Mentoring for growth

The best advice I was ever given was ‘get a mentor’. I wish I had taken it on day one, rather than seven years down the line!

That may surprise you, coming from a consultant who now mentors entrepreneurs for a living, but we all need someone in our corner from time to time and I still have mine.

Nobody gets up in the morning, steps in the shower and says ‘I need a darn good dose of mentoring today’, but I’d suggest it’s more important to a business’s stability and future growth – even your future exit strategy – than many bosses think.

So how do you know if you need a potent shot of it – and is mentoring a prophylactic or a pain killer?

I’m often called in when a company – or quite often its founder – hits a crisis. Seventy per cent of the companies I deal with are well-established; they’ve made it through the critical baby years when infant business mortality is high. They might even have structured a board and be well on the way to their first £10million. From the outside, they’re successful, mature businesses.

But it’s often what’s going on inside that triggers the decision to bring in a mentor. It might be that the MD’s had a health scare or their partner or children are beginning to forget what they look like. They need to let go of the reins a little and allow someone else to take on responsibility, but it’s harder than they think. It could be they’ve been forced to take stock by the loss of a key client or senior member of staff; or a dysfunctional board is fighting like cats in a sack.

Whatever the reason, the starting point for successful mentoring is always a question. Are you running a lifestyle or a value business?

The answer will have a profound effect on the advice you can expect to receive and the stage at which mentoring is likely to be most helpful to business growth.

Many lifestyle businesses are hugely successful, but if your intention is to take enough out for your needs and put some aside for retirement, there is unlikely to be anything in the company that anybody else would want to buy because its value walks out the door the day you leave. In this case, a mentor is often most useful to you during the birth of your business and the early learning years when you need help with the heavy lifting – business planning, recruitment, making the right partnership choices and a raft of other challenges that can’t be overcome by sheer force of the adrenalin rocket-fuel that gets you off the ground.

If, on the other hand, you’ve consistently ploughed money back in to fund expansion, protect your intellectual property, and further R&D, it’s more likely you are building a value business. In which case, the mentoring, its nature, intensity and frequency, will vary, depending on the company’s needs.

Take two very different case studies – one, an environmental consultancy that I’ve mentored from under £1million to more than £10million turnover over the past 15 years. We still meet quarterly for brain-draining sessions with powerzaps of advice in between. The other is a financial services consultancy that I’ve known for the same period and with whom I continue to have structured monthly meetings.

They take different things from the mentor/mentee relationship. The financial services outfit set out as a lifestyle business and has grown into a value business worth in excess of £1million. One of the hardest things for the founder was making the transition from ‘doer’ to manager; he has taken advice on every big step of his journey, seeking opinion on implementation risks and opportunities and issues arising from strategic choices.

Mentoring requires a large degree of disclosure about the business in order to be able to roll up the shirt sleeves and get stuck into the detail. It also requires some honest self-exposure on the part of the MD.

So why do I need a mentor? I called in Fiona Shafer of Omega Consulting, who runs the MD Hub in Brighton when I was running an 18-strong consultancy practice that I’d established after an executive career in banking. She gave me the courage to dissolve it and become a sole practitioner, with less hassle and more reward. Business ‘growth’ takes many forms.

I’m a perfect example of an entrepreneur who built a value business only to discover what I needed was a lifestyle business. It was a painful experience and maybe, if I’d had a mentor, I might have avoided it altogether!

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