As coaches, we can all appreciate the unique magic that comes from working with someone in a coaching relationship whether that’s for improving our health, relationships or any other area of our lives. However, as someone who is more on the mentoring end of the coaching / mentoring scale, I thought it might be helpful to explore exactly how business mentoring, in the way that I approach it, helps your business grow.
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We don’t know what we don’t know
The first thing that jumps to mind when I think about how mentoring helps you in your business is that, to put it simply, we don’t know what we don’t know. Business skills, in the very practical sense, aren’t innate – we have to learn them from somewhere and that’s where working with a business mentor can help.
The vast majority of us start our coaching businesses with no prior business experience, so when it comes to the really strategic side of making a business work, we need to learn or figure that out.
When I work with a client I’m using all of my experience over the last 13 years of running a business online myself, my experiences before that when I supported the business development of social enterprises and charities, and all the experience I gain from working with my coaching clients now.
So rather than you having no idea what to do to make things work, together we can create a plan and strategy based on real experience and knowledge of what does work – all applied to your individual business.
It’s going to save you time (and costly mistakes and detours)
I’m a big believer that for most of us, our business journey is part of a wider life experience that sometimes needs to go off in different directions and will have its own timelines. However, with that being said, working with a business mentor can help speed things up which in turn can save you time and money invested in things that don’t work.
Using the experience of a business mentor can help you skip steps and detours that you otherwise would be making yourself in trying to figure things out alone.
For example, if you know you want to get more clients and you’re doing various things to try and attract them but your 1:1 coaching package just isn’t right and you have no real sales process then you could be spinning your wheels for months (if not years) trying to get clients but finding nothing sticks. But if you work with a mentor who helps you refine your package, message and sales process, instead of spending all that time spinning wheels you actually get traction and results much more quickly.
You get individualised feedback and support that isn’t generic and one size fits all
There’s a reason why 1:1 or higher touch support is a higher investment than self study options – sometimes you just need that individualised feedback and support to get better results in your business.
This has been abundantly clear when I created and delivered the 1:1 Coaching Fix. I delivered the core training which was excellent training, but when we’ve got to the live implementation element where I’m feeding back on everyone’s offers individually – there’s just no way that those offers will have been as good as they are without that very individualised feedback from me.
So you can do all the self study things and download all the freebies and listen to the podcasts which can be amazing if you implement a lot of what you learn, but there’s always an extra layer that you don’t hit with something that is self study.
Getting that highly individualised feedback can make a massive difference to your outcomes.
You’re going to get someone else’s (qualified) eyes on your stuff
Linked to the above point, having someone who has knowledge, skills and experience in the coaching business arena look at your stuff can be a game changer.
Something I support many of my clients with is looking at their copy, their website, their offers, their content marketing, their behind the scenes plans and then give them new ideas and feedback based on my skills and experience that just makes everything work better for them.
Someone to see what you can’t see
I help my clients with ideas, new perspectives and to highlight things you might have missed yourself. For some reason I’m so much better at coming up with ideas for other people than I am for myself which I think is the case for a lot of us!
It can be so helpful to have someone by our side who can see things differently to us and bring our attention to new ways to think or approach things.
You get to talk about your business with someone who gets it
One of the best and most simple outcomes of working with a coach or mentor is just having a sounding board or someone you can talk to who gets the whole online coaching business thing.
You can talk to well meaning friends and family all day long, but there really is something incredibly valuable about having a person you can talk to about this who has experience in it all and can respond from a place of actually getting it and having their own lived experience of it.
We all face tricky situations in running a business and having someone you can come to and talk things over can lessen a lot of anxiety and stress.
You have someone get to know you and your business intimately
It can be incredibly valuable to work with someone over an extended period of time where they get to really know you and what you want out of your business, as well as understanding how your business works. I really love that I get to work with clients, usually over 4-6 months, where I end up having a really deep understanding of their business and of them as individuals and then using that deep understanding to help their businesses grow in the direction they’d like it to go in.
Greater confidence and self trust
A wonderful part of business mentoring with my clients is helping them build confidence and self trust when it comes to how they show up in their businesses.
While, as I mentioned above, we don’t know what we don’t know – there is also a more intuitive element in running a business and part of what I help clients with is learning to tune into that so when we finish working together they can make decisions and take their business forward being able to trust in what their gut is telling them!
Creating a multi dimensional return on investment (ROI)
The way that I approach my support and offers is that I’m super confident I can create a high return on investment for my clients.
This basically means that you should expect to make back what you invest in working with me, preferably several times over.
If your coaching package is priced at £1500 for example, if working with me in my 1:1 Mentoring programme helps you attract two additional clients, then that’s covered your investment.
ROI isn’t just monetary however, and depending on the stage of business you’re at, I want to be super honest and say that the full ROI might come along outside of the time scale of the mentoring package.
As well as this ROI can look like more confidence, a better work / life balance, a tangible outcome that has income potential over time (like creating a course or digital product, starting a new marketing platform, growing your audience etc), better organisation and tech set up in the background of your business that leads to you having greater capacity and time and so on.
Support to achieve tangible outcomes
I’m a big fan of having tangible outcomes in my work with clients and as a mentor this is really fun to focus on. Depending on what your goals are, this can look like using my support to help you build out a sales funnel, create a new marketing strategy, create and launch a group programme or course, create a new 1:1 offer and so on. All of these have the potential to create that multidimensional ROI!
Gain momentum, get unstuck, implement and take action
Finally, I feel like business mentoring, just like coaching, is a great way to gain momentum and pick up the pace of your results. It can help you get unstuck, bust out of procrastination and take action. People will often feel like mentoring is not something to do when they’re implementing but I feel that mentoring can be very beneficial if you feel like you need to focus more on implementing things you might have already learned and want to put into practice but for some reason have not done so yet.
Ultimately working with a business mentor (like me!) can have a huge positive impact on not just your business but you as an individual too.
If you feel like you’ve done all the courses and listened to all the podcasts but still aren’t any further forward, then looking at more high touch mentoring could be what you need.
As we approach 2024, I have slots available in my full mentoring package, Wholehearted Business and if it’s the right fit, my Get it Done programme as well.
Ready to chat about the options? I have a few slots left this year for free Holistic Coaching Business Audits. You can book yours here. In these sessions I’ll take a look at your business and send you away with a few actions you can take to help you get more clients. If you feel like you’d benefit from my support to do those things then we can discuss the options.
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