What does it take to get a seat on a board of directors?
That was the topic of discussion among Mandy Fields, chief financial officer, E.l.f. Beauty, Christiane Pendarvis, brand president and board director, and Brianna Rizzo, talent partner, VMG Partners, a private equity firm, at the WWD x FN x Beauty Inc Women in Power event in New York this September.
Pendarvis was most recently copresident of Savage x Fenty and reported to Rihanna. She serves on the board of publicly held His & Hers, a telehealth platform, and HootSuite, a privately held Canadian-based social media management company. She is on the audit committee for both of those boards, and she’s chair of the nominations and governance board at HootSuite.
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Fields serves on the board of Allbirds and helped take them public in November 2021. She is the audit committee chair.
People looking for board seats have “got to be focused on your career, because a board member is someone who’s very successful in their career,” Fields said. Professionals should also choose if they are going to be a multidiscipline person or an expert, because those are the two types of people boards are looking for. “They’re either looking for broad experience or somebody who’s a deep functional expert. “But for me, personally, I always wanted to be a CFO.”
When Fields was 10 years old, she would help her mom with the budget, “and it was the most fun thing for me to do,” she said. She made that her goal and became a CFO at 35 and a board member by 40. “You own the power to realize your dreams,” Fields said.
A mother of two sons, she said one of her sons wants to be “a successful businessman, like his mother,” the other, “not so much.”
Pendarvis said she has been on the apparel side of the fashion industry for many years and grew up developing product as a chief merchant and leading businesses. She had two tours of duty at The Gap and came into Savage x Fenty as a chief product officer, where she was running merchandising and design, and all aspects of functions that fulfill the product. She got promoted about nine months later to president.
“It was a life-altering experience,” she said, going from a functional expert focused on merchandise to running an entire business. She went through two capital raises, raising $240 million from private equity. She learned to manage finance, P&L, cash flow, legal and operations. She said boards are interested in improving their diversity, and they’re often looking for presidents or CEOs, “and they’re not as many of us out there as there should be. That was definitely a feather in my cap that helped me,” she said.
She said building a network is key to landing a board seat. She described how she got her first board role by keeping in touch with a gentleman whom she had worked for at the Gap, and had joined a new company as CEO. He said he was looking for someone with operational experience to join his board.
“He wouldn’t have known that if I had not stayed in contact with him,” she said. Every few months, she would shoot him a little text, “if I saw something interesting that I knew he was interested in, or I saw something about what was happening with this company. So keeping those relationships are mission critical because you never know where that pathway is going to be lead from that relationship,” she said.
Fields agreed that it’s all about relationships. Her audit partner at Deloitte introduced her to the Allbirds founder, and that’s where her first board opportunity came from.
She said she gets calls all the time about CFO roles, and says she’s not interested, but will ask them to introduce her to their board practice. She said Nasdaq requires boards to be diverse, and it’s important to make sure your senior team knows that you have board aspirations, so your CEO, or whomever you’re reporting into, can pass your name along if they get a phone call about a board opportunity.
Pendarvis had another piece of advice: “Say yes a lot to things you may not think you need to say yes to.”
“That has been really transformational for me.…I don’t know where that’s going to lead, and what door that’s going to open,” she said. For example, she became connected to Ilana Wolfe, who runs the board practice at Goldman Sachs, when Savage was raising capital. Through that connection, Pendarvis became part of L Catterton’s (which backs Savage) Prism program, which is about mentoring for women.
Fields and Pendarvis noted that board work requires a lot of work.
HootSuite, for example, was considering an IPO when Pendarvis joined the board, but nine months later had to lay off a third of its employees. The pandemic hit and things had dramatically shifted. “From the time that they had to lay off a third of its employees, our board met every single week for six months. Because the company was really in dire straights. There’s no way I could have predicted that was going to happen when I signed on, but I knew that’s always a possibility. And that’s what you’ve signed up for. So you have to be very, very clear about your why. And wanting to get into the trenches and understanding your duty as a board director and build your story around what you’re going to bring to the table,” she said.
“I love that because I think sometimes people see board directorship as glamorous,” added Fields. “But I like to say there’s a difference. People call it sitting on a board. It’s not sitting on a board, but serving on a board. There’s a ton of work that goes into being a board. It’s almost like having a second job.”