Becoming a Business Mentor Was Not My Plan
I have lost count of the number of times, once I became a business owner, I had to give myself a stern talking to!
“What’s your problem?
There you go, complaining again.
You are the one who decided to start your own business – so start doing business and stop moaning about it.”
Once the business-bug bit me, I wanted to be the best Personal Brand Consultant and Trainer, EVER. No way did I imagine I would be helping other business owners move from passion to profit (if you want to know that story, just ask).
Admission. I didn’t even know what a Business Mentor was!
I Had a Life Before Business
When I was an employee the world made sense and had structure. I had a job description; I had a place of work where I had a desk and a chair; I went to my place of work Monday to Friday – arriving at 9.00am and leaving at about 6.30pm – and I did the stuff on my job description.
I had a manager who told me what stuff on my job description I had to do and together we agreed what order that stuff would be done in; my manager had a manager who did exactly the same with her. Every month numbers would appear in my bank account and I could use those numbers to pay for things I needed like food and clothes and night’s out and holidays and …
My world had order.
Then I had this crazy idea to start a business. And that was the day order ceased to exist!
It was also the day worries of a different kind started to impact on me. No longer was it the crowds on the Victoria or Central Line or strikes on the tube, it was ‘why the heck am I not selling anything when people keep telling me they want what I have got?’
Was I Just Playing at Business?
I am the first to hold my hands up to say that I spent my first few years ‘playing at business’; operating at break-even (or below). But in the beginning, that didn’t matter because I had the safety blanket of, at first, my salary (I started by running a side-hustle), and then my redundancy money.
But then there was no salary and the redundancy money wasn’t there anymore either.
Things got very serious, financially.
I needed more business. I knew I had to get business-savvy
That’s When I Got a Business Mentor
In the film Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner is haunted by the message “Build it and they will come”.
On a daily basis, I meet business people (start-ups and longer-term businesses) who seem to have adopted this as their motto.
Don’t. It’s not true. It’s not magic and there is no quick fix.
This is what my Business Mentor taught me.
When I first started working with Henry I had – as I told him – a full diary, an empty bank balance and an addiction to coffee.
Why?
OK, I can be prone to a bit of over-exaggeration; the bank balance wasn’t entirely empty, it was ticking over. I had implemented business strategies that started to build my customer base back up after the disaster of losing loads of clients when the recession hit, back in the twenty-tens. But it wasn’t holidays in the Maldives and fancy cars money.
I have to admit, I like to help people. If I know something that they tell me they need to know, I will share what I know with them; if I can do something that they tell me they need to be able to do, I will show them how to do it.
Unfortunately, at the diary, bank balance and caffeine stage, I was doing so much of that I wasn’t spending any real time on my own business, and it was having an impact.
So, the first thing Henry asked me to do was a time and motion study. He asked me to note down everything I was doing at fifteen-minute intervals over a two-week period. At the end of the two weeks, we sat down together and analysed what I had been doing with my time.
Over 70% of my time was being spent helping others to create systems, processes and automations in their business. Talking them through the ‘business savvy’ things I had learned that enabled me to pull my business up after disaster hit at the end of the twenty-tens. Helping them move from passion to profit, and …
- There was no charge.
- I often had to buy my own coffee.
- I was shoe-horning my own business into only 30% of my time.
No wonder I was working 10+ hours a day, seven days a week.
OMG, sometimes I longed for the office politics and the water-cooler moments. I even longed for the torture of rush-hour journeys into central London on the Victoria Line.
The Difference My Business Mentor Made to Me
Henry was my helicopter.
He sat with me in my business, but he was also able to see my business as it was. No rosy-coloured spectacles there. He was one step removed from my business – this meant he was invested in my success, but also clear-sighted enough to be able to tell me the hard truths.
The truths that, if I continued as I was I would always be chasing ££. That if I gave everything away for free, why on earth would anyone want to buy from me? That I was fishing in the wrong pond and needed to tweak my customer profile. That what I had to offer was valuable, and I should step-back and implement all the things I was telling others they should be doing (for free) that were making all the difference in the world to their businesses.
How Did I Get More Business?
I got more business by listening to what Henry told me he saw happening in my business and working with him to create a strategy for my business that enabled me to spend some time ‘giving back’ by helping people who maybe couldn’t afford (at that point) to pay me but not to the detriment of my own business.
Together we worked on setting my business objectives, creating accountability-based action plans, developing ever-stronger customer profiles and honing products and services that those customers would want to buy.
It was the implementation of these easy-to-accomplish, accountable strategies that brought me more business.
So, How Did I Become a Business Mentor?
Henry didn’t work with me for free. And it wasn’t cheap.
He had 30+ years business and sales experience; one of those guys who could definitely sell ice to Eskimos. By the time I met him, Business Mentoring and Business Consultancy was his business.
It took me a while to decide to ask him to work with me – and it took him a while to decide if we were the right fit. As he knew (and I know now), the working relationship between a Mentor and a Mentee is very close, so the ‘chemistry’ has to be there.
As I have said, once we did work together, things started to get better for my business. Then, one day, he said:
“You like helping other business owners find ways to be more successful. You have spent hours (in coffee shops!) working through their problems with them. Why don’t you do that full-time?”
You know what, that’s one of the massive benefits of having a ‘helicopter’, they can pinpoint the thing that has been staring you right in the face!
I was doing it anyway, I loved doing it, so why not get paid to do it?
I formalised it; I went off and got accredited as a Business Mentor, and I am really proud to be a member of The Association of Business Mentors.
Do I always get it ‘right’ in my business – of course not! Do I often need a kick up the b*m to get things done – of course I do!
But my biggest learning, from my own experience, and from working with many clients, is that every business needs a Business Mentor to help them get more business.