What You Can Learn From a Business Mentor | If you are building your own business, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with tasks, staying ahead of the competition, and trying to figure out what to do next. You should know that you don’t have to go through this alone. Having a business mentor can make a big difference in terms of navigating murky waters and dealing with outside influences. Learn more about the various ways a business mentor can help you, no matter where you are in the different stages of growing your company.
What You Can Expect When You Are Starting Out
A mentor can tell you what types of problems you should expect to encounter when you are first starting out. This could be anything from getting a business license to finding a location to start out at, or even exploring the benefits of working out of your garage or your home. It can be helpful to find someone in your industry or similar, so they can give you more guidance on what to anticipate in the months ahead.
Mistakes to Avoid
Although you will make mistakes along the way, a mentor might be able to help you steer clear of certain mistakes that are avoidable, and could cost you a lot of time or money if you make them. Talk with your mentor and ask them what mistakes they made, and what they wished they could have avoided. Even gleaning information from their previous problems that they ran into as business owners can teach you a lot about what to expect and how to manage it.
Find Out How to Ride Out the Slow Months
Once you have found someone who is willing to offer your business advice and help guide you through setting up and operating your company, it can be helpful to find out if there are slow months that frequently happen within your field and if so, what you can do to ride them out. Again, this works best if you have a mentor in your industry. Perhaps you need to think about offering other services, or maybe you can discover what else customers might need from you, and how you can fulfill that need. Learning as much as possible about what fellow business owners do during the slow times can help you to be prepared for anything that comes your way.
Learn How to Benefit From the Competition
Mentors have likely dealt with competition themselves, and they know what it means to have a business you are just starting to grow, but plenty of competitors might want to take you down. Ask them how they found ways to stand out from their competitors, what methods they used to set themselves apart, and the different ways they encouraged their business to grow. No matter what field you are in, you will always have competition. The key is knowing what you can do to put distance between them and yourself.
Discover How You Can Grow Your Business
You might have a vision for your business, but have you thought ahead about what type of growth you would like to achieve for your company overall? Learning about the four disciplines of execution, also commonly found if you search for what is 4DX, can help you understand ways you can build upon your current company and create a vision for the future. Even if you don’t know what your company will be in the years ahead, this can give you ideas of what to expect or the type of direction you can see yourself moving in.
The Main Takeaway
Learning from a business mentor can teach you so much when it comes to running your own company. You’ll discover how to stand apart from the competition, what you can do when the months ahead are known for being slow, and you’ll find new ways to grow and develop your business. A mentor can even give you advice when you are starting out and walk you through mistakes you should avoid.
