Mentoring does something that coaching and training cannot do. It helps you to work out what the questions are before you begin to think about getting answers.
For coaching and training you need to know what the questions are before you can book or arrange the event.
This is one of the reasons why Business Link worked so well in the past; because their consultants were able to provide short bursts of mentoring.
Now Business Link has contracted into a website on this and some degree of service provision this has disappeared.
Being a mentor requires not just a deep understanding of business, but the ability to conduct on the spot SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats).
A mentor also needs to look very closely at an entrepreneur’s blind spots, in order to be able to suggest strategies and techniques to overcome these.
Not everybody can be a mentor as it’s a very difficult thing to do. But those who have benefited from mentoring will know that the power of mentoring is quite extraordinary.
The mentors is doing a number of things at once, while the entrepreneur talks about his or her business, the mentor is filling in a kind of mental questionnaire.
The second part of what they’re doing is thinking not just about the answers, but about strategies, tactics, techniques, methods and identifying businesses that can fill an entrepreneur’s blind spots.
It’s a very multifaceted and fascinating role, and one which is almost impossible to fill in any other way.
However could parts of a mentor’s role be replaced by a questionnaire or website? The answer is the initial question identification might be replace by a well designed questionnaire (on http://gibli.com for example).
This might use the SWOT process to uncover the entrepreneur’s weaknesses and lack of knowledge on certain subjects.
Linking further toward answers to these questions is more complex, as it requires local knowledge. Legal questions in the US would not be answered by legal answers from the UK for example. Equally suggestions as to which solution providers to work with may be based on local availability, and may be based on availability in the local city or town.
This approach could begin to solve the main issue, which is that there are many more entrepreneurs looking for mentors, than there are available mentors.
Equally, using a web based solution as a follow-on to the questionnaire would need to take into account that many entrepreneurs are short of cash.
A mentor possesses a rich mix of skill, knowledge, experience and ability, which would be difficult to match in an automated solution, even if the local issues were taken into account.
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