Business mentor, angel investor and speaker Mark Lyttleton is an adept business strategist, helping entrepreneurs to establish and grow businesses in a variety of different industries. This article will look at business mentoring and how young start-ups can benefit from the experience, expertise and contacts of a seasoned professional mentor.
A business mentor is someone who uses their extensive experience and knowledge to help others develop their careers and businesses through professional and personal development. While business coaching typically spans a relatively short timeframe – focussing on a particular issue or skill that requires improvement – business mentors can provide entrepreneurs with a role model, often forming a longer-term relationship. You can learn more about business coaching by viewing the attached infographic.
Mentors help business owners in a variety of ways. They provide advice, share vital knowledge and offer support. While traditional approaches to professional development and training can be somewhat hit and miss in terms of relevancy, mentoring is directly targeted to the fledgling or small company’s individual needs. To learn more about what professional business mentoring involves, please view the attached PDF.
While family, friends and colleagues can support and motivate small business owners, few have the requisite skills to help entrepreneurs actually run and grow their business. Business mentors provide invaluable insights that ultimately enable business owners to transform business performance.
Hearing first-hand experiences from a seasoned mentor provides entrepreneurs with the reassurance that they are not alone. Business mentors not only listen but also provide advice when asked, imparting lessons learned from their own successes and mistakes to steer business owners in the right direction and help them to make impactful improvements in their business.
A business mentor can be invaluable in times of crisis, highlighting options that business owners might have been oblivious to otherwise – from securing business funding to devising strategies to strengthen business resilience.
A professional mentor can be a catalyst for new ideas, providing a sounding board to bounce ideas off and sharing stories from their own business experiences that can alter a business owner’s way of thinking and inspire new ideas.
Benefiting from an extensive network of long-established contacts, business mentors are also ideally placed to connect business owners with the contacts and opportunities they need to help them develop new products, expand their market reach and take their business to the next level.
For more information about the importance of business networking, view the attached video.