(2023) Business Mentors for Startups: 5 questions to find your best mentor
Finding a business mentor could be one of the most defining moments for your company, especially for young entrepreneurs and small business owners. Whether you're building a startup or a traditional company with slower growth, having the opportunity to learn from experienced entrepreneurs can have an impact on your company's trajectory.
In this article, we build upon the foundation of who qualifies as a business mentor and then discuss tactics of evaluating them, what questions to ask, where to find suitable startup mentors for your team and more.
I'm the founder of Sparrow and I personally spent months vetting startup advisors, to find the most successful and empathetic ones for helping founders scale their revenue. I'm very passionate about this topic and I hope you'll enjoy reading what I've learned over the months!
"If you cannot see where you are going, ask someone who has been there before."
— J Loren Norris
Table of Contents
What are business mentors?
A mentor is someone who teaches/gives help and advice to a less experienced person (Wikipedia). A business mentor is the same, with the unique addition of them having the credentials and accomplishments to back their words.
I want to be very precise about this response because there are a lot of charlatans who pretend to know a lot about building businesses but have never implemented/tried/executed any of the advice they give you. Be very careful.
It is crucial to exercise caution when seeking a business mentor, as their track record of accomplishments validates their expertise. Be wary of individuals who may lack the necessary experience and rely only on flashy business cards designs, as tangible accomplishments and practical knowledge are vital for reliable guidance.
This can get tricky sometimes, because you'll have "mentors" who do an MBA or some business development in some capacity and make that their whole personality. It's like they've adjusted the sail on a finished, ready-made boat, and now they're advising folks on how to build a yacht from scratch - don't take these people too seriously. And I'll explain why below.
"A mentor is someone who sees more talent and ability within you, than you see in yourself, and helps bring it out of you."
— Bob Proctor
What do business mentors do?
Their purpose as a business/startup mentor is to guide you with experience and thinking models:
Experience - What they've gone through in their past, ideally in the same industry and type of niche product/service business that you're operating in.
Thinking models - Teaching you to think through certain situations, rather than providing you with their solutions. This enables you to think on your feet.
This may sound broad but that's intentional. Good mentors are great at two things: (a) helping individuals become better versions of themselves and (b) providing their domain expertise knowledge, only when needed. They'll teach you to grow, but won't spoon-feed you.
An example is one of our advisors (Mohammad) who founded and scaled 2 companies to $1mm and $12mm annual revenue. When you're mentored by him, he'll teach you how to better position yourself to get closer to product-market fit based on your product, team and audience (point a) and give you tactical instructions on optimizing your growth loops (point b). However, over time, he believes that founders need to learn to become self-reliant and so he'll teach you to think like a seasoned entrepreneur, instead of making you reliant on him or other advisors. That's class.
You may ask yourself "Why are mentors important in business?" Although the ideal answer here depends on your product's and audience's needs - the general answer is that it's always recommended to seek learnings from those who've "been there, done that." and are a few years ahead of you.
Our Sparrow advisor (Jeff) writes about the three types of mentors you need in your journey here. Jeff scaled his company to $12mm in annual revenue and then sold his company to SoundCloud with his co-founder, Joey. Both of them are Sparrow advisors.
Different strokes, different stages
Here's where things get funky. You may need different kinds of advising figures throughout your journey of building your business. As referenced in our article for finding a good coach, I look at a company as having 3 main stages:
Stage 1: Ideation, MVP and Launching
At this step, founders generally need help adjusting to their own startup/small business life and learning how to validate their business ideas, build an MVP, pivot and iterate till they reach steady demand.
The knowledge necessary here for an entrepreneur should come from those who've built companies from zero. At this stage, if you talk to a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, it won't really help you.
It'll motivate you in some way. But usually they can't give you tactical ideas for going from 0 to something viable. I highly recommend a detailed article I wrote about this stage, to lessen your chances of failure and build a product people are more likely to pay for.
Stage 2: From MVP to Product-market Fit
Most of our Sparrow customers are from this wholesome category. This is generally where most startup founders need guidance because there are 19 ways to scale your company (reference from book - Traction) but learning how to systematically test acquisition channels, measuring their effectiveness and using them to attract more clients may take a lot of time for first-time founders.
This is where you go from $0 to $10,000, as you slowly approach ramen profitability and product-market fit.
Stage 3: Fundraising and Scaling towards Acquisition
At this step, founders have usually demonstrated enough traction to either raise funds for expanding or acquisition. Ideally you would speak to two kinds of advisors at this phase.
The first type will help you understand how they can start approaching investors and pitching to them effectively.
The second type helps you make sense of the 20 moving parts of your growth funnel, sales and operations so you're able to keep increasing your revenue profitably as a late-stage startup.
What to ask a business mentor?
Before you start paying your potential mentor
Do your homework. For every potential mentor you speak with, you must always read up about their past experience. That means googling their name and finding their Medium articles, LinkedIn posts, personal websites, etc. This gives you a solid idea of what they've done and may be capable of teaching you. And also, it shows them you're diligent.
I always recommend having a 20-min discovery call (no cost) with your preferred startup mentor before committing to paying for their time. This does this two things:
Emotional fit
You get to feel if a working relationship between you two would be a good idea. Here are some questions I recommend you ask yourself about your mentor. If you're feeling bold enough, you may even bring up some of these topics with them (but that's not recommended unless you feel absolutely comfortable doing so and handling tough follow-up questions about your concerns).
Does she respect me? Do I genuinely value her expertise?
Does she listen to what I say, or is she going to do all the talking? Do I feel heard?
Am I able to understand what she is saying/referring to? Is she the right mentor for me?
Professional fit
This is my favourite because you get to evaluate your mentors' experience and their ability to actually help you see results. At Sparrow, here are the questions I prepare your matched advisor for, when going into your discovery call:
How exactly do you intend to address the founder's main issue and challenge?
What is your proposed goal/roadmap to help the founder reach their main goal?
What is your mentorship style and how will you adapt it to your founder?
Most of these answers they won't have until they've spoken with you during your discovery call. But these questions help them structure the agenda for it. Similarly, you should seek answers to the following questions on your call:
Given what you know about my business, are there any high-level ideas you recommend I try out? How many sessions over the next 2-3 months do you personally think we'll need together?
How does your past experience make you a good fit for my exact goals?
Have you previously provided guidance to other entrepreneurs with similar backgrounds like mine? What results did they achieve?
What is your mentorship style? For my exact issues, will you be providing tactical challenges (e.g., optimizing landing page, step-by-step help setting up Google Ads) or more strategic help (e.g., planning which acquisition channels to test, high-level discussions about brand positioning, etc.)
How much time commitment are you able to provide? What does a perfect mentor-mentee relationship look like to you?
Your job is to find a mentor -> and make them into your trusted mentor.
After you start paying your startup mentor
This generally depends on your relationship and discussion with your mentor, based on what exactly you're trying to accomplish.
I provided five detailed tips on my article here on how you should plan your sessions, provide context to your advisor and think about how you can take their advice and put into action.
You can ask your own questions to your startup mentor. Just make sure to cover these:
Short-term vs. long-term goals. you decide on
Exact activities they recommend you do in the next 2 weeks vs. 2 months
Guidance on how to solve your immediate issues which keep you up at night
To simplify this, we've open-sourced our own templates and documents as online resources to help entrepreneurs become better at planning their mentorship journey. Hope it helps. Here's some things other mentorship programs won't teach you:
Mental alignment
You do not always have to agree with what your mentors say. They're human and have their own assumptions and biases, and false thinking.
Healthy disagreement
If you don't agree on their suggestions, you should let your mentor know that and explain your reasoning for it. This lets them course-correct you accurately, instead of giving advice you'll never use.
Standing up for yourself
When you feel that your mentorship is unhelpful/inadequate, let your mentors know! This helps them change their approach and tailor future sessions to your needs.
How to find business mentors
The types of mentoring sessions vary depending on what you need help on. Mentored businesses and early stage startups generally make good progress in growing, finding networking opportunities and building their professional network.
Trusted platforms
Sparrow is an example of such a platform where I've personally vetted every advisor based on their past qualifications. Once I understand your startup challenges, I personally prep your matched advisor to effectively help you scale your startup.
Accelerators and incubators
Y Combinator or other smaller ones like it might be a great fir for you. The advantage is that you get access to their startup network, but the problem is that you only get to talk to the right mentor if you get accepted.
Many entrepreneurs apply every year making it very hard to get in. Plus, you also need to give up equity to join! Yikes.
Cold outreach on LinkedIn
It's funny but this is how I sourced the first advisors for Sparrow's early mentoring sessions. It's a great place to reach entrepreneurs who can potentially mentor you but it's hard to evaluate their experience at operating startups - over LinkedIn messages!
And to find a mentor, you also need to know if they're in the mindset of "teaching" entrepreneurship to others. I know this is hard, and that's why it took 2 months for me to find a mentor for Sparrow's first batch of advisors.
How much do business mentors charge?
Depending on their experience, (i.e., real world experience vs. providing latest insights/advice from academia) a mentor's hourly price generally varies from $50USD - $1000USD.
In my personal experience, this is also due to startup mentors providing general, strategic advice vs. industry-specific advice from their decades of experience in a specific field.
At Sparrow, rates start from $75USD/hour all the way up to $500USD/hour. Our advisors are entrepreneurs themselves who've built, scaled and sold their own startups and will help you do the same, regardless of industry.
If you want to learn more about how startup mentorship can help you, I recommend you read my article on how they can help you accomplish three main things - under Table of Contents, read into "How startup advisors can help founders like you."
Final words
I write each of these blogs for hours because I genuinely want to help the entrepreneur community. Providing knowledge to the entrepreneurship space gets me so excited. I am also currently building a free community for mentoring startups. Interested? Feel free to join us!