Just like every sports team has a coach on the sideline, analysing the game, changing players and tactics, motivating and guiding, every business needs a mentor for similar reasons.Business mentoring - every business needs an outside support to help analyse the business, guide their general direction and provide outside knowledge and motivation.A recent study found that only 2% of people are capable of working without supervision so most business owners need somebody to help guide them.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. What outcomes do I seek from business mentoring?What additional skills and experience do I seek from a business mentor?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.
Accountability - the main steps in mentoring are to identify the issues/areas to improve, put a plan in place and ensure that the plan is implemented. Most mentor assignments that I take on with clients last 3-6 months. Putting a plan in place is the easier part of this process. Making sure the changes are made can be a bigger challenge. This is where the mentor plays a key role as the business owner gets 'homework' to do and knows that the mentor will be along again soon to review this work.
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.
If you randomly decide when you will and won't work, you'll likely spend too much time behind your computer and find that family is suffering or you are not putting in enough time. Keep track of the hours you contribute toward money generating activities in your business and hold yourself accountable. Do this because that's what a home business coach/leader does. You are not in the business of convincing your business partner to stay in the business if they are not putting forth the effort. That's not what I'm talking about. What I am talking about is that most home based business owners do not get adequate support and you, as a home business mentor, will be their breath of fresh air. Remind them of their dreams and their why. Let them know they are not alone in their business and encourage them to reach out to the online community and establish new relationships with like-minded people. Do this because that's what a home business coach/leader does.Don't be afraid to make them work. Do not do the work for them, but certainly it's OK to show them some things and point them to information or resources where they can master what they need to learn. People want confident instructions, good ideas and resources.Let them see you work. Let them see your fresh new content being placed online on a consistent basis. Leading by example has been defined as the best thing you can do as a leader. When they can see you placing ads, participating in the social media platforms, putting up videos, attending seminars, doing webinars, they can see you practice what you preach.
