They are the ultimate side gigs in southeast Michigan.
These part-time jobs can pay around $300,000 a year in cash and stock awards, involve a time commitment of a few hours a week and let you hobnob with wealthy CEOs and businesspeople, including pro sports team owners.
They are director positions on the boards of the region’s dozen or so remaining publicly traded companies, and for the average person, the spots are extremely hard to get. Membership is typically limited to high-level business executives, although there are exceptions, including for well-known local figures.
Each spring brings fresh details, in the form of required Securities and Exchange Commission filings, about the composition of these boards and their members’ compensation.
Some past and current “non-employee directors” on the boards — meaning people whose seats aren’t tied to being an executive in one of the companies’ C-Suites — include Detroit Pistons legend Isiah Thomas; former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer; former University of Michigan Athletic Director Dave Brandon; Detroit Corporation Counsel Conrad Mallett; real estate and banking entrepreneur Gary Torgow, and retired banking executive Sandy Pierce, who also is on the Michigan State University Board of Trustees.
Since his days playing and coaching NBA basketball, Isiah Thomas has been busy running a variety of businesses and being a studio analyst on TV. He has also been earning an extra six-figures a year by serving on the board of Pontiac-based United Wholesale Mortgage, whose chairman and CEO, Mat Ishbia, owns the NBA’s Phoenix Suns and has called Thomas a great friend.
Pierce has the distinction of sitting on two corporate boards that pay well: that of Bloomfield Hills-based Penske Automotive Group and Detroit-based Dauch Corp., formerly known as American Axle.
Last year, she earned a combined $708,000 in cash, stock and “other” compensation from those two board seats, according to SEC filings, or $447,750 from Penske and $260,401 from Dauch. (The “other” compensation she received from Penske is the value of a company vehicle with company-sponsored auto insurance ($37,750), plus a charitable matching gift of $100,000.)
Pierce didn’t respond to a Free Press inquiry sent to her MSU Board of Trustees email.
The SEC filings also detail some notable departures from the board of Detroit-based Rocket Companies, the corporate parent of Rocket Mortgage.
Jennifer Gilbert, the ex-wife of company founder and Cleveland Cavaliers majority owner Dan Gilbert, has left that board. (The Gilberts filed for divorce last year.) Also gone is Nancy Tellem, the former CBS entertainment executive who is married to Arn Tellem, the sports super-agent who is now vice chairman of the Detroit Pistons.
One of the longest-serving directors of a southeast Michigan public company is Conrad Mallett, the city of Detroit’s corporation counsel and a former Michigan Supreme Court justice. Mallett has been on the board of Southfield-based Lear Corp. since 2002, and last year earned nearly $335,000 in compensation between cash and stock awards, SEC filings show.
Why board of directors seats are hard to get
Getting a seat on a corporate board typically comes down to one’s networking and connections, or gaining the attention of the search firms that assist public companies in finding board members, according to Tom Shohfi, an associate professor of finance at Wayne State University’s Mike Ilitch School of Business.
The seats typically go to people “who have very distinguished careers, who have a lot of experience and have a lot of really stellar qualifications,” Shohfi said.
“To become a board member on a major Fortune 500 company like Ford or Walmart or McDonald’s, you need to have tremendous amounts of experience working for large companies, or sometimes people who have already run large companies as a CEO,” he said.
The biggest public companies in southeast Michigan often nab talent from outside of the state. So it may be easier for a locally prominent person to join the board of a smaller company — or one whose founder still holds a great deal of control and with whom they have a connection.
Why companies use boards
A board seat ordinarily comes with responsibilities, such as offering business insights and guidance and overseeing how well the company’s CEO is doing at his or her job. There can also be a lot of in-person and virtual meetings to attend.
“The board of directors is a very important corporate governance mechanism to ensure that the shareholders are being served well by the management of the company,” Shohfi said. “Your job is to ask questions and really be someone who’s thinking very critically about whether or not shareholders’ value is being maximized.”
A 2025 survey by the National Association of Corporate Directors found that the average time commitment for an independent, nonemployee board member was nearly 300 hours a year, up from under 250 hours a decade earlier.
However, the expectations for board members can vary from firm to firm.
Another survey by the association found that median pay for directors was just under $250,000 last year, counting cash and stock awards.
“Most of the people who get these jobs are very highly accomplished people, so they’re not people that are just going to sit around and do nothing,” Shohfi said. “So, is it a cushy job? For a person who doesn’t really want to put in the effort, yes. But for most of the people who get to this level, they’re putting in a substantial amount of effort for the compensation they’re getting.”
‘Highly accomplished’
Companies pay big bucks in compensation to their boards because of the high stature of the members, according to Nejat Seyhun, professor of business administration and finance at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.
“The board members are highly accomplished,” he said. “They have experience, and so they can check on the management, make sure the management doesn’t stray too much from shareholder value maximization.”
The compensation for board members is usually determined by the board’s own compensation committee, which considers what similar companies pay their directors. In general, the bigger a company’s market capitalization, the bigger their board members’ compensation, Seyhun said.
“One of the reasons you may notice compensation is quite high is Michigan companies are pretty large companies,” Seyhun said. “These are large well-known companies, and the fact that they’re making $300,000-plus a year is not out of line with (their) peer companies.”
Most lucrative southeast Michigan board seats
In southeast Michigan, some of the best-paid directors are on the General Motors board. Ten of the 12 nonemployee members on the automaker’s board last year earned cash and stock award packages worth over $400,000. And everyone on the board was offered a company vehicle.
GM pays its nonemployee directors a basic retainer of $325,000, with extra pay for those who chair a board committee, such as the compensation committee that sets pay packages for the automaker’s top executives, including CEO Mary Barra.
However, GM board members must defer at least 60% of their yearly retainers into stock shares that cannot be sold until they leave the board.
Most of the directors have or had careers outside of Michigan, and include a retired Northrup Grumman CEO, a retired VISA CEO, the CEO of fashion company Tapestry Inc., the head of a venture capital firm who once worked for Tesla and a former deputy director of the CIA who is now a consultant.
In a statement, GM said that a more appropriate comparison group would be other “Fortune 50” companies.
“We have recruited an incredibly diverse and experienced board across information technology, digital commerce, retail, higher education, investment management, international affairs, defense, transportation, cybersecurity, pharmaceuticals and other critical sectors — a breadth of perspective that is a meaningful competitive advantage for the company,” GM’s statement said. “They receive appropriate compensation for their work.”
DTE Energy, the public utility, also is a public company with a board. Its 11 nonemployee directors received a median compensation of just over $300,000 last year, mostly in cash and stock awards, for a grand total of over $3.4 million, SEC filings show.
The DTE board includes Brandon, the former CEO of Domino’s Pizza and Toys “R” Us who served as U-M athletic director from 2010 to 2014.
Another DTE board member is Gary Torgow, who started the Detroit-based real estate development firm Sterling Group and went on to lead a succession of regional banks from the late 2000s to the early 2020s, including the former Talmer, Chemical and TCF banks.
Tapping local expertise came under fire in the past
One past example of a local public company with a significant number of local directors was Compuware, a mainframe computer software company that was headquartered in downtown Detroit.
Prior to the company’s 2014 sale to a private equity firm, its 11-member board included prominent area residents such as the head of the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, a former Marygrove College president and the former Detroit mayor Archer.
Compuware’s cofounder and chairman, Peter Karmanos Jr., once had to defend the makeup of his board against critiques from two hedge funds, who noted the board’s heavy Detroit-area composition and supposed lack of outsiders with deep tech business expertise. One of those hedge funds, billionaire Paul Singer’s Elliott Management, was a so-called activist investor that pressured for changes at the company, ultimately leading to Compuware’s breakup and sale.
Karmanos at the time rejected any notion that “board members should not be familiar with the community that the company is headquartered in.”
“We have an outstanding board with outstanding people who had outstanding careers and who give very good advice in those areas that our technical people aren’t adept at,” Karmanos told the Free Press in 2013. “That’s supposed to be the purpose of a board — to give strategy, manage your reputation in the community.”
Those prominent locals, including the former mayor, grew wealthy from their Compuware stockholdings with the $2.4 billion sale that took the company private. Yet from there, Compuware rapidly downsized and ultimately was sold to a private equity-backed competitor, BMC Software, and left Detroit.
3 best-paid corporate boards in southeast Michigan
Total 2025 payouts in cash, stock awards and “other” compensation for nonemployee directors
General Motors
Penske Automotive Group
Ford Motor Co.
A Ford spokesperson gave the following statement: “Given the company’s size and complexity, the board compensation program is designed to attract and retain highly qualified directors, while aligning their interests with those of the company’s shareholders.”
Source: SEC filings
Contact JC Reindl: 313-378-5460 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on X @jcreindl
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan corporate board seats can be lucrative, annual filings show
Reporting by JC Reindl, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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