Global Mentoring Panel – The Benefits Of Mentorship

Panel Fireside chat about Mentoring – Why you need it, what is it, when do you engage them, where to find them and how mentoring works?

Join the team Mayking from the UK, Mark and Linda in France and Jono in the USA to talk about why mentors are beneficial for business growth.

Each of the panellists has been in business for over a decade and have varied experiences. From big business Microsoft, Google, Qantas, to advising heads of state and working with royalty. They have made the mistakes in business and aim to show guide you to make better business decisions.

The overall aim is to help you navigate the ever-shifting sands of business with a team of experts to help you on your journey.

What are the things that stop us taking our business to the next level? is it limiting decisions we make for ourselves? furthermore, what are the fears we face on our adventures as an entrepreneur and how do we combat them? These are all discussed in the chat with the mentoring panel and much more.

The topics that came up in this fireside chat:

• Imposters syndrome
• How do you know you need a mentor?
• Mentoree being open to sharing their experience and volunteering as a mentor
• Mindsets Matters
• Communication & culture
• The value of surrounding yourself with experts
• The when, where, why and how about mentoring

Business in Bare Feet is honoured to have such an incredible team of minds for you to access as global mentors. We bring them to the table for you, in the CLUB membership at SandTracks.  These individuals have expertise in business and have travelled the entrepreneur’s journey. They all have something to share uniquely different from the others.

All our mentors lead adventure lifestyles and sports, paragliding, light sport pilots, mountain biking, motorcycling, Kiteboarding, hiking, digital nomads, Gyrocopters, travellers and more. And our mentee’s are adventure seekers too.

Our global mentoring team is growing fast with new mentors coming on board every week.

Why do you need a mentor?

This article and panel is not here to convince you that you need a mentor, Because who are we to tell you what you need! our aim is to give you options, opportunity and share stories to help you assess your needs. Which we discuss in the panel.

Why is having a mentor so important when it comes to growing your business?

One thing many successful entrepreneurs have in common is a close relationship with a mentor. Bill Gates was mentored by Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckerberg by Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs by Bill Campbell.

When you start a business for the first time you need to understand the building blocks of a business. Because soon enough if you have not built strong foundations the cracks will start to show.  If you don’t do something about addressing the cracks with a good variety of perspectives or indeed learn from those who have done it before. Why would you build a house without an expert, myriad discussions with people who are experts at it? So that is why we have a team of experts ready for you to engage with over at SandTracks.  Apologies for the overuse of metaphors! (as she giggles!) I do love them!

What is mentoring vs coaching?

The question a lot of people ask is “What is the difference between the two?”

• A Mentor-mentee relationship can be immensely rewarding and beneficial to your career due to the value they add with connections, experience, perspective and having new valuable resources.
• Mentors can help you gain professional knowledge and develop skills to achieve your personal career path.
• Mentors can also provide value by connecting mentees to industry leaders and trends.
• Mentors can also practice their own leadership and development skills by helping young, less-experienced individuals in their industry.

Vs Coaches

• Coaches of the other had are teachers of processes and focus more on technique.
• Coaching is a form of development.
• Coaching is an expert in their field in which an experienced person.
• Coaches identify problems due to experience.
• Coaches support a learner or client in achieving a specific personal or professional goal by providing training.

Snd on some continents the learner is sometimes called a coachee.

When should you engage a mentor?

Build it and they will come! We see a lot. I made the same mistakes as a new entrepreneur beginning my first side hustle. That’s not often true if at all. The need to validate a market and the size of the market helps you in so many ways. A mentor can help you analyse this. Sometimes I wonder if we are ever ready to start a business so I suggest just giving it a go.

When I was starting my first online business, there was no such thing as a global mentoring team to access such as what we have created here at Business In Bare Feet. Having a global mentoring team and community from all over the world gives a much broader perspective of what is happening on all continents as you may find your specific market is much bigger somewhere else. That’s just one benefit of have global mentors. Shameless plug over!

Back to the story!

I share story because although I cringe at the mistakes I make I think it is valuable to share as you might experience something similar. My intention is to save you money, time and grief, and to get at least the framework right so that you don’t make the same mistakes like my first attempt of building my first online business in 2004.

My first side hustle, while still working full time. Driven by a personal passion in health, to make non-toxic readily available to them online. I was passionate but it was not enough.

At the time my personal thought was that mentors were for successful people in business, who could afford them almost like a luxury. I was not aware of any programs available to me at the time. Mentors can help you make good decisions, give you options and guide you to get quicker results and move faster.

The need to engage a mentor is different for everyone. The earlier you engage a mentor the better through my experience. One reason could be for example; you might build your business on a floored business model and not realise there is a better way a mentor can help you identify that.

Save money and avoid the pitfalls

Another issue I found was spending too much of your own money straight from the get-go. Not knowing other options available. Like most people who have the money to spend when you first start, you will spend too much money on building regardless and thinking ‘they will come’. This is a common problem that occurs. A mentor can guide you to discover other options for funding, and guide you to find the right legal advice.

A mentor can help you to find different ways of validating your market before you go ahead and build it, this saves you time and effort, avoiding building something nobody wants.

They can help you to put together a pitch deck so that you can possibly do presales.  Mentors can also guide you through a pivot in your business and breath life into your business.

There are so many ways a mentor can help. It’s about having a safe community to talk about what’s not going well and how you can fix it.

Timing is paramount for product market fit

Often the timing of your idea into a business can be a make or break. Let me explain.

For example, Apple bought out the Newton handheld computer which was like a mini iPad back in 1991. The technology was brilliant but no one had a use to apply it and there was no product-market fit for such forward-thinking device. There was the palm pilot that became popular in 1997 but it took till 2010 till it really took off with the Apple iPad,

Realising there is no market fit or need for your idea and acknowledging nobody cares can be hard to take. It doesn’t mean that there will never be a need for your solution to a problem. It is just bad timing.

Without validating your market, you will never know how they currently get around it some other way. Mentors can be great guides for validation of the need for your first release or Minami Viable Product. I remember wanting everything to be perfect for my first release. Which waisted a lot of time and money.

A mentor can help with all these aspects because they can see the holes in your business and help you address them.

Often without a mentor or a business incubator programme with mentors, you just can’t see the holes in the business. From my personal experience from both perspectives. Meaning from the entrepreneurs perspective and the mentors perspective.

One of the reasons I am so passionate about mentorship is that I didn’t have it in my first business and I didn’t know what questions to ask. And I did not surround myself with experts who knew what the journey of an entrepreneur took.

Not being aware the foundations of the business are strong enough is one thing, but soon enough the cracks will start to show. And if not addressed they will grow deeper and a mentor can help you identify the cracks.

Understanding all aspects of how your business functions is essential.

Sometimes like what we are experiencing in 2020 their might be a need to pivot. Recognising when to pivot is something you may not even consider if you don’t fully understand your market, your customer. A mentor can help you identify these things.

Now more than ever, being aware of markets pivoting or having the agility to pivot could just mean life or death for the business.

Getting back to my personal story of my very first side hustle…

As a new entrepreneur doing my side-hustle after coming back from working in the middle east. I had a burning desire to create something that mattered something meaningful and that helped people. So being cashed up I went ahead and built it.

I had a lovely website, beautiful broachers, great name, suppliers, good relationships with my supply chain, I had a clear intention, I identified a need I even had customers, but no distribution model. So many holes it was leaking like a colander in the process to get my first MVP. And I had a web developer that had me spending all my money on the bling and filling his pockets. Rookie mistakes happen all the time.

If you don’t identify these mistakes early through having experts around you to help you identify them, it’s a painful process. With a mentor, it feels like more wins than losses and it’s a much smoother ride.

You might even be the person who has been in business but the market has changed and bottom as fallen out of your income stream.

Market shifts

SOMETIMES you may not be fully aware of what you have to take into consideration when the market shifts. You were so busy doing it (working in the business and not on the business – From the book the E-myth by Michael Gerber).

Perhaps you just had something that worked and you were so busy just doing the do you got too complacent. And then the market shifted and whammo! no more customers. Most of this is consumer behaviour, economics and tech-related, not to forget the competition and natural unforeseen factors as we are experiencing. It just was not foreseen in the plan”What if” plan.

How mentoring works and how you can contribute

Studies out of USA military institutes and universities have studied Mentoring and benefits of having a mentor as opposed to those you did not have a mentor. A deeper level of studies from the institutes of high performance in also provided stats that, those who have chosen to be mentors and be mentored have a much high chance of success.

If you offer your time to be a mentor you are also helping our own growth through consistent reminders of helping to solve problems for others and asking the right questions to help others get to them to solve their own problems.

Asking for help is one of the hardest things for some. Because often we are so used to doing it yourself. Sure you can do it but if you are looking to get there quicker a mentor and help with that. They know a long way and the short way to so it, because most of the time they have taken the journey themselves.

Mentors won’t tell you what to do as such. They are like a tour guide and they will layout options give you choices and share experiences, so that you can make up your own mind.

Getting mentoring and asking for an outside perspective is always beneficial. Since you are in it ( the problem or searching for the most direct solution) you as the mentee often can’t see the forest for the tree. Right!

Quote of the day to motivate you the Entrepreneur.

How does mentoring work?

Mentoring can be personal or group mentoring. Here at Business in Bare Feet, besides our free Sandtracks Remote Coworking Community on Facebook we have three ways to engage a mentor for which there are three different products essentially:

1. Personal one on one mentoring
2. Sandtracks CLUB – Group mentoring
3. Startup hub or coworking spaces can engage our team of global mentors

Personal

One on one mentoring available for businesses that are ready to scale. This includes free access to our Private Sandtracks CLUB community and app which gives you access to our 25+ global mentors to ask questions. Purchased on a monthly basis.

Sandtracks CLUB 

• Gives you access to our global mentors on a quarterly basis for the purpose of new startups and new businesses. You get access to all the mentors 24/7 it’s like having a mentor in your pocket.
• You get access to all our the Quarterly Execution Planner, hence the reason for our 3 monthly membership in the CLUB.
• You get our free Remote Coworking Community.
• Our Free book for startups The First One Hundred Days by Mark Phillips
• Accountability buddies
• Weekly CLUB Rooms openings for mentee’s and mentors

So much more value is in this CLUB that is individual.

Startup Hub Access

You can buy CLUB seats for your members in your coworking space to gain access to our SandTracks CLUB. You might have local and national mentors but having global mentors allows your cohort to ask real-time questions to real-time mentors to access markets understand what is happening in their industries on different continents.

Join Us…

Our community is full of experts, events and daily support for you as a remote entrepreneur or remote worker. It is there for Coworking spaces and also individuals who want to interact with other like-minded coworkers around the world.