Business Mentors for Startups

Preparation, negotiation, enabling growth and closure are the four main stages of mentoring. For any startup CEO or business owner, choosing our small business mentoring services its important to acknowledge that mentoring is a process to commit to and results come from engaging equally with each of the stages. There’s no shortcut to mentoring success.

Work with a Scaling Partners startup mentor and you’ll find they all practise the 3 A’s of mentorship. But what does that mean? The 3 A’s are availability, acceptance and affirmation. Availability is about being generous with time, because no startup mentorship program can be a success without the mentor’s engagement. Acceptance is a promise to listen, advise and counsel – but never judge. And affirmation is about being on your side. Growth and scaling a startup is hard. A Scaling Partners’ mentor will celebrate every success with you.

Mentoring is a partnership. Your mentor will fulfil the 3 A’s from their perspective (see above) but a mentee has responsibilities too. You will engage with the process, taking the initiative in suggesting areas on which to focus and asking for advice on specific topics. You will create action plans and put your new insight to work. You’ll ask for assignments (and then put in the work to complete them to the timescale you agree). And you will seek and receive feedback constructively. 

It’s a huge cliché to say ‘you get out what you put into mentoring’ but it’s also completely true.

A mentor/mentee relationship is a personal one. To work, you need to know you and your mentor will be a good fit. So before you choose the business mentor for your startup, here are questions to ask your mentor:

• What’s your experience/track record? You want to know your mentor has stood in your shoes and experienced the sort of challenges you face.
• What are your biggest successes? Note the plural – you need to know your mentor is a serial success, not a one off.
•  What will you expect of me? You need to know in advance what your level of involvement will need to be.

·         Would you be interested in mentoring me – and why?

Before each mentoring session, ask yourself what you want to get out of the process. Questioning for questioning’s sake is a waste of everyone’s time. But questions that get to the core of what you need to do more of/less of or do differently can help you make the changes that lead to being a better CEO.

Here are 7 questions to get your business mentoring program off on the right foot:

• What’s the most important thing I can learn from you?
• What should I be doing more of/less of?
• What do you see as my strengths – and how can I make better use of them?
• What do I need to do differently?
•  What’s your approach to problem solving?
• What are the opportunities I’m missing?
• How can I improve my leadership skills?

The distinction between the two is somewhat artificial. What matters are the specific questions, the advice or guidance you’re looking for – not the label you want to give it. But traditionally a coach is someone a CEO might bring in to help them tackle a specific challenge such as creating a more scalable business. They are industry experts, proactive, looking for challenges within a business and helping the CEO find ways to fix them. In some ways, and depending on the level of experience of the person you bring in, there can be overlap between the role of coach and that of a Chief of Staff.

Mentors may not have direct experience in a CEO’s industry, but they have rich experience in business and will be able to use that experience to help a CEO navigate challenges such as new product launches, fundraising, international expansion, building culture and more. Unlike coach, business mentorship programs tend to be reactive, relying on the CEO to raise the issues for the mentor and mentee to address.