Significance of Mentoring in Entrepreneurship

Being an entrepreneur is challenging and at times quite intimidating too. It is not an easy journey. You sure will have a lot on your plate to handle. The fact is that it is quite exciting to go alone about it and become your own boss without anyone’s interference. However, the reality is that in spite of having a great idea and noble intentions to make it big someday, you may not know exactly how to go about it. You likely might experience huge obstacles now and then.

A mentor comes to your rescue in such situations. A mentor is an experienced person who utilizes his own knowledge/resources to hand- hold your startup and helps you during critical decision-making situations. The value of the impact of a mentor should never be underestimated. Here are some important reasons which make the presence of mentors quite valuable:

Expert advice

Usually, mentors are experienced people who have been through the journey and have ventured into whatever obstacles you are experiencing at present. The expert insight that they can provide for your business is quite invaluable for the success of your business. Your mentor surely has much more experience as well as knowledge. Utilizing this wisely is important for you as you don’t need to actually live out all those experiences and problems in order to gain the practical wisdom is required for making the startup a dream venture.

Networking

Besides having a ton of experience within their specialized niche, mentors also do have a vast network of industry connections. This can be extremely useful for your business as it will help you in making networking contacts with more people within your target market, who could be your potential prospects, customers and even your team members.

In fact, your mentor can introduce you to other known people in a much more familiar way instead of the traditional way of meeting people during networking events and then try to tie up with them. Your mentor, in fact, can lobby for you to get that first critical meeting across with senior executives, who are ready to invest in your companies and which will help you get past those initial barriers, thus opening many doors of opportunities for you.

Offer Encouragement

An entrepreneur’s on-going journey requires a ton of patience and perseverance. Mentors offer encouragement and keep us going ahead in our path. Losing hope during tough times is inevitable. However, mentors enable us to see the hope within ourselves. They are with you, no matter what, during turbulent phases and offer moral support and encouragement. This makes you realize that giving up on your business is the last thing you would want to do as an owner. Mentors also give you the hope and support that you could do whatever and whenever is asked of you in any situation.

Instill Discipline

Being disciplined is one of the essential ingredients of being successful in your venture. Are you an entrepreneur with unlimited willpower? Willpower is an offshoot of discipline. In fact, following a self-disciplined lifestyle and approach is critical for self-development. Mentors also are self-disciplined people who create the necessary boundaries that otherwise you might fall short of setting up for yourself. Good and regular habits define one’s routine. Following your mentor’s disciplined principles will enable you to sharpen your focus on self-priorities and result in more productivity for your business.

Mentors are just like sounding boards

Having a mentor increases your ability to utilize your mentors as a sounding board in evaluating your ideas and thoughts regarding important business decisions. There could be many ideas which you wish to implement in your business. However, you ultimately may find yourself unnecessarily wasting endless hours in trying out some concepts which are sure to get failed as they were already tried by your mentors at some point of time in the past.

Discussing your ideas well before implementing them can help you immensely for gaining a different perspective towards any type of new ideas floating in your mind for the business. Talking out all these with your mentor will surely help you in figuring out the ones which have a lot of potential and the ones which should be applied. On the other hand, you also get the knowledge required to figure out which ones are those which you are better without. They put an end to any conflicts arising within you and help in straightening out all those kinks during the entrepreneurial journey.

  

Bringing out your Strengths

Every person has a set of well-defined qualities which are ultimately their strengths. It is quite possible that unknowingly you might have downplayed many of your core strengths which otherwise could make a huge difference to your company. Any individual’s core strengths are a combination of skills, knowledge and experience.

Your greatest room for growth lies in utilizing all those strengths in the right way for growing the business. A mentor is someone who can bring out those core strengths in a positive way which you might not necessarily have seen in yourself. By doing this, you will be able to cultivate and utilize your strengths which might be preventing you to achieve the glorious success you deserve.