like, it would just keep reopening the same kind of decisions and like, are you sure about this? And I’m like, yeah, we stop it, you know. And then it’s like what not to do. Don’t invent things. You know, do not close a meeting without handing it off to the secretary.

Sandra Booker [00:25:08]:
So—

Monica Froese [00:25:08]:
And you update the instructions as you come across things that it’s doing that you, you know, like, Like what you just said, you go into instructions and you say, don’t do this, start doing that type of thing?

Sandra Booker [00:25:20]:
Yeah, yeah, depending on what it is. Yeah, I’ll put it in instructions, or if it’s just one of the advisors that’s going rogue, then I just edit one of the advisor skills.

Monica Froese [00:25:29]:
Okay, can you show us the skills?

Sandra Booker [00:25:31]:
Yeah, it’s very different. So here, here’s my Chief Marketing Officer. So it kind of gives an overview of like You know, what this is for, how it gets triggered, explains who the person is. It reminds it where reference materials are. Because sometimes I might just be talking to this person and not in anywhere else. So just in case, like, it’s in a chat that’s— doesn’t— if I’m in a chat, not a project that has access to the things, it’ll know where to look. Gives them a brief view of like who they are, their core beliefs, communication style, how they are to advise me, you know. So always start with a question, evaluate against the long game, you know.

Sandra Booker [00:26:25]:
She’s gonna check my positioning alignment, all that stuff. Plan for sustainability. And then relationship with other board members. So like, Her and David are deeply aligned on the importance of positioning. So it’s just kind of like highlighting where the two intersect and where maybe they don’t.

Monica Froese [00:26:44]:
Well, as you built this out then, so obviously you had to start with one of them and then move on. So would you have— every time you built a new advisor, would you have it go back and update the skills for the other advisors you’ve already built?

Sandra Booker [00:26:58]:
So honestly, I was on the Max plan, when I built this. So I did not build one at a time. A big, big conversation with Claude, explained exactly what I was looking to accomplish, explained that I want these people to act as if they are people in a room together where they react to each other, and that I wanted them to, you know, I didn’t want overlap in, in places like if 2 people, like, for instance, if 2 people are covering positioning, like one of them should focus on this, one of them might focus on that, or they push back on each other or whatnot. So I just told it what I was trying to mimic in boards before. I wanted all of the good things about a board without all of the negative things about a board. Negative things about a board is that nobody can make a decision.

Monica Froese [00:27:53]:
That is so true.

Sandra Booker [00:27:55]:
Yeah. So I really explained it and then I said, okay, can you create each board member as its own individual skill that I can install? And it created all of them. And then I just reviewed and tweaked as needed. I have not updated them since adding the Chief Human Advisor because I don’t feel like I need to specify between them.

Monica Froese [00:28:23]:
Right.

Sandra Booker [00:28:24]:
But like, I didn’t need to specify like, oh, how are you gonna react with this person? Because that person is more of a, okay, Sandra, based off of what they said, here’s what I think, you know, you would do. But if I— if it was something where this person really needs to interact with these people in a specific way, then yeah, I’d probably just make sure that I go and update those skills if— to make sure that they talk to each other right.

Monica Froese [00:28:50]:
Yeah. Okay, so I’m gonna ask Nicole’s question, and then I have a question. So Nicole says, do they talk to each other, like create a chat with each other? I would get a trip out of that. I’m gonna guess, like, they— you could, you could absolutely just pit them against each other if you wanted to, right? You could start a chat and be like—

Sandra Booker [00:29:06]:
I imagine you could. I never have tried that, but I imagine you could. I haven’t noticed it doing anything like that where it’s on its own saying, oh, I’m gonna put you know, Nalini and Dory together and have them hash this out. They really are— they, they talk to each other only in that they will reference each other’s points. So often, like, Dory will go, all right, well, the one thing that nobody else has seen is that Sandra can turn this into that. And that’s why— so sometimes they’ll make my point for me. Which I find absolutely fascinating that the AI is not just repeating the same thing over and over again. It’s, it is literally going, well, what the thing that this person didn’t see is this.

Monica Froese [00:29:55]:
It immediately consumes all of your tokens. Yeah.

Sandra Booker [00:29:58]:
Yeah, exactly.

Monica Froese [00:30:00]:
I know you set them off to do their own thing and before you know it, Claude’s like, you are out. You come back in 3 hours.

Sandra Booker [00:30:06]:
Come back in 3 hours. Come back in 30 days.

Monica Froese [00:30:10]:
Okay, so I want to make sure we get to the question of what problems that board members have solved in your clients’ businesses and any other unique use cases you’ve seen in different businesses. But I really want to know, the CFO, Mike, does he have access to like your QBO? What is he pulling? How does he know your profitability and revenue and stuff?

Sandra Booker [00:30:33]:
I just update it regularly in my master doc. That’s how he knows whatever whatever’s happening. I did not give him read access to QuickBooks because I didn’t think it was necessary. I’m like the same, my goals and stuff, and I just like pop it into my master doc. This has changed.

Monica Froese [00:30:51]:
Okay, so now to your clients. So have you experienced with your clients finding any other different type of board member that was unique to their business? And then what kind of results have they gotten from implementing this?

Sandra Booker [00:31:04]:
Yeah, I let my clients, they talk to their own boards. So I haven’t done any, I don’t have any case studies or anything. I’ve had all of them come back to me and just say, oh my gosh, this is freaking amazing.

Monica Froese [00:31:19]:
Mm-hmm.

Sandra Booker [00:31:19]:
It is, I have been sitting with this decision or avoiding this decision or been unsure about this decision for months or years. And I finally know what I need to do. That’s probably like the number one thing that I’ve seen across the board, having the confidence to move forward on something that you didn’t have the confidence to move forward on before. Yeah.

Monica Froese [00:31:47]:
How do you decide for your clients who the— like what advisors they need and who they should mimic for their businesses?

Sandra Booker [00:31:59]:
The exact same way I’ve done it, I did it for me, is I feed in like all, so each of my clients have their own project, their own space that I talk to in. I give it all the information about them. So like with when I was doing Tarzan’s board of directors, I’m very familiar with Tarzan’s business already. So I knew a lot about her and the business, But I just, I have that Curate the Room offer where if somebody needs help building a board, I have a full intake form. They just fill in all of their business details. And then I use that to create the board the exact same way I created it for myself, which is just feeding it all of the details and then working with Claude to figure out what the best person is. So when I did it with Tarzan, one of the big things is with Tarzan, her whole business is— I don’t know if anybody knows Tarzan, but Tarzan Cave. And hearing from a diverse group of people, really understanding, you know, people’s privileges and, you know, things like that.

Sandra Booker [00:33:15]:
So it was really important for her to have a really diverse lived experience in her board. So that was extremely highlighted, and that pulled people like I had never heard of. So many people that I had never heard of. Some people, many people I have. And then I just built a board for somebody who has— it’s more like a kind of like luxury kind of brand, and their marketing is way different than the marketing that needs to happen for Um, for most of my clients, um, and it’s way more about, you know, building that brand and that identity. And like, they’re not doing digital marketing in the traditional sense. Um, and all of their board members were— none of them, I think only one of them was like a traditional, like, CFO. Everybody else was like a non-traditional, uh, board seat, um, that specialized in in luxury marketing, branding, goods, all of that.

Monica Froese [00:34:21]:
When you mentioned Tarzan wanting diversity, I was like— because it did strike me when you were giving me the, the names, a lot of them seem to align to he. Um, I think I really need it. I, I also really want a diverse one. So yeah, I’m gonna try to articulate my my conflict here. So I’ve mentioned a few times, but for anyone who doesn’t know, so I grew up in corporate tech. Like, that was before I took the business full-time a decade ago. And I was exposed to not great things in the boardroom, I will say. Very toxic stuff.

Monica Froese [00:34:59]:
And I probably could have a whole podcast about it, to be honest with you.

Sandra Booker [00:35:02]:
Yeah.

Monica Froese [00:35:03]:
It was a big driver for me to start my own business. I just didn’t like the way things were done. And it was a publicly traded company too. So that just added another layer of complexity. It was just cutthroat, lots of stuff.

Sandra Booker [00:35:14]:
Yeah.

Monica Froese [00:35:14]:
So I noticed while there’s a lot of toxic things being done in the boardroom, men also have a very— it’s like I want to channel how they think of things without their toxic stuff though, you know what I mean? Like, and I— that’s really important to me because like I feel like they’re— they go for what they want. women hesitate a lot more. But I also— but I also want women to shine too with their expertise. Like, it’s just such an interesting— it’s hard for me to articulate. It’s really hard for me to articulate if you’ve never been in a boardroom with this happening, because the dynamics are wild to watch, especially when you’re in your 20s and you still don’t really know much.

Sandra Booker [00:35:58]:
Yeah.

Monica Froese [00:35:58]:
And you’re like, I could see what was going on, but it really took me being removed from it and getting older and having kids to be like, That was awful. That was really awful, the way people treat each other and the way they handle each other. And so I’m just trying to think for myself, how can I make sure that I get— I want the opinion, I want the— I want the good, like you said, I want the good side. How do you make sure you get the good side out of it without all this crap?

Sandra Booker [00:36:28]:
Yeah. I, before I picked anybody for my board, I did look at them and like, you know, are these people who are saying anything that I disagree with fundamentally? All of the people that I have, none of them are people that I would like, if I saw them on a YouTube channel, I’d be like, that guy, and go away, you know?

Monica Froese [00:36:55]:
You’d be like Dave Ramsey. He can stay away from me.

Sandra Booker [00:36:58]:
Yeah, yeah, there’s lots of them. Like, I’d just be like, no. Um, so all you have to do is like, um, so one, tell Claude that, like, you know, I don’t want anybody that’s going to do X, Y, and Z. I value people who treat people like this. Um, and I don’t want anybody who would ever treat anybody like this or say things like that. Like, just tell it what you’re looking for. And it is really good at finding really good examples out in the wild for you.

Monica Froese [00:37:36]:
Yeah, you know, because while I haven’t gotten to the point where I’m willing— well, I’ve really publicly talked about some of the things I experienced, which I hope one day I do get to that point, because I think it’s a really important conversation to have. I’m just not comfortable yet doing it. But I would be comfortable telling Claude. So maybe I should actually share with Claude some of the things that I witnessed. That I really disagree with, and so I can steer clear.

Sandra Booker [00:38:00]:
Yeah, and then the other thing I’d say is like, when I’m looking at— when I looked at what got brought in to the skills, I didn’t see any major like, oh, that is such a male toxic idea or anything like that. So I would also suggest if that is something that you are potentially sensitive to, give them names that are androgynous or just non-names. So just call them your chair, your CFO.

Monica Froese [00:38:35]:
Yeah.

Sandra Booker [00:38:36]:
One, it’ll be easier to call them because you can just say, I need to talk to my CFO. But 2, as you hear their responses, you won’t immediately have preloaded any bias or any thoughts. So it will, like anybody, I’d say like anybody who might be sensitive to that because of history or whatever, give them non-differentiating names.

Monica Froese [00:39:02]:
I probably will rename. Yeah, I like that.

Sandra Booker [00:39:05]:
That could be a good place to start. And if you have any, like if anybody has any questions, feel free to like hit me up. So if you’re not, in case you’re not familiar, Claude has a skill creating skill.

Monica Froese [00:39:15]:
Now it’s come up.

Sandra Booker [00:39:17]:
So honestly, like, you’re not— you can tell it to say, oh, I want to make sure to include X, Y, and Z in all of the skills. But the way I built it, I did not. I wanted it to build it the way it thought it would best— I would best be served by what I told it I needed. And it did a really good job that way. So I would say, like, the people who have come to me and said, I just built my board, I think that’s pretty much what they’re doing is they’re, they’re not, they’re not overly guiding it and trying to be the master of the creation.

Monica Froese [00:40:00]:
That’s important. I think that’s the whole point. The point is that it does have, like, an independent— it is able to kind of have a mind of its own and challenge you. That’s the whole point of a committee is—

Sandra Booker [00:40:13]:
Exactly.

Monica Froese [00:40:14]:
To challenge the idea. I like that I am going to implement this. But who knew? It’s so funny when certain things bring up stuff for you. You’re like, huh, boardroom, bad experiences. And now it’s like almost giving me permission to how can I implement this in a positive way for myself?

Sandra Booker [00:40:31]:
Yeah, exactly. Rewrite that history and have a positive board experience. Because yeah, I have, I’ve had plenty of terrible board experiences. And yeah, what I love about my board is that one, I am always the absolute deciding factor in the end. I am the biggest voice in that room. It doesn’t matter what they do, and they are just there to advise me. And—

Monica Froese [00:40:56]:
Ultimately, you run the ship. It is your business. It helps you get— it helps with You know, when you’re doing it by yourself and you don’t have anyone to bounce the ideas off of, you might, you might think something’s an incredible idea, but you’re, you don’t know what you don’t know. And they’re meant to challenge your critical thinking, which I’ll take it a step further and say that, you know, I know there’s been a lot of talk about is AI going to ruin our critical thinking? And I think for some people it might, it depends how you use it, but this is another way to help it.

Sandra Booker [00:41:27]:
Yeah.

Monica Froese [00:41:27]:
to increase your critical thinking, not because ultimately, and maybe that’s something you have built into the boardroom meeting. And if not, I would probably build it into mine, which is ultimately we make the final decision. Like, the decision’s not up to you. It’s up to me. You are there to guide me to make that decision in a critical thinking way.

Sandra Booker [00:41:48]:
Yeah, exactly. I didn’t bother putting in who gets to make the final decision because as Because the tool just naturally, it already knows I’m the boss, right? So I didn’t bother reiterating that. It was just that I thought an unnecessary addition. What I really loved about it, the thing that was so helpful for me was that one, so I’m a people pleaser. I am not one to ask for help. I am here to help people. So I’m that person who’s like, I don’t want to be a bother. I don’t, you know, you can tell me, oh, if you need anything, ask me.

Sandra Booker [00:42:29]:
You can tell me that every single day. I’m never going to ask you for anything. Like, I struggle to do that. So I struggle to go in, like, even when I’m in a mastermind, I’m always struggling to ask for help. I never want to take up too much space. Yeah. So it’s always hard to give people all of the context they need in order to help me make a decision. Even when somebody has all the context, context, they might not have all of the knowledge and expertise and skills themselves.

Sandra Booker [00:43:01]:
I don’t have unlimited amounts of money to just hire these people, and all of the people on my board, for the most part, are people that you couldn’t even hire to have a consultation with. They’re like people, they don’t do that. So, um, so yeah, and then even, even when you do find people to talk to, like sometimes it’s like those people have a vested interest. Like if you’re talking to a coach, they have a vested interest in you using their frameworks and getting a good result.

Monica Froese [00:43:29]:
That’s a good point.

Sandra Booker [00:43:30]:
You know, if you talk to a team member, they have a vested interest in you liking them and keeping them, keeping them hired, you know. So, um, And you’re talking to friends and family, you have to worry about, like, if somebody tells you the worst idea ever, now you have to manage their feelings. Like, how do you tell them, ah, it’s a bad idea? You know, like, so this board, I don’t have to worry about their feelings. I don’t have to, you know, they don’t have any vested interest in anything that I do. I can just speak freely. And like, the number of times I’ve told Blair, like, no, Blair, you totally missed the point.

Monica Froese [00:44:06]:
I love it. Okay, let me just wrap up these comments real quick, and then we’ll just do a final what your freebie is and how people can find you. The board meeting skill— does the board meeting skill include a description of how the board members are supposed to interact?

Sandra Booker [00:44:25]:
The board meeting skill— I’m actually looking because I can’t remember. The board meeting skill. No, it’s just about how the— no, it’s just about how the meeting runs. So it goes over— I can show you this too. This might be helpful to see. So this is the board meetings skill. So again, it tells it where to reference the master context. It says who’s in the board.

Sandra Booker [00:44:57]:
Okay. And then it kind of gives an overview of what the board does. So it says, like, we’re setting the agenda. What happens if there’s just one thing? What happens if there’s more than one thing? It talks about the question phase for each topic, because I always want them to ask me questions. And then follow-up questions if needed. So sometimes they will actually, depending on what I’ve said, they’ll go, oh, like, you know, there’s other questions, but I don’t want to have endless questions. So it’s like, there’s a maximum number of questions they can ask me.

Monica Froese [00:45:31]:
Yeah.

Sandra Booker [00:45:33]:
This is staying on topic. So David’s primary job as chair is to stay on topic because sometimes as you’re answering, you might say something. And if you don’t have them— so I’d say if you don’t have anything else in your thing, you have to have this, keeping— having the chair keep you on topic because the AI will naturally follow rabbit holes. It will naturally like go, oh, you said this, so I’m gonna start a conversation about that. And I’m like, no, that’s not the topic. So, and then it talks about like the discussion phase. So what each person is discussing, like focusing on, and then basically the wrap-up. So chair’s synthesis.

Sandra Booker [00:46:19]:
And then this is the only thing where it highlights how they interact. This is just highlighting common tensions to expect. So like David versus Daniel, Blair versus Dory, Mike versus Daniel. So these are the common things where they’re probably not going to agree. And then the wrap-up is like moving to the next agenda item if there’s more than one, or closing off and handing it to the secretary if we’re done.

Monica Froese [00:46:47]:
Nice. Yeah, I’m definitely doing this. Okay.

Sandra Booker [00:46:51]:
You can always find me on Instagram under Sidekick COO as well. All right.

Monica Froese [00:46:56]:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing this, and I will report back to you after I do my boardroom and run through my big decision about how it turned out. Yeah.

Sandra Booker [00:47:06]:
Anybody who leaves here and goes and creates your boardroom, please, please, please email me and tell me how it went. I really want to hear it.

Monica Froese [00:47:15]:
Yes, we will do that. Thanks, Sandra.

Sandra Booker [00:47:17]:
So much, Monica.

Monica Froese [00:47:18]:
Yeah, bye.