Forgotten Secret to Help You Reach Startup Success Today

The need for mentorship in business is not insignificant. Too many people – too many young and old – receive zero education and training in either launching or running a business. A mentor will share knowledge and experience, explain needed skills and how to develop them to help someone else grow.

And yet, when it’s time to make a living, it is to a business of one sort or another that we all run to start making that living often without sufficient knowledge, experience or skill because we’ve failed to be mentored.

Fake it til you make it?

How in God’s name then can we help a business operate well if we have no understanding of how a business operates? How then can we start one if we know not what it takes to build it from scratch?

Without a doubt this is one reason why so many people remain unemployed for so long once they lose their job. They do not know how to pitch a valuable proposition to a business. They know how to take orders, but not how to show their work adds value to the business and objectively prove it.

This doesn’t mean they couldn’t convincingly argue a proposal if they were coached. A coach will provide guidance about specific goals to reach, a technique to do it with, and backup to achieve them through personal involvement with the client.

But that’s not the same as mentoring.

Dead or Alive Mentorship?

A mentor doesn’t even have to be alive to impart wisdom. Pick up a good book and you’re being mentored. For those who want to start a business of their own, the information on how to run a business operation is crucial and could be found through selective research. One dead mentor could point to another, and so you go on learning the eternal gems of wisdom.

However, adventurers who put everything on the line to exploit a market opportunity can become impresarios that lose it all, if they misfire, sending them and their employees into the chasm of unemployment. Why risk it?

Rely on living mentors. It’s so very significant to your startup success!

Just like a career adviser who should have ample experience in managing a personal career is able to share insights with a new entrant to the job market, so can an experienced business owner in tune with current market dynamics share sound advice with new entrepreneurs on how to launch and keep a business alive today.

In the last 10 years, an entire coaching industry has emerged to attempt to fill this gap, as technology and new markets have lowered the cost of and opened new opportunities for starting new businesses. And business coaches have specialized. Some know plenty about how to build an audience on social media. Some know how to optimize an accounting business process. Some know how to shorten a sales cycle and close deals faster. Some know how to craft a more attractive brand and attention-grabbing message.

But how many should you rely on when just barely starting out?

One of the key services that a business mentor can provide to a new entrepreneur is to help focus the mind on what is truly critical for not only the survival but the advancement of that brand new business. This requires a generalist. Someone with a broad base knowledge of business and experience in bootstrapping, who can speak with gravitas about strategy and methods.

If you hang out with chickens, you’re going to cluck and if you hang out with eagles, you’re going to fly.”

― Steve Maraboli

If you hang out with specialists, you’re going to specialize. And if you spent a lot of time with a lot of coaches, you’re going to learn to coach. That doesn’t translate into knowing how to start a business. Plans must degenerate into work. But it is only too easy to get caught up in the daily grind of work and lose track of what the main objectives of the original plan were.

Without periodic evaluation, it’s only too easy to end up at the place that the coaching work would naturally take you or, as an old Chinese proverb has it, “If you do not change direction, you will end up where you are going.” And that place where you end up may not have been in your plan.

Keep Parkinson’s Law in mind. It says that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. It means that there may be unnecessary work you’ll do before getting to where you really need to go. So, don’t do it. Yet by leaving time open, you will take longer to reach your chief objective. Don’t take the time just because you think it’s available. Get an advisor to keep you from procrastinating. Get a mentor not a coach to keep you focused and in control.

Even though you may start a business on your own (and you can decide this on a moment’s notice, literally overnight!), you will never really be in it alone. So remember that in the multitude of counselors there is safety.

Here is a short (6-minute) illustration of what a living mentor session looks like from one of the best around – Jay Abraham. Take note. Jay charges $5,000 per hour session and anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 for a speaking engagement. This tells you how valuable a top mentor can be.