When you first think about starting a business it can be very overwhelming and it’s easy to get lost in all the noise and actually just freeze and do nothing. There are a lot of ways to get clarity in business and stay focused on your goal, but that’s a topic for another video, another day.
One of my favorite ways to stay pumped and stay the course so to speak is to get a mentor.
Now before we jump into how to find a mentor in business let’s first understand what a mentor is.
Maybe some of you already know but I’m guessing a few for sure do not fully understand what is a business mentor and how can it help you improve and grow.
So a mentor is basically a person who has much more experience than you in your niche or space and that you can learn from and improve yourself based on their knowledge and success.
So for example, if you’re an aspiring artist, just getting started and looking to get recognition, you could find an experienced artist who already made a name for himself and that you can look up to.
If you know someone like that in real life that is the best way, you can simple ask him, or just ask to shadow him, or maybe he teaches or have classes so you can enroll, whatever, the point is if you can get access to his knowledge it can be a huge thing for you.
A lot of people think a mentor has to be someone you know in person, which in fact many times a mentor is someone you follow online, maybe on youtube or other social network.
It doesn’t really matter, the only thing that matters with mentors is the fact that you can gain information and inspiration from them and improve yourself.
If we’re talking about business, real life experience is very important and you can never learn to do business better than actually do it, so learning from someone who already did a lot and hopefully gained some level of success is the best class you can have.
So now that we understood what a mentor is, let’s get into how you can actually find a mentor.
So finding a mentor is usually not a quick process, for some the most obvious route will be to search your industry or niche and try to make friends with the person you want as your mentor, for example if you’re a young lawyer, you can try and get a job in the law firm of a successful attorney you know and what to learn from.
Another way is to find a business mentor online.
My mentor is actually Gary Veynurchuck and I first saw him online on Facebook actually. Since than I’ve read all his books and I’m an avid watcher of his content for many years now.
The level of tips, information, inspiration and motivation I gained from Gary is really astounding and I can honestly say it helped my success tremendously!
So how did I actually found my mentor? Well I searched online for as much info as I could about online businesses and similar topics and eventually I stumbled on Gary and this is actually the easiest and best way I can recommend on finding a business mentor.
Just start typing on google or facebook or Youtube about topics you want to learn on, and you will be exposed to new people in that niche and some of them might be right for you.
How can you know if a person is a good mentor?
Not every person you see online talking about something can be a mentor, you shouldn’t take just anyone’s word and follow it as some people are just amateurs looking for attention and you should take their advice with a grain of salt.
So how do you know the person you want as a mentor is legit, try these tips:
- Check to see who this person is online, most successful people in any niche will have a good online presence and if you can’t find much about them, that’s a bad sign.
- Check their achievements, success is measured by many things, not just money, but for the sake of this video, in business usually you measure success in revenues, sales, clients and similar, so check and see if the person has had success in business for real, maybe he sold a company, maybe he ran a very successful company in the past.
- Make sure their advice feels right, like in many other things in life, you should follow your own gut feeling and common sense, if a business mentor tells you to take all your money and gamble it away obviously common sense should tell you NOT to do it. So just make sure the advice you hear makes sense and use your own judgement
- Make sure you have a connection with your to be mentor, this is something you also have to feel, when I first started hearing Gary, I instantly felt like he was talking to me personally, the things he said really resonated with me and made sense, it was like I always felt and thought about things and myself and here comes this really successful business person and saying the same things. It hit home to say the least.
So make sure you feel it, if it doesn’t feel right, you should not do it