Choosing A Business Mentor
Finding the right business mentor is critical and can be made easy. The success of your business can rest on the coaching that you get, and your finances can rise and fall with food and bad advice. A combination of preparation and simple approaches to selecting the most suitable mentor for you will help ensure that your business mentor provides long term benefits for you and your business.
Before you embark upon the search for your business mentor, you need to sit down with your managerial colleagues, or alone, and ask yourself some questions. Assessing where your faults and weaknesses lie is vital to identifying what you need and from where.
Start by asking yourself these three questions.
1. What outcomes do I seek from business mentoring ?
2. What additional skills and experience do I seek from a business mentor?
3. What mentoring personality and style would help me the most?
Armed with the answers to these questions, your search will be much easier. You can identify potential mentors through many different routes including personal recommendations from people you know, on-line through Google, and through various web directories.
Be careful with personal recommendations; your friend with the hair salon will need drastically different advice to your accountancy firm. A good business mentor for hair and beauty might see instant results in a salon, but you need to have the advice catered to your specific sector.
When concerning Google and web based searches, you have to be on the lookout for fraudulent or lower quality service. The internet is a very ease platform with little barrier to entry, so you have to maintain a vigilance when looking for paid services online.
Once you have identified potential mentors, you can use their websites to learn more about them. Websites will often highlight the personality, style and approach of the mentor and already at this point some may stand out to you as a person you could work with. Having a look at testimonials and references is another angle that can help identify the most suitable mentor. Testimonials give you information about the type of clients and the type of work the mentor covers. Use all these sources of information together with your criteria for the ideal mentor to short-list a handful of potential candidates.
At this point, make contact and have a chat on the phone with the mentors on your short-list. After each conversation ask yourself how you would working with this mentor? It will be easy to identify the ones that you really aren't fond of, negative feelings will manifest themselves strongly when you don't develop an initial trust.
Based on your feelings, select a few potential suitors and arrange to meet with them.
All good business mentors will be happy to meet with you to talk through your business and mentoring needs. The meeting helps both parties find out if you can work together and create a mutually beneficial outcome. After the meetings go back to your criteria and ask yourself which of the people you have met would help you the most. Ultimately you need to assess this before you look at their costs and timeframes, mentors who charge less likely do so for a reason.
Picking a business mentor is a long term decision, so taking these steps is a good investment for you and your business. Importantly your investment is one of time rather than money. Once you have identified someone who you feel can really help you, ask them how they propose to work with you and at that point be clear to them about your budget. Having followed this process it is likely that you and your preferred mentor will find a way to work together that suits both parties as well as your budget. The art of haggling lives on in these kind of personal negotiations, try your luck on.
Before you embark upon the search for your business mentor, you need to sit down with your managerial colleagues, or alone, and ask yourself some questions. Assessing where your faults and weaknesses lie is vital to identifying what you need and from where.
Start by asking yourself these three questions.
1. What outcomes do I seek from business mentoring ?
2. What additional skills and experience do I seek from a business mentor?
3. What mentoring personality and style would help me the most?
Armed with the answers to these questions, your search will be much easier. You can identify potential mentors through many different routes including personal recommendations from people you know, on-line through Google, and through various web directories.
Be careful with personal recommendations; your friend with the hair salon will need drastically different advice to your accountancy firm. A good business mentor for hair and beauty might see instant results in a salon, but you need to have the advice catered to your specific sector.
When concerning Google and web based searches, you have to be on the lookout for fraudulent or lower quality service. The internet is a very ease platform with little barrier to entry, so you have to maintain a vigilance when looking for paid services online.
Once you have identified potential mentors, you can use their websites to learn more about them. Websites will often highlight the personality, style and approach of the mentor and already at this point some may stand out to you as a person you could work with. Having a look at testimonials and references is another angle that can help identify the most suitable mentor. Testimonials give you information about the type of clients and the type of work the mentor covers. Use all these sources of information together with your criteria for the ideal mentor to short-list a handful of potential candidates.
At this point, make contact and have a chat on the phone with the mentors on your short-list. After each conversation ask yourself how you would working with this mentor? It will be easy to identify the ones that you really aren't fond of, negative feelings will manifest themselves strongly when you don't develop an initial trust.
Based on your feelings, select a few potential suitors and arrange to meet with them.
All good business mentors will be happy to meet with you to talk through your business and mentoring needs. The meeting helps both parties find out if you can work together and create a mutually beneficial outcome. After the meetings go back to your criteria and ask yourself which of the people you have met would help you the most. Ultimately you need to assess this before you look at their costs and timeframes, mentors who charge less likely do so for a reason.
Picking a business mentor is a long term decision, so taking these steps is a good investment for you and your business. Importantly your investment is one of time rather than money. Once you have identified someone who you feel can really help you, ask them how they propose to work with you and at that point be clear to them about your budget. Having followed this process it is likely that you and your preferred mentor will find a way to work together that suits both parties as well as your budget. The art of haggling lives on in these kind of personal negotiations, try your luck on.
