Most acquisition entrepreneurs spend months (or years) cold-emailing business owners, hunting for that one deal that will change their trajectory…

But Callum Laing has a better idea — and it starts with a board seat.

At a recent Business Acquisition Virtual Summit, Laing (a 25-year entrepreneur and partner with Jeremy Harbour at The Unity Group) laid out a framework for using board directorships to fast-track negotiations, unlock insider deal flow, and generate serious income — all while building the kind of credibility that cold outreach doesn’t buy.

Here's what he shared:

The biggest obstacle in any acquisition conversation is trust.

A business owner has no reason to take a cold approach seriously… but they'll listen to someone who already sits on multiple boards.

Board seats do two things instantly: they confer credibility & they open doors. For acquisition entrepreneurs, that combination is worth more than almost any other positioning strategy.

Laing is direct about the opportunity most people are ignoring:

There are 330 million businesses in the world, and fewer than 1% have a formal, active board. Yet every aspiring board member chases the same handful of advertised seats — nearly all of which are fake listings anyway.

The smarter play is to stop competing for the scraps and, instead, start creating boards that don't yet exist.

Laing's approach flips the traditional playbook entirely.

Rather than applying for board seats, he coaches his clients to approach small business owners with a simple, compelling offer:

"You've got a great company. I notice you don't have a board. I know some impressive people who might be interested in sitting on one — I'll set it up for you, free of charge, for a year. If it's valuable, keep us on. If it's not, we walk away."

Once someone is sitting at that table — as a trusted adviser, contributing in the owner's best interest — the conversation about using M&A to grow is a completely different one. The dynamic shifts from cold pitch to trusted partner.

The board seat starts the relationship, and then the relationship accelerates deals.

Laing's Veblen Director Program lays out a clear progression (and none of it requires the "right" background, the right school, or decades of corporate experience)...

Laing notes that starting internationally often produces faster results than working locally. More companies exist outside any one country than within it, and the same diversity and ESG tailwinds that apply domestically are reshaping boards across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

Those who can provide international perspective — and help companies qualify for the $20 trillion sitting in ESG-focused funds — are genuinely valuable.

The average starting salary for a first publicly listed board seat is around $40,000 USD per year — for a part-time role, typically a few meetings a month.

But the salary is rarely the point…

Laing shared the story of Keith — who joined his program — and within 4 months had taken on two paid board seats and been approached by an S&P 500 company offering $168,000 a year for a second-tier board role.

Keith turned it down... because by that stage, he'd negotiated equity stakes and revenue-sharing arrangements with the founders of his private company boards — arrangements worth hundreds of thousands in year 1 and potentially millions in year 2.

All he was doing was connecting those founders to people in his network who could move the needle.

Laing outlines 5 areas that matter at every stage of the journey — not as a one-time checklist, but as a cycle to return to repeatedly:

Laing closes with a counterintuitive warning: never try to fix a problem in the first board meeting.

It sounds obvious, but for someone earning $40,000-plus to attend a few hours of meetings each month, the instinct to justify that pay by solving everything immediately is powerful — and almost always fatal to the relationship.

The board members who last are the ones who sit quietly, observe the power dynamics, learn the landscape, and deliver over time. Low expectations, massively exceeded, build the kind of long-term career that one heroic first-meeting intervention never will.

Getting board seats are not a closed shop reserved for people who went to the right schools or spent 30 years climbing a corporate ladder...

It’s a learnable game — one that most acquisition entrepreneurs are not yet playing.

For those who are willing to start at the bottom, build patiently, and create boards rather than compete for them… the compounding effect on deal flow, credibility, income, and impact could lead to, in Laing's words, a 10x return on where most people start from.

The first step is deciding not to wait for an invitation that was never going to come anyway.

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