Can a “Niche Mentor” provide better help than a "Business Mentor"?
Real talk, when most startups and entrepreneurs look for mentors, they tend to look for generic "business mentors." A person who can help to guide them on their journey to success. However, entrepreneurs often find more success with niche mentors. Often times looking for niche mentors is better than trying to find a general business mentor.
What is a "Niche Mentor?"
A niche mentor is someone who knows just one specific area of your business model very, very well.
For example, let's say you're a rapidly expanding eCommerce delivery website. You're getting to the point where you need to switch from a small 2-3 person startup team to a medium 10-15 person remote-first business process outsourcing team. Unfortunately, neither you nor anyone on your staff has any experience running an IT-BPO operation.
You don't know the right equipment or tech systems. You don't know the processes. You wouldn't know a good employee from a bad one. You don't know where to start.
Instead of looking for a "business mentor," you should instead be looking for someone who understands just remote outsourcing very, very well.
This concept applies to just about every business. The expertise you need might be financial, it might be technical, it might be in manufacturing, it might be in marketing or sales. Whatever the case is, sometimes it makes more sense to look for mentors in a very specific arena rather than generic mentors.
Figure Out Where You Need Mentoring
Break your business down by all the different areas of expertise needed. To continue the eCommerce delivery example, the breakdown might look something like this:
- Ability to generate traffic
- Ability to run software platforms
- Ability to scale customer services
- Ability to build a sales team
- Ability to find the right talent
You might look for mentors in each of these individual areas. Some areas, like talent, can be addressed by any mentor or company. Other areas, such as finding the right BPO partner or providers can be overwhelming, a niche mentor will help to ensure success by leveraging strategic experience.
Some of These Mentors Can Be Hired
When you're looking at a broad business mentor, you're usually looking at someone who has a very casual relationship with your company. You might only meet with them for coffee once every week or two.
That's because these kinds of mentors tend to be high net-worth individuals or require equity partnership agreements. You won't be able to bring them onto your team unless they're also investors or shareholders.
On the other hand, many niche mentors won't always be high net-worth individuals. For example, an expert on how to run a great business process outsourcing operation probably isn't a millionaire, but rather has a wealth of real-life experience to learn from. With a proper monetary offer, you'll often be able to hire these people and bring them to your team.
Your team can be your mentors. As Michael Dell says, “your core group of employees should always be smarter than you. You shouldn't be pulling your employees to the next level; instead, they should be pulling you.”
If you are looking for a niche mentor to help implement, scale, and develop your business and would like a FREE consultation please contact me directly.
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