Betsy Berkhemer Credaire “How to get on Corporate Boards: Resilience and Intentionality”

Today our host, Brenda McCabe, speaks with Betsy Berkhemer Credaire. Betsy is an advocate, author, and search professional, CEO and President. 

Her retained executive seach firm, Berkhemer Clayton Inc., has celebrated 28 years in business. The retained executive search firm specializes in senior-level national and regional searches with diversity focus for Corporate Boards, Communications & Marketing, Finance & Investor Relations, for client corporations, universities and large nonprofit organizations. 

Additionally, 50/50 Women on Boards is the only national campaign to educate and enable more women to serve on corporate boards of directors, and encourage companies to seek and select women. 
She's also author of two books, "Winning the Board Game" and "The Board Game--How Smart Women Become Corporate Directors"

You can find out more about betsy at

www.berkhemerclayton.com.

and her book "Winning the Board Game"

or find her on linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/betsyberkhemercredaire/

 

transcript:

00:04
 Welcome back to the Founder's Sandbox. I'm Brenda McCabe. I own and operate a consulting firm, Nextac Advisors, where I have a simple mission. I want to assist entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs in building scalable, well-governed

00:34
and resilient businesses. The Founder Sandbox is a recent podcast. It's an additional channel to feature founders, company owners, corporate directors that are current and aspiring and professional service providers who like me want to use the power of the private enterprise, small, medium and large, to create change for a better world. Through storytelling with my guests.

01:01
on topics that include resilience, purpose-driven enterprises, and sustainable growth. My goal is to provide a fun sandbox environment where we can equip one startup founder at a time to build a better world through great corporate governance. Today, my guest is Betsy Berkimer-Crader. She's CEO and co-founder of Berkimer Clayton, a retained executive search firm

01:31
and CEO of 50 50 Women On Boards. Betsy and I are going to talk about how to get on corporate boards, resilience and intentionality. Thank you, Betsy and welcome to the Founder's Sandbox. I'm delighted to be here, Brenda. Thank you for asking me. And your consulting firm is called Next Act Advisors? Yes, ma'am. It's my next act rather than my last act. Right, it's an excellent title. And

02:00
Just wanted to emphasize that for your listeners, Next Act Advisors has a breadth of meaning that your audience certainly could take advantage of. Thank you. So you and I go back to about the time I landed in Los Angeles. I was making LA my new home. And at that time we coincided, you were president of the Los Angeles Orange County Chapter of Women Corporate Directors. And I actually got my first offer.

02:29
to join a corporate board of a US company. And I never negotiated a contract with a board in the US. And I sought out your help and you helped me negotiate my first board opportunity for a US company. And we became fast friends since, it was eight years ago. So I wanted to share with my listeners

02:56
that you not only are a trailblazer, but you're an advocate for diversity. You are a business owner. And the podcast today is about your story, about where you started. You had an advertising firm, a public relations firm. And you sold that many years ago and started a new career. And I wanted

03:26
start an executive search firm with diverse candidates. Can you tell us your story and how that began? Well, it's a long story. I'll try to make short Brenda, but it's such a pleasure to talk with you and with your listeners and to talk about entrepreneurship. Sometimes...

03:47
My favorite term is accidental entrepreneur, because oftentimes, especially women business owners start out not really thinking that they are going to own and build a business. Sometimes that sounds just too daunting, but start out with their job and then starting their job as an independent consultant and then growing it and building it. And that's sort of what happened with me with when I first started my public relations agency.

04:17
And because frankly, I couldn't find a job that I wanted. So I just started doing PR for companies and as a consultant. And suddenly it turned into many projects. And then I hired individual to work with me and therefore, well, a business. And I took on partners and we grew it to be the largest PR firm on the West Coast in a matter of 10 years. And then sold it to Golan, which is a global.

04:44
communications firm based in Chicago. I begin that I'm just a normal person who just, I didn't have any money to start a business, but I started the PR firm with a goal in mind that I wanted to do good work for companies and help companies really improve their brand and their visibility and their reputation management, which is what PR firms do.

05:13
And it just worked. And an overarching theme is always be optimistic like you are and just have confidence that things will work out. And if it doesn't work out, you can always go back and get a job somewhere. So that's how I grew the PR firm. And then when I sold it, I was able to stay on for five years. And then I launched the executive search firm, Berkhamer Clayton.

05:41
which does emphasize diversity and started it back in 1994, when diversity and focus on DE&I wasn't even heard of in those days. But what prompted me to start it was that I was involved in the marketing task force for Rebuild LA, which happened right after the riots, the civil unrest in Los Angeles back in 1992. That's right.

06:08
right, the king beating and what that led to in terms of civil unrest. And I realized that most of my corporate client companies did not have diversity in their senior ranks. And so I thought this was an opportunity perhaps to launch a retained executive search firm, a boutique, although providing the same services, corn ferry or hydrogen struggle, some of the big search firm names that your audience will have heard of.

06:35
They probably have never heard of Berkham or Clayton. We started as a boutique, we're still a boutique. But we've been able to over these last almost now 30 years, next year will be our 30th anniversary. We've been able to play senior executives at corporations and 62% of them have been women and people of color. And I'm very proud of that. It's a better statistic than any other search firm. And that's looking at hundreds of executive searches

07:05
we've handled. So pretty proud, Brenda. Thank you. I particularly like the story of getting involved with the task force and rebuilding LA. And there's currently a lot of preparations along LA for the Olympics that are just around the corner. So there's going to be additional opportunities to continue to build Los Angeles. Well, if I could add to that, that I've always been involved like you have with nonprofit organizations, I was on the board of March of Dimes when I was in my early 30s.

07:35
And building contacts, I didn't even know the value of being on nonprofit boards, but the primary value of besides being committed to a mission and helping with executing that mission. It's a great way to make business contacts other individuals who serve on the board with you. So I always recommend that for women and men.

08:00
in their mid-careers, even their early careers, to be on nonprofit boards, get to know business people, get to know the community really well. And to your point, the Olympics are coming up, but also there's a brand new mayor, Karen Bass here in Los Angeles and in other cities and states, new office holders, where your listeners can become involved as commissioners or as involved on the...

08:29
efforts, the agencies that those new legislators appoint people to. So there are several ways to become known, become visible and learn along the way, ultimately then years later leading to corporate board positions, which we'll talk about. Yeah, it's a great segue to your being an author. So a lot of the teachings you have provided to largely women,

08:58
on how to get on your first corporate board. You published your first book, Women on Board, Insider Secrets, which this book will be available in the show notes. The second book you authored, The Board Game, and actually I will do a little publicity. I was featured in one of the chapters here on my international, The Board Game, How Smart Women Become Corporate Directors.

09:23
Right. And then if I could add the third, Winning the Board Game, which is the name of the website where you can find these books, winn And the reason I did the books, the first was in 2012 and then Winning the Board Game was 2019, very recent. And the reason that I did the books was because there were very few women on corporate boards back in 2012.

09:52
In fact, the statistic was of all Russell 3000 public company boards in the US, the statistic was about 10%. 10% meaning of the board seats of those companies held by women. That's of thousands and thousands of board seats, 10% was not very many. So the books feature

10:17
the total of them, 110 women who serve on corporate boards and how they got their first board seat. As you know, since you serve on boards, it is hard to get the first board seat, but then subsequent board seats might happen because people know you in the board world, if you will. And so that story, these stories of the women and how they got their first board seats are really helpful. And it's a very quick read.

10:47
So for those of you in your audience who are looking to be on corporate boards someday, even then these stories will help you figure out how to do it. Bottom line is it's all strategic networking with the people you already know, people you've met through your nonprofit boards or through your business career, people you already know who serve on boards or they know people who serve on boards. And then they recommend you because they know you and they've seen you in action in business. So.

11:17
It's good to know how the system really works. It is. And if it hadn't been for your leadership and really gathering those stories together, it's very readable. But it's by the sectors where these women came from. I actually read your first book when I was between Europe and the United States.

11:43
the United States. And I actually reached out to quite a few of the women that were featured in your book and they've become friends and part of my network. And certainly my name has been cast come up for nomination committees as a result of some of the women you featured in those books. So thank you. In addition to being an author, you're not on Capitol Hill, but you get up to Sacramento quite a bit. You've been an advocate for a lot of the legislation in the state of

12:12
to increase the diversity in corporate boards. What's going on with initiative SB826? Well, that's the name of the law, Brenda, standing for Senate Bill 826. And we named it for August 26th, interestingly enough, International Women's Equality Day, August 26th, the 100th anniversary of when women got the right to vote in the United States.

12:41
and that was in the year 1920. Now that's the 102nd anniversary, 103rd anniversary will be this August, but that's the significance of SB 826. And the law was the first in the nation and the first one to stand up to require companies in the state of California publicly held companies, those are

13:11
stock exchanges to require that there would be at least one the first year and then two and then three women on their corporate boards no matter how many women or how many board members they have on the board and requiring just three even if your board is 15, 15 members requiring just three is not requiring a quota it is requiring enough women to have a voice because research says

13:40
whenever you have a group of three among a larger group, at least that minority group has a voice. So that's what the law says. And how it came about, I have never done a law before, never even approached Sacramento on a law. I only had made some contacts in Sacramento because I also in the nonprofit effort and became...

14:07
president of the National Association of Women Business Owners for California, because I had been the president of the Los Angeles chapter, there are 11 chapters of the Mabo. And so I became statewide president. As a result, I would visit Sacramento once a year and get to know some of the legislators. So I thought, well, why don't we try a law? This is back in 2012, a law that nobody else has saying that

14:36
We want to require three women on every corporate board. And what an adventure that turned out to be because whenever you get involved in politics, it's all your own expense traveling up to Sacramento and bringing in other friends who will travel up there with you and testify to the need for such a law. But I really learned a great deal. I had no idea how long it was gonna take or how difficult. It took seven years to get the law passed.

15:04
but it went into effect in January of 2019. Yes. And as a result, that year alone, 1200 women got on boards in California, 1200 women. And since then, I don't know the total number of individuals, but I do know that we have gone from 16% of board seats in California held by women to 34%, over a third of the board seats in California held by women.

15:33
More than any other state. And the national level is 28% of all public company board seats are held by women. So California is way ahead. I'm very proud of that. But it's an example for your listeners of just having an idea that may have legs. I had no idea, neither did my other Nobbel member friends, no idea if it would work or not, but we just proposed it. And then it's upon a life, a slow life.

16:01
but a life of its own. And then we finally got it, finally got it passed thanks to Senator Hannah Beth Jackson who was really the champion behind it. And she's from Santa Barbara and she's now retired but it's the proudest accomplishment of my life. It truly is. And it's a true testament of one of the parts of the title of your episode which is around resilience and intentionality. And it brings us back to

16:30
one of your current professional activities. I don't know how you do it all, quite frankly. In 2018, you were asked to become CEO of 50 50 Women on Boards. And five years later, you have taken this organization to over six continents with major activities in 19 cities. And because of the pandemic, a lot of this went on to a virtual environment.

17:00
your footprint is actually larger. Can you tell my audience or share with my audience, you know, what that journey has been like? I think it's largely around the metrics of just putting limelight on the number of women that are sitting on boards. And what's the program for 2023 looking like for 5050?

17:28
Other organizations also taking up the torch and saying, hey, it's not a matter of equal rights by any means, but it's a business issue to have more women on boards. And research, McKinsey research and many other independent reports say that when women are on the corporate board, the companies do better. They're more profitable by significant numbers and more productive.

17:58
and the workforce is better engaged, just because, as we know, women tend to focus on the details. That's a very general statement, but women get things done. Yes. So shining the light on the issue that more women were needed is for business purposes. That's what really propelled this

18:26
the role of CEO of 50 50 women on boards, which I'd like everybody to look up 5050wob.com in order to track the research. 50 50 women on boards tracks the research following how many women are on boards and how many are added every year and what it took to get them there. So it's a great service that 50 50 women on boards provides plus

18:55
educational workshops and events in those 19 cities you mentioned. So it's an example of helping to propel the momentum of something that was really needed, but nobody was paying any attention to 20 years ago. And it's a little anecdote. Back when I first started the PR agency, women could not get loans.

19:25
from a bank in their own name. I know. And I had to have a male, didn't have to be a husband, it could, in fact, it was a boyfriend off the street. No relation, had to co-sign a loan for a tiny little amount of 2,500 bucks to get started with some expenses for equipment that I needed. And it was just appalling. And it was the National Association of Women Business Owners way back in 75.

19:53
that took on that issue federally and got the women's credit bill passed in order to have women have their own checking accounts and women to be able to get loans. So I only point out that example that in 2020, I mean, in the year, the millennium, the year 20, 2000, yes, very few women were on corporate boards and starting to notice the issue, starting to notice that this needed attention.

20:22
and then gathering steam behind it with books, with the law, with other support systems and other organizations saying, yeah, that is a problem. That's how we've been able to build this incredible issue to what it is today. And just last month, it is a global issue. Just last month, the FCA, which is like the SEC in the US, but the FCA in London,

20:52
in the UK require that 40% of all board members be women in the UK. And so, you know, we're on to something big, women. It's a sea change. It is a sea change. It is. And you asked me what the program is for this year. It is continuing the city events for educating women where directors, corporate directors, men and women,

21:20
do one-on-one coaching with the women in, who attend the events and the same with our workshops. So we're continuing what is really working, educating women about how to use their own networks in a very strategic way to get themselves onto corporate boards. And with the goal of 50% By 2050? Or more.

21:45
So look at what happened with the, some of you may know that the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors now all five seats are held by women. And just in Arizona, which previously was a very conservative state, they've got now a woman governor and all of their top officers are women, same in Michigan. So we- And the new mayor of Los Angeles. And the mayor of Los Angeles, thank you.

22:11
You know, Betsy, I always like to give an opportunity to my guests to provide some information about how to get contact you and your firm. And these the information you provide here will also be in the show notes. So it's over to you. Well, thanks so much, Brenda, our, our executive search firm, which I also still own and run in parallel with 5050 is Berkamer Clayton. That's B-E-R-K-H like my name.

22:38
Clayton, my business partner's name, Fred Clayton, Brenda's knows well, and we're at berkamerclayton.com. And then I mentioned 5050 women on boards 5050 w OB.com. And I think you'll enjoy traveling around those those websites. On the 5050 women on boards website, we have the research you may filter by city.

23:06
not by city, sorry, by state or by industry to find out and, and overall, of course, nationwide to find out how many women are on the boards and what specific companies have how many women on their boards. And it's just eye opening. And great, great, great fun, but also a little bit, you know, disturbing to look at some of the statistics and say, well, why don't some of these companies have more women on their boards?

23:36
The needle's going in the right direction. Yes, it is going in the right direction. So I always like to bring us back to finalize to the founder sandbox. Next Act Advisors, my consulting firm, is all about working with founders and business owners on resilience, sustainable growth, and purpose for organizations or purpose for corporations.

24:06
What does the meaning to you in your own words of resilience? Well, I think about it occasionally because I like to remind myself to be resilient. And I just think through all my years of being an entrepreneur that you're gonna get no, the answer no a lot. You propose a certain project or something, you get the answer is no or not at this time.

24:34
Just don't accept that as something that's going to stop you. I think the key to being an entrepreneur or an entrepreneur inside a company is to be always optimistic. And so this one didn't work out, but the next one will. And it's a good sales technique to remind yourself that every no you get is closer yet to yes. I love it. That's resilience to me. In the entrepreneur world. I love it.

25:03
What about purpose-driven enterprises? I think what you've done with the businesses you have founded have been extremely purpose-driven. What's that meaning for you? Well, it sort of just happened for me in that when I was in the public relations business, I was doing good PR for companies without much purpose other than providing good service. And then when I...

25:29
stumbled upon and because I've always been an advocate for women and women in business. Clearly I was president of women business owners and as I mentioned, a novel and always advocating for women. It was quite logical that I would notice that there were a few women on boards and therefore that purpose really is the driving force of my life now. It's the fuel behind me.

25:57
continually until I kick the bucket, to put it in a nice word. I don't plan to ever retire. I don't believe in retirement. I believe, and sadly, some people might retire from a job, but then I believe you should pick up and become an entrepreneur right away. Because the kiss of death really is just sitting around and doing nothing. Even some people retire.

26:24
and from a regular job and take a year off, that's okay. But I'd say come back to work right away. Don't stop and don't stop until the day you- And consider sitting on a board of a nonprofit, right? Yes, yeah, absolutely. Boards of nonprofits and boards of corporations. Always, I do advise though, if you're interested in getting on a corporate board,

26:53
to think about that in your 50s, because most corporate boards ask their board members to step down at 72 or 75, and on public company boards, that's sort of a given. Therefore you wanna get on your first corporate board, certainly in your 50s, and enjoy a runway of 15 or 20 years before you step down.

27:21
But interestingly enough, even after 75, you can serve on private company boards, just not on public company boards. And many people do and continue serving until they can't serve anymore. Like, you know, many famous names, you know. What about sustainable growth? What meaning does sustainable growth have for you?

27:46
Well, I think related to the environment is what anything, any of us always need to be thinking about and what we are doing, are we helping the environment or are we hurting it? And therefore that's one definition of sustainable. The other is sustainable, can you keep the business going? Yes. Or can you scale it larger? Me, I don't need to scale to growth. My search firm is a great size

28:16
a great number of employees and I don't want it to grow anymore. I like the way it is. So I'm not trying to grow for growth's sake. And I don't think that growth has to be an ultimate goal. But getting to the point where you can all make a nice living in your own company, that's the goal. And enjoying what you're doing. And it's very purpose to come up with new ideas.

28:43
that your business can accomplish. That's, that's always important. So everybody stays interested in what you're doing. So it's, it's, it's fun to be an entrepreneur, everybody. I'd love to see a show of hands, Brenda. We'll have to do this. Or intend to be right. Well, I have one last question, Betsy. Okay. Did you have fun in the sandbox today?

29:10
I love the name of your podcast, the Founders Sandbox. And it does remind me of a little bit of building something and playing at something. And sometimes the sandcastle falls down or the waves roll over it, but you just got to keep going and build another one. Is that what was the thinking behind your name?

29:33
Um, thank you for asking. It was around, I had actually three ideas, uh, did a poll, went out and did some market research. And what I found is that I work with such early stage of, um, company. They use a lot of agile methodology. They always talk about sandbox, right? It's a test environment. Um, and biotech it's, it's the bench, but there's this sandbox terminology and it actually won in a poll.

30:02
The other alternative name was you don't know what you don't know. Again, the gift I give to or the professional advice I give to my clients is all around the 25 years of corporate experience I've had. And to know what barriers you may run into and how to leverage my experience and running a very well corporate from a corporate governance point of view, a very well.

30:31
govern business. So the Founder Sandbox is fun. And it allows me to have guests and we discover how to you know, our personal stories, professional stories, and bring it back always to resilience. Well, you certainly optimistic and, and goal oriented. So eight years now in Los Angeles, and you have been one of the

31:00
greatest assets in my life. So thank you very much. Thank you, Brenda. So to my audience, this podcast with Betsy Berkamer-Crader, CEO and founder of Berkamer Clayton, retained executive search firm, as well as CEO of 5050 Women on Sports.

31:26
We talked about corporate boards, how to get on them resilience and intentionality. This will be released in the month of March, which happens to be the month of International Women. International Women's Month. That's right. Fantastic timing. Thank you, Betsy. And thank you listeners too, for listening to the Founder Sandbox. Have a great day.