Most owner-managed manufacturers do not have a chair. The owner runs the board, if there is one, and the board is usually the owner, the finance person and whoever else is in the room. That works until it doesn’t. The point at which it stops working is usually when the owner wants to step back, bring in outside money or sell.
At that point the question comes up: who should chair this business? Here is how I would answer it.
Not the owner
If the owner chairs the board, the board is a management meeting with a different name. Nobody challenges the person who signs the cheques. An independent chair exists to ask the questions the owner would rather not hear, and to make sure the decisions get made rather than deferred.
Not the accountant
Your accountant is useful on the board but should not chair it. They see the numbers after the event. A chair needs to be looking at the market, the customers and the management team as well as the accounts.
Someone who has run a business like yours
Manufacturing has its own problems: capacity, lead times, raw material prices, the one big customer, the machine that is twenty years old. A chair who has run a factory understands why the plan slipped. One who has only ever advised will nod and write it down. I spent 24 years at WILA, a UK and German lighting manufacturer, including 12 years as its owner after a management buyout, before I sold it to private equity in 2016. That is the experience I bring into the room.
Someone who is independent
Not a shareholder, not a family member, not a friend who owes the owner a favour. Independence is what lets a chair say, in front of the management team, that the plan is not good enough. Owners who have never had that find it uncomfortable for about three months and then wonder how they managed without it.
Someone who will stay
A chair role in an owner-managed business runs for two to four years. The first year is spent building a proper board: the pack, the rhythm, the numbers, the habit of deciding things. The second and third are where the value is. Anyone offering a chair role for six months is offering something else.
How it usually starts
In my experience it rarely starts with the chair role. It starts with a defined piece of work: a growth strategy, a commercial restructure, a review of how the business is governed. Where that goes well, the owner asks me to stay on. Two of my current board roles began that way.
If you are an owner thinking about this, the first conversation costs nothing and usually tells both of us whether it would work.