Over the past month, multiple reporters at the Daily Dot have received a spate of tantalizing DMs on LinkedIn, offering the kind of roles top-level executives only dream of.
Last month, I got a LinkedIn message from Lisa W., saying she’d “love” to hop on a video call.
“Your background matches some of our paid board and advisory positions that we have been retained to do a search for and present candidates to,” Lisa wrote.
Others came from Sara, similarly exuberant and eager to connect.
“I’ve been getting those too nonstop,” another Daily Dot reporter noted. “They’re relentless.”
The offers, from a start-up called Boardsi, seemed dubious.
The company hinted that it worked with Fortune 500 firms like Starbucks, national banks, and popular airlines to put people on their corporate boards.
Did they really want to talk to journalists about joining the governance team of a multinational conglomerate company, where seats pay high six-figures and decisions shift billions in stock price?
No.
The much-too-wide net Boardsi (pronounced “board-sigh”) cast is by design. As is the prominent placement of name-brand businesses, which don’t actually engage Boardsi’s service.
The company bills itself as a matchmaking platform for companies in need of board members and ambitious professionals seeking board positions. And it is waging a relentless LinkedIn campaign to attract clients for its service.
The pitch leaves many prospective customers skeptical—and not without reason.
Former clients say they paid hundreds of dollars to access Boardsi, which provided, in their view, mediocre services and did not yield any board seats. Other online reviewers say they were rebuffed when they asked for documentation or further information on their introductory calls.
Some users, though, really did end up with board seats that have furthered their careers.
But not without first annoying almost everyone on LinkedIn.
“If Lisa Williams or Sara Molina or anyone else contacts you from Boardsi, based on my research, it is is a scam,” wrote one irritated attorney. “Boardsi is committing bait and switch and I will be contacting relevant authorities.”
At its face, the idea of a board matchmaking service is simple: Companies need advisors with specific expertise, and many experienced executives want to burnish their resume while earning the supplemental income a board position offers.
Publicly traded companies and major brands rely on connections and established search firms to fill out boards, which vote on compensation packages, steer overall business strategy, and offer guidance to senior executives.
But for smaller, private companies, a non-traditional service can make sense.
Search firms, however, are paid by their corporate clients, not the people they’re trying to hire. Boardsi flips that structure, putting the financial risk on the people hoping to get placed on a board.
Subscribers to Boardsi pay a $195 startup fee and a monthly subscription of $49 or $195 for access to the site’s portal, where they can find board listings from corporate clients to apply for. The companies pay only a small success fee on the backend.
Pay-to-play recruitment and branding models have a checkered reputation, but Boardsi founder and CEO Martin Rowinski said having the customers pay was the only way to make the business work.
“When we got the companies on the phone, one of the first things they would say is, ‘Is this going to cost me an arm and leg?’” Rowinski told the Daily Dot.
This system passes the bulk of the financial risk to the consumer while also ensuring any board seat available on the platform comes from a firm that would rather not pay upfront to find suitable clients.
Rowinski claimed that the platform averages 4,500 to 5,800 active clients and 500 to 750 board-level listings at any given time, but declined to share documentation verifying these figures.
The concept has worked out for some. The Daily Dot spoke with Dallas-area tech executive Lou Gasco, who in 2023 was working as a product manager and wanted to further his career by joining a board. After receiving ads and cold emails from Boardsi, he gave it a shot, advertising himself as an expert helping executives better leverage technology.
Within a month of joining the service, Gasco connected with British analytics firm AlternativeSoft, where he has happily served as a board member ever since.
The Daily Dot found at least a few other positive reviews online from executives who, LinkedIn shows, now serve on boards. These people did not respond to requests for comment.
“It may be weird, but their business model is pretty simple,” Gasco said. “They have a job board focused on directorships.”
But Boardsi doesn’t exactly brand itself as a job board through its aggressive advertising.
The LinkedIn message Daily Dot reporters received hinted that Boardsi had specific positions for which they would be an immediate fit. Rowinski claimed this was a fair portrayal, given the array of industries he said are available on the portal.
Boardsi’s website featured logos from major companies like Starbucks, M&T Bank, and Southwest Airlines, implying Boardsi had openings on the boards of those big firms.
In reality, Rowinski said, people who worked at those companies had used Boardsi’s platform. The logos were removed after the Daily Dot reached out to the companies to verify if they had a corporate relationship with Boardsi.
As for why the company recruited a spate of journalists, Rowinski said LinkedIn’s search tools picked up the keyword “director” in my profile—a rather nebulous business term. He confirmed that this strategy attracts plenty of prospective clients who are not ideal board candidates.
For those clients who may not be ready for a board position, Boardsi provides branding services, like designing a resume focused on corporate governance and posting a biography in its in-house online magazine LEADIFI.
The company also offers online courses in board leadership, though the certificate program is not yet accredited.
But it is the prospect of a board seat, particularly a paid one, that draws in customers.
“What attracts people is the end result of the journey,” Rowinski said.
Some clients left the service unimpressed by both the journey and the end result.
Mike, a government relations executive based in Europe, was hesitant to join Boardsi when he first received a LinkedIn message. The price wasn’t prohibitive for him, though, and he decided to trial the service for a few months.
But things turned sour soon after, as the company shuffled Mike between a few different contacts and prepared a new board-focused CV even though he already had one.
“It very quickly became pretty amateurish,” Mike, who asked to have his last name withheld for privacy reasons, told the Daily Dot.
Boardsi representatives told Mike it would take time to find the right organizations, but he canceled his subscription after a few months of searching and hundreds of dollars in fees yielded no results. Within days of Mike leaving a negative review on Boardsi’s TrustPilot page, the company refunded him.
Kimberly Lucas, a recruiting executive in Colorado, reported a similar experience.
Lucas said she had a very professional intake interview with Boardsi, but the profile the company created for her was riddled with errors and misspellings.
“My profile ended up being a really bad kind of copy-paste of my LinkedIn profile,” she told the Daily Dot. “I wanted it down immediately.”
Lucas, too, secured a refund after leaving a scathing review on TrustPilot.
Anonymous reports from Reddit, LinkedIn, and TrustPilot contained similar warnings. Anyone searching “Boardsi complaints” or “Boardsi scam” on Google will find plenty of ammunition.
Rowinski countered that disgruntled reviews never gave the service a fair shake. During the interview, he shared his screen and matched a number of negative reviews from TrustPilot to people on Boardsi’s CRM platform who participated in an intake interview but never actually used the service.
Gasco, who still gets regular LinkedIn messages from skeptics after leaving a testimonial on Boardsi’s website, said consumers are often confused, likely looking for consulting roles and not board seats.
Rowinski, too, conceded that dissatisfied clients often complain they were sold false expectations in the initial meeting, or come into the program with their own idea about how quickly they will get a board seat. (He told the Daily Dot that Boardsi retrains salespeople who get carried away.)
Many other online reviews, however, complain not that Boardsi promised too much, but that the company wouldn’t share enough information—whether that’s placement data, proof of success, or payment and refund details.
Rowinski said he couldn’t provide exact numbers when asked about the number of executives placed on board seats. He also declined to facilitate interviews with either corporate or individual clients who have had success using Boardsi “due to confidentiality agreements and our commitment to client privacy,” despite readily outing dissatisfied customers to the Daily Dot.
Asked how long a typical executive stays on the platform before finding a seat, he estimated seven months to a year, but added that some have been on the platform for three years, which would amount to thousands of dollars in fees.
Rowinski also admitted that Boardsi has urged clients to give positive reviews on TrustPilot, many of which the customers seemed to post before securing any kind of board seat.
Many of the reviews discuss intake and not actual employment. The onus to get hired still seems to fall on the customers.
And whether every random LinkedIn user DMed is actually a fit appears irrelevant to Boardsi, prioritizing quantity over quality, given the company profits when people sign up, not when they get an actual job.
Boardsi may work well for some candidates. But its business strategy rests not on success but sign-ups.
Which means you can probably expect the unwanted DMs to continue.
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