The digital age has made entrepreneurship more available than ever before, yet countless people are still finding themselves incapable of summoning the willpower, courage, or expertise needed to launch their own business. Despite the fact that we need more entrepreneurs now than ever before, many possible business owners who are brimming with potential are going unnoticed because they lack a business mentor to show them the way.
It’s becoming increasingly recognized that good business mentors are a necessary component of a functioning economy. Here’s why entrepreneurs need business mentors, and how you can benefit from partnering up with a mentor even in an established corporate environment.
Mentorship programs are hard to get right
If there’s one thing that’s certain, it’s that companies everywhere are struggling to get mentorship programs right. Most businesses have woken up and realized that offering their younger workers a mentor is the only surefire way to guarantee that they’ll stick around for the long haul. Furthermore, they’ve noticed that mentors help make workers more productive while lowering the overall level of stress in an office environment. Despite the positive spotlight that’s been shining on mentorship programs, however, many entrepreneurs have shunned the idea of getting a mentor because the idea seems daunting and complex.
If we want to know why companies can’t get mentorship right, we need to explore what makes a good mentor. Having a bad mentor can be worse than not having one at all, but those entrepreneurs who have someone to show them the way and elucidate past mistakes can expect to go much farther than those who had to struggle by themselves for years on end. As information from McKinsey can attest to, entrepreneurs who were mentored to make a difference see the positive results of having a mentor reverberate throughout their careers.
One of the more obvious reasons that entrepreneurs need a mentor is so that they have someone to inspire them when things go wrong. An essential part of being an entrepreneur is failure – after all, virtually no major company or business initiative succeed on its first attempt, with many major corporations only surfacing after countless early iterations fell short of public success. Having a mentor to show you that a single defeat isn’t the end of your commercial career can be tremendously important for any entrepreneur. Nevertheless, we can’t expect all mentors to behave similarly, as some entrepreneurs need different sorts of mentoring than others.
Who needs more mentoring?
A recent study grabbed headlines by announcing that entrepreneurs everywhere need more mentoring. The study claimed that small businesses were failing in part because they lacked expertise and authoritative mentors when their owners first set out to make a buck. Of those small business owners surveyed, 92 percent of them agreed that having a mentor was a crucial part of their overall growth and survival as a business. It’s thus clear that modern business owners see the perks in having a mentor around, even if some entrepreneurs suffer more than others from a draught of expertise and mentorships.
Drop ship champion, Franklin Hatchett of Ecomelites has said, we can’t approach mentorship with a one-size-fits-all solution, however, as entrepreneurs from various demographics and backgrounds will demand specific approaches when it comes to training and inspiring them. Oftentimes, for instance, female entrepreneurs have suffered from mentors who felt it necessary to “rescue” them, which really means dictating over them and claiming credit when things succeed. Knowing how to properly mentor women and other groups that suffer from discrimination in commercial environments is going to keep being a crucial part of modern business success.
Entrepreneurs need mentors because every business is going to fail sooner or later, yet those that persist are almost certainly those which enjoyed the senior expertise and experience of a mentor. If your company is just trying to get started in the world, your business owner and senior employees are going to be under plenty of stress. Having a mentor to rely on for help when things inevitably go south is imperative not only to your business success, but also to the mental wellbeing of your workers. Employees who have no one to turn to often burn out quickly, after all. Understand that entrepreneurs need business mentors to succeed, and your company will be doing better in no time.