My contribution to a board
A board overseeing a field-service business usually sees response times, utilisation and margin. Those figures can all look healthy while technicians are leaving, rollouts are being rushed and a contract exclusion is quietly souring a client. I can help directors ask which week a figure describes and who carried the cost of producing it. My experience covers dispatch, installation programmes, depot repair, software implementation and remote-resolution centres in two countries, so I can usually tell when an operating plan relies on capacity nobody has hired. I have also lived through an acquisition whose integration plan was written before anyone visited the business being bought. What I cannot offer is experience as a commercial director. I have presented to a sponsor-controlled board for five years and served on a non-profit board for seven, and I would expect an experienced chair to help me learn the difference between advising management and overseeing it.
Judgement in practice
01Separating what a contract permits from what we owed
In the November 2023 outage our contract probably allowed us to refuse every credit, and our finance and legal colleagues said so. I recommended paying the part attributable to our own seven hours of misdirected triage, and the chief executive agreed while finance recorded its dissent. On another board I would ask the same question when management presents a dispute: is the company relying on wording to avoid a cost it actually caused? A director should not overrule counsel on interpretation. A director can ask whether winning the argument would cost more in client trust than settling it, and whether the root cause has been fixed. I would also want any dissent recorded in the board paper, as ours was, so the decision can be reviewed later on its merits.
02Testing an acquisition's savings against the business acquired
The Sallowmont plan assumed a desk closure within six months, and no one had asked the desk what it did. When I found the routing knowledge and client relationships it held, I recommended eighteen months instead and accepted a large shortfall in first-year savings. As a director I would ask, before approving an acquisition, who from operations has spent time inside the business being bought, and which assumptions in the savings case depend on people we are about to lose. I would expect the board to accept slower savings when the evidence supports them, but also to review the shortfall quarterly, as our board did, so that caution does not become an excuse for never integrating.
My first year on a board
Before my first meeting I would ask to spend a day where the company's frontline work happens: a dispatch room, a depot, a service van or a job site. Board papers describe an operation; a day inside it tells me which figures in those papers I should trust. In the first two cycles I would mostly ask questions, chiefly about how management defines its service measures and where the definitions changed recently. I would read the last two years of committee minutes to understand which issues keep returning, and I would ask to see one recent client dispute from start to finish, because how a company settles disagreements tells me more than its service dashboard. I would ask the chair for blunt feedback after six months, including whether my questions were helping or simply adding to management's workload. By the end of the year I would hope to have earned enough understanding to challenge a plan, not merely to describe how my own company would do it.
Conflicts and their management
My largest potential conflict is commercial. Brisendale serves about 150 restaurant and retail operators, buys from equipment makers and parts suppliers, and is controlled by a sponsor that owns other companies. A board seat at any of those, or at a direct competitor, would be unsuitable. I would give the nominating chair a full list of these relationships, and I would ask Brisendale's chief executive and our sponsor for written consent before accepting. If a matter came to the board involving any party I deal with, I would declare it and leave the discussion. I would not carry client pricing or service-credit terms from one company to another. Time is the other conflict. A major outage can take a weekend without warning, so I would agree with the chair in advance how I would cover a missed meeting. If Brisendale began bidding against the company whose board I had joined, or our sponsor bought into its sector, I would raise it at once and offer to step down rather than wait to be asked.
My independence statement
I would expect any board to test my independence itself. My employer, its sponsor's portfolio, our clients and our suppliers are the relationships I would set out in full before the first conversation went further.
Committee contribution
Chair and member readiness| Capacity | Committees |
|---|
| Ready to join | Audit and risk · Operations or service-quality committee |
|---|
Capacity and preferences
- Time available
- 24 days per year
- Current directorships
- 1
- Sectors
- Multi-site and field services · Facilities and equipment maintenance · Technology-enabled outsourcing
- Company type
- Private or sponsor-backed services company with a dispersed frontline workforce
- Company stage
- Growing by acquisition or integrating a recent one
The seat I am pursuing
The seat I want is an independent director's role at a services company where the operating model is the main risk: a business whose results depend on hundreds or thousands of people working away from head office against commitments made by someone else. I would be most useful where the company is integrating an acquisition, opening a nearshore operation or renegotiating service terms with large clients. I would prefer to join audit and risk or an operations committee and learn how that board works before taking on more. I am not seeking a role as a technology or cybersecurity expert, or a seat at a listed company with a heavy regulatory calendar as my first appointment. I want to contribute a practical operator's view to directors who bring finance, legal and commercial experience I lack. Should such a company later prepare for a listing, I would expect the board and its counsel to reassess my independence under the relevant exchange's listing standards rather than rely on my own view.
Governance learning and readiness
IICA Independent Directors’ Databank: Not yet registered
The Indian Independent Directors' Databank does not apply to the US boards I am considering, and I have not registered with it.
- I have completed a director-education programme for first-time private-company directors and attend our audit committee's sessions with the external auditor as an invitee.
- On the Wrenmoor board I have learnt how a programme committee holds management to account without running the programmes itself.
Board and committee exposure
Presented to the Board or a committee
Brisendale Field Services
Board of directors and its audit committee
March 2021–present
Presents quarterly operating results, service-credit exposure and acquisition-integration progress as chief operating officer; invitee, not a director.
Served as a director
Wrenmoor Skills Alliance
Board of directors (non-profit) and its programme committee
January 2019–present
Unpaid director of an Indianapolis non-profit that prepares people for technician careers; member of its programme committee; no chair or audit role.