A sit down with Bant Breen on the growth and development of ChairX

I recently sat down with Bant Breen on The UNCAGED Show to talk about my career as Founder & CEO of ChairX. ChairX is an International Business Network for Executive and Non-Executive Board Directors - Chair, CEO’s and Independent Directors. This is an edited excerpt from our discussion.

Bant Breen:

Today we're joined by Caroline Hayward. Caroline is the founder and CEO of Chair X. And their tagline is discussing the business of boards. She looks after chair people, and focuses on the evolution of Board activity and some of the challenges boards face when it comes to providing community and advice in that area. And we'll go through some of the amazing things that ChairX Network is doing in a second. But before we get there, Caroline, tell us a little bit about yourself and your career.

Caroline Hayward:

Well, I suppose I'm a serial entrepreneur. Quite a few people of any age are now starting up and running businesses. I was previously running an executive search firm in tech and software. So I did that for a long time, and we recruited for all the big, mainly American brands- recruiting VP sales chief execs, chefs for VP sec, VP, CTOs, etc. And so that was my sort of initial business.

Bant Breen:

Executive search is such a huge industry. And I certainly can see how that kind of opens up to something like Chair X. And being a chair myself, I know the value of your network. So, tell us a little bit about what you've built over the last couple of years.

Caroline Hayward:

When I was running my search firm, which is called Hayward associates, I had a Chairman's network for which was basically its PR arm. We'd host events and private lunches, typically at Claridges, which as may know is a very smart and expensive hotel in the West End of London. And we'd bring 50 or 60 senior execs together for a very long, very expensive business lunch with tech speakers, some from all over the world, essentially. So that was fun.

Then about five years ago, I got a bit disillusioned with exec search and thought, right, maybe I'll just run Chairman's network as it was cool. So I engineered it mainly whilst swimming actually because it’s when you're swimming, and it's boring, that you actually end up releasing the brain to sort of rethink how it could work in practice. So most of what you see today is actually from ‘lengths thinking’, where I’d be thinking “That'll work, why wouldn't that work”, et cetera, et cetera.

Bant Breen:

?I've participated in a whole bunch of stuff that you guys have done. And it's always really insightful. And my experience has been that you have this incredible network that you've built up, you have key topics that you're highlighting and bringing groups together to discuss sometimes outside speakers tell me a little bit more about the activities of Chair x and what you guys are doing.

Caroline Hayward:

It’s probably best to start with why people join. Essentially, it is discussing the business of boards, which is our tagline, but people also join for thought leadership. We've got a lot of experts that can share their expertise, which is great. The learnings that you guys say we call it, you know, lifelong education, from those experts. The discussions are where you kind of build up relationships with people. So for instance, we've never actually met each other because we've been on some sessions together, and we've had a few zooms. And then on the back of that, it's the business connections and the business networking. So it's sort of building trust in a relationship. But it's not a sales platform. It is a connecting platform. You follow up with people and see if you can get a win-win. And that's essentially how it works in practice.

Bant Breen:

Well, kudos to you and all the work that you've done to build it up to what it is already, and I'm excited to see where Chair X will go in the near future. Caroline, thank you so much for being on UNCAGED today and we look forward to having you back.?

To see the full interview on the Uncaged YouTube channel, go to: https://youtu.be/uUOB34VMs2s