How to Choose A Mentor For Business
Okay, so you’ve started your own business and decided to choose a mentor. However, if like many of my viewers you are new to entrepreneurship and don’t know what to look out for, you could face painful mistakes that are all too common to new business owners, and your company may suffer for it. Today, I’d like to discuss ways to avoid making errors in judgement when you decide to choose a mentor and the questions you should be asking to ensure a healthy and profitable relationship.
Choose A Mentor Who Uses Specifics
One of the most common early mistakes that people make when choosing a mentor is not asking if they’ve achieved the specific results that you’re looking for. In other words, if you’re looking for a mentor to help you build a six-figure business, you most definitely want to ask what six-figure businesses they’ve built in the past. Is their business six-figures? Are any of their client’s businesses six-figures? How long have they been in business in the first place?
Be very careful with mentors who don’t give you specifics. If you want to achieve a certain income level on The Internet, you should know exactly what it is that you’re going to be taught. If making money online is your business goal, for example, then you should ask your potential mentor:
“What is it specifically that you’re going to teach me? Is it how to build blogs, get SEO traffic, and monetize that traffic through affiliate marketing? Is it a YouTube business where you monetize your videos through sales? What kind of experience do you have with all these things? What kind of sales have you gotten in the last 30 days? Using the techniques that you’re teaching, what kind of sales have your students gotten? Where’s the specific proof of that?” Ask if you can talk to one of their current clients. Why wouldn’t someone allow you to talk to one of their clients? There’s really no reason.
Track Record: A Good Mentor Has Testimonials
Another good place to look is testimonials. Ask your potential mentor where their client’s reviews and testimonials of success are to be found. When you watch them, do they appear to be given freely and not scripted?
Many companies now pay for scripted testimonials delivered by actors, but they should be easy to spot. On any legitimate mentor’s website, there should be a community, forum, or landing page with solid, believable, and traceable testimonials of success.
A good mentor has done the same things that you want to do, and done it successfully. If you want a mentor for doing SEO, he better have done SEO himself – extensively. He should also be able to teach you and others SEO properly. Otherwise, how do you know he’s really qualified? He needs to prove this as much as anyone.
If you can find a mentor with a provable track record, you know you’re on the right track, especially if this person has a lot of experience teaching people. By all means, ask questions… screen them as they’re screening you.
Treat them like someone you’ve just met in the last few minutes, someone on the street perhaps – give them a healthy amount of skepticism and truly investigate if they are who they say they are. If they impress you favorably, great. If not, there are plenty of people offering legitimate mentoring services on The Internet.
Why Should You Choose A Mentor?
So, why am I telling you this? You may be thinking, “But Aleks, this is all so intense – I don’t want to buy personal services on The Internet… it’s all so scary”. Think of this way – before the web, if you went into a store and bought something, there would be no reviews whatsoever to verify its quality.
The Internet is the first place where you can get a good, honest review from regular people on camera. Before, to get a review on camera, you would have to get a TV crew or something of this nature. Before that, you had nothing more than a biased newspaper ad.
Furthermore, you should focus on if your prospective mentor’s students are at around the same point of development as you. Does he or she have experience teaching businessmen and women in your niche? At your revenue level? With similar issues? If you focus on these kinds of questions, you’re going to be much more successful at choosing your mentor.
Finally, if your potential mentor passes all of these questions and still has your interest, then he or she should additionally allow you to get a refund in the first 30 days. If you don’t get results, you should be able to get a refund.
You’re not paying for information, you’re not paying for a mindset, you’re not paying for a product, you’re paying for a result. Don’t ever get that wrong because if they don’t get you results, you’re wasting your time and your money.
A Mentor Is No Replacement For Hard Work
You still have to do the work, of course. If you’re not prepared to do the work, if you’re not prepared to hustle, don’t even bother getting a mentor. No one’s going to motivate you, no one wants you to be a tourist. You have to implement, you have to push yourself.
They can provide you value, they can provide you content, they can provide you all the information you need to build and start your business, but don’t get the idea that there is some kind of magical system where you can skip a million steps, press a button, and money appears out of the sky.
This magic system does not exist, and anyone who tries to sell you that is not being honest with you. Don’t fall into the common Internet Marketing newbie traps. Those traps can be easily avoided.
Treat hiring a mentor like you would purchasing a very expensive product… you can test the product, you can bring the product back if it doesn’t work, you can get a guarantee of quality. The same process applies for choosing a mentor for your business,or starting a business in general.
