I had lunch today with one of the top advisors in Ottawa.
She started in 1988. Almost forty years in the business. She manages family offices for some of the wealthiest people in the country, and I’d heard her name for years before I ever sat across the table from her.
She’s a workaholic. She’ll tell you that herself. But she’s also one of those people who genuinely loves people. You can feel it in the first five minutes. She asks questions and actually listens to the answers.
We got to talking about volunteer work. I mentioned I’m Chair of Advocis Ottawa and that I sit on the parent council at my kids’ school. She smiled and started rattling off the boards she sits on. Ottawa Hospital. The airport authority. A few others I won’t name. The kind of boards where you don’t apply. You get tapped.
So I asked her the obvious question.
How did you get on those boards?
It started with Kiwanis
She told me when she first moved to Ottawa, she joined the Kiwanis board. I’ll be honest, I don’t know much about Kiwanis. But that’s not the point.
She didn’t join to build her business. She joined because she wanted to learn about the city. She wanted to meet people. She liked the work.
She showed up. She did the work. People noticed.
Then another board opportunity came along. She took it. Then another. Each one bigger than the last. Each one putting her in rooms with more senior, more connected, more interesting people.
She told me a story that stuck with me. She was on one of these boards, and she looked around and asked the other members why they were there.
Almost every one of them said the same thing. Business.
She laughed when she told me this. Because she was the only one in the room who wasn’t there for business. She was there because she found the work interesting and she liked the people.
And here’s the part that matters.
Her career flourished anyway.
The detour through accountants and lawyers
Now here’s where the conversation got really interesting.
She told me that early in her career, she did what every new advisor does. She went after accountants and lawyers. She tried to build the traditional COI network. The classic referral playbook.
And it didn’t fit her.
Not because the strategy is bad. It works for plenty of advisors. It didn’t fit because most accountants and lawyers aren’t business owners themselves. They’re professionals running a practice. Their world is hourly billing and transactional engagements. Their values, in her experience, didn’t always line up with hers.
She wanted to work with business families. People who’d built something. People who cared deeply about the next generation. People for whom the conversation about insurance and estate planning wasn’t just about tax efficiency, it was about love and legacy.
So she pivoted. She stopped chasing accountants and lawyers and started going directly after business owners.
And that’s when things changed. But not in the way you’d expect.
Where the referrals actually came from
The business she built didn’t come from accountant and lawyer referrals. It came from the circles she ended up in because she started saying yes to boards.
Here’s the pattern, and it took me a while to see it.
She’d join a board. She’d meet the chair of the hospital foundation. The foundation chair sits next to a major donor at a gala. The major donor runs a private family enterprise. The donor doesn’t hire her. But six months later, the donor’s brother-in-law, who runs a different family business, needs an advisor.
And the donor says, “You should talk to her.”
That’s the referral. That’s the chain.
It didn’t come from an accountant. It didn’t come from a lawyer. It came from another business owner she’d never sold anything to, who’d watched her show up at board meetings and do the work, and decided she was the kind of person worth recommending.
Why this happens at the top of the market
Here’s something I’d never really thought through until this conversation.
At the high end of the market, accountants and lawyers are often external players. The wealthiest families hire them for specific engagements. The transaction. The will. The corporate restructure. They’re brought in, they do the work, they go away.
The people inside those family enterprises, the ones with real influence, are different. They’re the CFO who’s been with the family for twenty years. The president of the operating company. The board members of the family foundation. The trusted friends who’ve been around for a generation.
Those are the people who make referrals.
And those people are not at your local accountant’s office. They’re on boards. Hospital boards. Foundation boards. Industry boards. They’re at the chamber dinner and the gala and the symphony patron night.
At the smaller end of the market, accountants and lawyers absolutely drive referrals. Small businesses lean heavily on their external advisors. That referral structure works.
But as you move up, the structure changes. The referrals come from inside the network of the people who already know each other. Other business owners. Foundation directors. Senior nonprofit leaders. Philanthropic families. Board peers.
You can’t break into that world through a coffee meeting with an accountant. You break into it by sitting on boards with the people who live there.
Why most advisors get this wrong
I see advisors on boards. Hospital foundations. Local charities. Industry associations. But almost every one of them is there for business. You can tell because they treat the board seat like a prospecting list. They’re scanning the room. They’re networking. They’re trying to make something happen.
And it doesn’t work. Or it works badly.
The other people on the board can feel it. Senior people have a finely tuned radar for who’s there to give and who’s there to take. The minute they sense you’re there to mine the room, you get politely frozen out.
The advisor who joined to learn, to contribute, to actually do the work of the board? Different story entirely. People want to introduce them around. People bring them into other rooms. People recommend them when other boards have an opening.
The harder you push, the worse the outcome. The more genuine the interest, the more the network opens up.
What’s actually happening in those rooms
Here’s the part I want you to really understand.
When you sit on a board with a senior business owner or a foundation chair, the dynamic is completely different than any other interaction you could have with that person. You’re not trying to sell them anything. You’re not asking for their business. You’re not pitching.
You’re a peer. With a shared mission. Doing actual work together.
And in that context, people show you who they are. They share things they’d never share with someone trying to sell them something. You learn what they care about. You learn what they think about wealth, family, legacy, succession. You learn their values.
And, just as importantly, they learn yours.
The advisor I had lunch with today told me something that stuck. She said the families she works with have been pitched by every investment advisor in the city. They’ve got accountants and lawyers coming at them from every angle. What they don’t have is someone whose values actually line up with theirs.
Someone who believes what they believe about family.
That alignment is invisible from across a boardroom table at a sales pitch. It only shows up over time, in unguarded moments, doing the work together. Which is exactly what board service provides.
What I’ve learned from my own board seats
I’m not sitting on the Ottawa Hospital board. I’m Chair of Advocis Ottawa and I’m on the parent council at my kids’ school. Modest stuff.
But even at this level, the learning is enormous.
The parent council isn’t business. It’s just school. But I now understand how the school actually works. I know the teachers, the administrators, the politics, who decides what. I know other parents at a different level than I would in the pickup line.
Advocis Ottawa is closer to my industry. We’ve got four people on the board right now and we’re looking to expand. It’s not glamorous work. But you learn what’s happening in the industry from the inside. You meet the senior advisors, the carriers, the people running adjacent organizations. You see the chess board from above instead of from inside a single square.
My plan over the next few years is to get on more of these. Not for business. To learn. To meet people. To understand the city and the industry from inside the rooms where decisions actually get made.
If business comes from it, great. But that’s not why I’m doing it. And I suspect that’s exactly why it’ll work.
This isn’t for every advisor
If you love sitting at your desk running illustrations and modeling tax strategies, this probably isn’t your move. There’s nothing wrong with being a technical advisor. Some of the best in the business are heads-down specialists who never sit on a board in their life.
But if you’re someone who genuinely likes people, who’s curious about how things work, who finds meetings interesting rather than draining, board work might be one of the most undervalued long-term plays you can make.
The key word is genuinely. You can’t fake this. People on senior boards have been around. They can spot a networker from across the room.
The strategic version
So how do you actually approach this if you want to be intentional?
Start small. The advisor I met started with Kiwanis. Not the Ottawa Hospital board. Pick something local, something you actually care about, something where you can show up and contribute.
Do the work. Don’t just attend the meetings. Take on the assignment. Chair the committee. Write the report. The people who get tapped for bigger boards are the ones who actually move things forward at the smaller ones.
Be patient. This is a ten-year strategy, not a ten-month one.
Pick a sector that fits your practice. If you specialize in medical professionals, hospital foundations make sense. If you work with business owners, the chamber of commerce or an economic development board fits. The board doesn’t have to be unrelated to your business. It just can’t be a thinly disguised prospecting tool.
Resist the urge to pitch. Ever. The board seat is not where you do business. It’s where you become the kind of person other people want to do business with, or refer business to, over a long period of time.
Where this connects to events
Now here’s where it ties back to something I talk about a lot.
I’ve written about the Advisor Event Engine and the idea that the events you host say more about how well you know your clients than any pitch ever could. The right event in front of the right people communicates more in two hours than a year of newsletters.
Boards and events feed each other.
The board gets you connected to people you’d never meet otherwise. People you cannot reach through cold outreach. People who would never accept a meeting from an advisor they don’t know.
Then you invite those people to your events. Not as prospects. As peers. As fellow board members. As people whose company you enjoy.
“Listen, I’m hosting a dinner with a few clients and some folks I think you’d find interesting. No agenda. Just good conversation. Would you come?”
That’s a completely different invitation than a sales advisor cold-calling a wealthy business owner. It comes from a peer relationship that was built doing real work on a real board. And it gives the person a chance to experience your world. To see how you operate. To meet your other clients and understand the caliber of people you serve.
You’re not selling them. You’re letting them experience you.
And if their values align with yours, the way that advisor’s values aligned with the business families she now serves, something starts to shift. They start to see you not as another investment advisor trying to win their business, but as the only one in the city whose worldview actually matches theirs.
That’s when the referrals start. Not from accountants and lawyers. From the network itself.
One last thought
If you’re reading this and thinking, I don’t have time for a board, I’d push back gently.
You probably don’t have time to keep doing what you’re doing either. The cold prospecting. The constant networking events. The LinkedIn grind. All of that is a treadmill. It produces some business but it never compounds.
A board seat compounds.
Three hours a month for ten years gets you somewhere that thirty hours a month of cold outreach never will. Different math entirely.
And the people you meet on those boards are not the people your accountant and lawyer referrals will ever introduce you to. They’re a different network. They run on a different referral logic. And the only way in is to do the work, alongside them, for the right reasons.
So if there’s a cause you care about, a sector you’d like to understand better, an organization in your city you respect, look into it. Send the email. Have the coffee. Start small.
You might be sitting across a lunch table thirty years from now telling some newer advisor how it all began with one local board you joined because the work seemed interesting.
Talk soon,
Andrew
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