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Scaling a business brings new opportunities – but also more complex decisions, leadership challenges and growing demands on your time.
In this practical webinar, Mark Eames explores how mentoring can provide the clarity, confidence and independent perspective needed to achieve sustainable growth.
What business mentoring is and how it supports growth
How to choose the right mentor for you and your business
How AI can complement human mentoring and improve decision-making
Mark is the founder of Bespoke Business Growth, and his mission is to help business owners and senior leaders gain clarity and make confident decisions.
Mark has extensive experience and brings an independent, commercially focused perspective to complex business and leadership challenges.
Through constructive challenge and confidential support, he enables clients to overcome obstacles and achieve sustainable growth.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Caitriona: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Caitriona, and I'll be your host today.
For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses.
I'm pleased to introduce Mark Eames, who's the founder of Bespoke Business Growth.
In this session, Mark will discuss how mentoring can provide the clarity, confidence and independent perspective needed to achieve sustainable growth.
If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session.
Today's webinar will be recorded, and we'll send a follow-up email with the recording and further resources later today. Over to you, Mark.
Mark: Thanks, Caitriona. Welcome, everybody. I hope you're having a great Tuesday.
As the title says, this session is about how to choose your mentor. That came about as a result of a bit of thinking on my part and the realisation that, yes, it's what I do, but a lot of the significant points in my life have come about because somebody was there.
Sometimes it happened by accident. Sometimes there were conscious choices. Hence this session.
What we're going to talk about today is what mentoring changes. What mentoring changes is a key point in deciding who, what, how and when to engage.
We'll look at how to choose the right mentor, with "right" being a relative term to what you're looking for, and where AI can add value.
Initially, I was thinking: do we need another AI webinar? But actually, that's not my specialism. What I have had to do is consider its impact on what I do. That's important to be open about, I think.
Then there will be questions and the opportunity to talk about whatever it is, how it impacts you and what else we can do to help.
So there are three takeaways from this session.
One, understanding what mentoring is and how it supports growth.
It's one of those words that everybody's probably heard a thousand times. And if I were to ask, I would probably get a thousand answers.
Two, how to choose the right mentor. And three, how to combine human mentoring with AI information, and see how the two can complement each other.
So a little bit about me then. Why is he speaking to us about these things?
I'm a founder of a number of businesses. Currently, Bespoke Business Growth is the one I've opened literally for this purpose: to help people develop their businesses.
I help owners gain clarity around decision-making. I've got lots of experience. I started in manufacturing a long time ago, as it turns out now.
I've worked in technical departments, education and sales. Because I've run a lot of other people's businesses as part of my consultancy, I've got a lot of experience around business and manufacturing in general.
My approach is to take constructive challenge and confidential support. It's important that everybody everywhere has someone they can talk to.
I go boxing, and one of the guys I box with, we have a kind of sounding board relationship with each other. We know that it's not going to go any further. So he sometimes comes in and offloads stuff.
But it's about finding a more suitable or structured setting for that. I'm always growth-focused.
As you sit there, I want you to think about some words. I'm going to give you about 30 seconds or so to think of the words that you associate with mentoring.
Off you go. That was actually 20 seconds, and it feels like forever online, doesn't it?
These are the kind of things I hope people have come up with.
The key one now, obviously, is change. This is just one of the graphics I was able to find with a simple search. But there are all sorts of words, from brainstorming, goals, fulfilment, behaviour, growth and commitment.
So there are all sorts of words that we associate with mentoring. And here's another look at the same thing. Same focus, very different set of words.
That's why I thought it was key to clarify what we're talking about when we're speaking about mentoring.
What do we mean? The Association of Business Mentors is the association that I'm a member of, and I use the code of practice associated with them.
They are set up to support mentors, encourage mentoring and support mentoring. They have this definition as a professional relationship where there is a difference between experience and inexperience.
So the experienced person offers guidance and support. The title is key here: perspective, not prescription.
So it's guidance, questioning and support rather than prescriptive "do this, do that, do the other". The business owner retains ownership of the decision and the results.
Having worked as a consultant previously, I found one of the biggest challenges in mentoring is to leave the results and the decision-making with the client, with the mentee.
As a consultant, I've done a number of business turnarounds where I literally get parachuted into the business. Not with a literal parachute, but I go into the business and take the reins.
One of the turnarounds I did, we went from within 20 minutes of bankruptcy to profit within four months with a little bit of restructuring.
It wasn't wildly off. There had just been a few poor decisions made. I had to do that and then go through a process of giving the business back to the owner.
That's got challenges. Mentoring isn't like that.
Mentoring is sitting back, having the conversations, and the mentee comes to that decision, takes the actions and reaps the result. So mentoring brings experience, perspective and challenge.
That one's a more collaborative approach. The graphic there is to suggest that collaboration rather than direction.
Mentoring is much more collaborative than directive. The mentee brings the context, the ambition and the ownership.
The people I work with, I ask them what they want to get out of it. Not what they want to do, but what their aims are.
We might talk around that, and there might be a little bit of challenge around whether those are the right objectives. But actually, they're bringing their stuff, and the mentor's role is to support with the solution.
The solution is created between us. That's a really key part. Again, it's not: "I have the experience, I'm the mentor."
I have a mentor myself, so I work with somebody with more experience than me. But it's that transfer of understanding rather than just, "Well, I've done this before and it worked."
It's: "Let's create this thing between us and aim to achieve your objectives through this process." Mentoring turns experience into insight, for both of you.
A couple of models then.
If you search for mentoring versus coaching, training or consultancy, because they're all occupying the same space, and I say kind of because they're all part of the same continuum of skills which an individual might use in different contexts within a business or within a contract. I know that's my experience.
I've gone in as one thing, taking over a business on a turnaround, gone in as chief executive, operating officer or whatever it is, and taken on responsibility for the business.
I've coached some members of staff, looked at the training, because that's often the source of many of the problems, mentored people into the positions they have or into other positions, and done it within the space of an hour, sometimes in the space of a day.
But whichever model you look at, there are common themes. There are commonalities. Mentoring, coaching, training and consulting are similar but different.
There are various two-dimensional, three-dimensional and four-dimensional issues if you look at time because, obviously, the relationship often changes through time.
It can start as being a very prescriptive consultant role and end up being a very non-prescriptive mentor role.
They're not always fixed models either. It changes. Navigating that change is part of the mentor's role.
Part of the code of practice of the Association of Business Mentors looks at how that change is managed.
That can feel uncomfortable sometimes, but it's about being clear that the changes are OK.
As I've said previously, through a session or a series of sessions, the input, the focus and the amount of input change.
I'm a volunteer mentor in the healthcare scheme. From the start of the scheme to the end of the scheme, what I'm looking to see is greater independence as the mentees grow and develop that confidence.
It's about helping individuals grow, growing skills and confidence so that they can help their businesses to grow.
At the start, it's very much mentor, almost consultancy. At the end, it's much more mentee-led because they're blossoming.
So here's a summary of mentoring. I've compared it to coaching because it's the thing I think it most commonly gets confused for.
This isn't 100% prescriptive, by the way. This is my experience of it, I guess.
Mentoring is more collaborative, more question-based advice and guidance. There's meant to be an imbalance.
You can't get 40 years' business experience quickly. You can get it more quickly than 40 years with the help of somebody experienced, but that volume of information and experience takes time.
You have to have been through those scenarios and seen them.
Then we've got accelerated learning pathways. That's one of the things mentoring really offers: a more accelerated learning pathway.
People don't have to make the mistakes or go through the process and the challenges that I did because I can share the learning from them and hopefully help people go around them. But they'll still need to have their own. It doesn't remove that need.
Mentoring is constructive, but it involves feedback and challenge, and it's often one-to-one.
Coaching is less collaborative and more guided. It does use questions, but it's often skill-focused.
I've seen things pop up on my feed about becoming a certain type of coach. I'm like, people haven't done that.
But with coaching, you don't need to have done the thing yourself. You need to know the skills, and you need to know how to coach people to be able to do that.
I go to classes at the gym and the person teaching doesn't always do the class, but they know how to teach the people doing the class how to do it. Coaching is often more than one-to-one.
So we'll move on now. The actual purpose, how to choose your mentor, is to choose the relationship, not the regimen. This is something that was key to me when I have had mentors previously.
It's about how I choose the person, not what the CV or resume says. The process is this.
First of all, there's a process that can be helpful. The start of it is the discovery process. Discovery calls are the first thing I would do with someone. I say: "Book a discovery call."
I don't try to work with everybody. One of the things I found most challenging in running my own business is not trying to be all things to all people.
It's broadening that appeal so I can reach the right people, but I work really well with certain types of people.
I have a certain approach. I've come from manufacturing and from the north. I'm quite direct.
I'm a graduate. My first degree is in chemistry, my second degree is in sociology and my master's is in education. So I take quite a linear approach to things, and I use a lot of logic.
A lot of the cost improvements, for which the Help to Grow scheme has been really successful, are quite simple analytical tools. Five S, Six Sigma, lean, whatever we call them these days.
Those are all the kinds of tools that I will use if we're doing a cost improvement programme or somebody's looking to simplify their business.
But the first thing is: can I work with this person? Can we get on successfully as a working relationship? We aren't going to be mates and go out and have pictures together, but we need to be able to get on. There needs to be a level of trust.
The decision is: are the approach and experience a good fit? Is this person a good fit for my business? I might like them, but they don't have the experience.
I have worked in online internet sales businesses, so I've got quite broad experience. But if it's medical, it's not me. I've not done that. I don't understand that framework, and the language won't fit my experience.
So we might get on, but I wouldn't be the person for that. Manufacturing, various different types.
I've just had a lead for an ice cream manufacturer. I've worked in frozen and chilled, but I haven't actually done ice cream specifically. I have done ice cream, but not an ice cream factory. But I can do ice cream because I understand the process.
I can talk manufacturing language. I can talk about the hassles and flows, processes, control points, temperatures and CCPs, because it's just one of those things.
It's important to know whether someone has started with an empty room and built a productive factory that's complied with all the legal frameworks.
Yes. I can help them because that's the process or the outcome.
Then there's contracting. The Association of Business Mentors is really good for me. There are others, by the way, such as ICF and various others, and they all have a framework to work to.
When you're choosing somebody to work with, it's really important to ask them about the framework they use, because the framework is all about confidentiality, boundaries, scope and outcomes.
I'll speak in generic terms about people that I've worked with and things that I've helped to achieve as a mentor and consultant.
But it's essential that I maintain that confidentiality and that I don't breach somebody else's IP. That wouldn't be fair at all. It also wouldn't give me very much work.
So contracting is a process where you agree what boundaries and confidentiality apply to this. Whichever association it is will have its own set of contracting expectations.
The scope of work is also really important. These types of relationships, because they're naturally a discussion and a conversation, can get sidetracked and zoom off in different directions.
Whilst that can be productive, part of my role is to go: "Hold on. The scope says we're doing this. Do you want to change the scope?" The scope says we're doing it, and to keep repeating that.
That's really interesting, certainly at the start of these relationships. Once the excitement starts and once we start uncovering the gold, we start seeing all sorts of things we can work on. It gets very exciting.
I never thought I'd say a mentoring talk was exciting, but it is.
The opportunity to improve a business, sort out some processes, make it slicker, automate stuff, get AI involved in some of the automation process, make more money or save money, whichever way we're approaching it, is really exciting stuff.
It's easy to get pulled away in shiny directions when we've actually got foundations to deal with.
So it's important that the contracting is clear about that.
Then agree some outcomes. What are we trying to do? It's great having a chat for an hour. Like I said, my friend down at boxing and I do it pretty much every time we go boxing, two or three times a week.
He'll chat about his, I'll chat about mine. I'll ask him, and we bounce ideas around for five minutes, usually while we're warming up.
But what are we actually trying to achieve? What is this mentoring focused on? Then keep coming back to that outcome. Are we achieving the outcome?
The way I work with people is that, at the end of a session, we'll come back to: how is what we've done today related to the intended outcomes and the scope of the project? Have we done what we tried to do?
Finally, the codes of practice. This has been one of those unregulated areas.
When I worked as a consultant, a lot of the confidence I had came off the back of being a car salesperson. I learned to sell cars on a pitch and therefore learned to speak to people.
I learned to have conversations with people about their business and about them, find out facts and start to build that rapport.
But there wasn't a lot of regulation. It was self-imposed. I've always worked in a regulated environment, so I've always used my own version of regulation.
But now there are professional standards and accountability.
Every mentoring relationship should at least have reference to the expected standards around confidentiality and all the standard expectations you would have when working with somebody in a contracted setting.
Also, accountability. Who's accountable for what?
I've worked on projects where we agree a set of actions, you go back the next week and the actions haven't been done.
There's only so much accountability the mentor can take for that. If the action is not getting done, it's going to be difficult to achieve the outcomes.
Then there is the ongoing relationship. I've put the three Cs. I came up with these myself.
Check. As the relationship progresses, because mentoring is more of an ongoing relationship than consultancy in my experience.
As a consultant, I'm used to going into a business, fixing a problem and going out. It might be a couple of weeks.
I did an efficiency programme in an internet sales business across eight weeks, and we got a 42% uplift in parcel throughput.
That wasn't rocket science. It was because the business had grown very quickly and outstripped its processes.
A book I listened to the other day talked about process. A lot of my work and a lot of my strength is understanding the structure and benefits of process.
Do we have processes on key things that support and extend the growth of the business, or are we working for the processes and the processes aren't working for us?
So the systems and process background is the place that I would start, because usually, if things are falling down, that's often where to look.
Mentoring forms a longer-term relationship. Because it's the mentee that's doing the work and getting the outcomes, it's very much a drop-in, drop-out.
Weekly goes to two-weekly, or goes to monthly, and then you have a monthly catch-up.
Have we agreed the outcomes? Are we on track to agree the outcomes? Do we know where we are on the plan?
We've got a 12-month plan and it's six months in. Are we halfway, or have other things happened?
Change. What needs to change as priorities shift? Because sometimes we uncover the gold and go: "Hold on. That's far more valuable to us as a business now, so we're going to go this way."
That's happened with one of the people I'm working with currently. We've seen an opportunity for sales, and it's left something else that was an initial target.
We need to bump that 12 months and not do it yet, because if we do this, we've got a more stable financial base.
The other thing is: is the relationship working? It's OK to go: "This relationship isn't working. I now need somebody who's better at this." That's the point. It's a professional relationship that will develop over time.
There are people I work with that I've worked with for 10 years, and there are people that I've worked with for a few weeks and then moved off.
It's about accepting that the needs of the business are what drive the relationship.
I would continue. And this is basically: are we still creating useful challenge and progress? Because that's the purpose of the mentor and mentee relationship. So we've done the ongoing nature of the relationship.
I've gone through the process of selecting a mentor focused on their framework, their qualification, picking the person, their experience, their compatibility, and then the framework and accreditation side of them.
I had this from a client. I've pulled it apart because I like the graph, and partly because every single thing coming into my inbox seems to be AI-related.
I had a client recently. I'd done a piece of work for them. My record recently was £82,000 worth of labour savings in two hours of chat.
They were able to start realising about 70% of that within another fortnight as they did a restructure.
At the end of it, I got an AI-generated set of questions saying: "How will you do this, this, this, this and this?" I thought, what a shame.
What AI can do is generate information fantastically usefully.
Over the last three to six months, I've noticed massive improvements in its ability to process, its outputs, its ability to collate and summarise huge amounts of data and turn that into something, or to create all sorts of workflows and adaptations.
I'm really embracing it personally. But I think there's this idea that I can just ask AI and don't need a person.
I've been working with this person, who I think is the jobs manager, for 10 weeks. He'd gone in and oversold. I'd done a pre-close. I'd done a close on the guy, but then he reverted to AI because he wanted to use AI.
That's fine. It's the human-in-the-loop aspect of mentoring that AI can't do. It can, and I absolutely encourage it. One of the people I'm working with currently is doing a full process map for his business.
We looked at going into a statutory framework. Once he'd done the work, he said: "I don't want to do that."
He'd used AI to gather information and collect information. He'd been able to process a massive amount of data really quickly to come to a decision that, actually, the better business decision is to do this bit first. Again, it was about foundational stuff.
So what I try to encourage is human judgement with AI capability. I absolutely support all my mentees to embrace AI because it is, without a shadow of a doubt, in the future. Embracing it is going to save everybody time.
Automation and the processes it can take off free up time to do the more strategic and structural stuff. So it can do ideas, structures, information, content and plans.
It can also, in case anybody's interested, give you up-to-date feedback on how your current hi-fi setup is working and what you need to go and buy, but that's probably an aside.
What it can't do is judge, having gone out and bought a piece of hi-fi, how the other house occupants, namely my wife, will react when she sees it. That wasn't quite as positive as AI predicted.
But that's the essence of it. It can say what's a good idea, but what it can't do is read the context and it can't read the environment yet.
So let's check we understand. What we're trying to do is talk about a business mentor, what it is and how it supports growth.
What it is and how it supports growth is that it's an ongoing relationship. There is an imbalance in understanding. That's the point of it.
It supports growth by supporting the mentee to make their own decisions, but with more information than they would have otherwise.
Choose the right mentor. It has to be the person that you can work with. It's not the best resume. It's the person you can work with most effectively.
And absolutely embrace the use of AI in this process. It can complement human interaction currently. Thank you for your time. Thank you for listening. Questions?
Caitriona: Thank you so much, Mark. We've had a few questions come in. Let's start with this one from Dominika.
This question is regarding the outcome of mentoring. Transformation is very dependent on the mentee. If they don't put actions in place and are not consistent, there won't be results.
How can I, as a mentor, be responsible for the results? What am I accountable for?
Mark: That's part of the contracting phase. When setting up that contract, it's important to be really clear.
I use a framework of the Association of Business Mentors, which is that the outcomes are dependent on both parties, or all parties, completing their actions.
So in that circumstance, I will go into a challenge and say: "OK. So we haven't achieved it the first time."
Look, everybody has a day. The first time is OK. So are we going to redo that?
The second time, it's about going in and saying: "OK. We said we were going to do this. The outcome depends on it. What's going on? We can't achieve this outcome without this action. First of all, how can I help?" Because if it's not a meeting, I can't fix it.
Then, secondly, what do we need to do to move past it? So for me, the key aspect of that is the challenge around it and asking: what's going on? Usually, as a friend of mine would say, the thing is not the thing. That's often the case.
I hope that helps.
Caitriona: Thank you. Building on this slightly, we have a question from Josh. He's asking: what qualities make mentees enjoyable and worthwhile to a mentor?
Mark: That's a fantastic question. Enthusiasm. For me, the people I work with are absolute shining stars. I am so lucky.
My job as a mentor is to uncover that shiny bit. Everybody has a shiny bit.
One of the toughest jobs I've ever had to do was taking on a business where it was within 20 minutes of foreclosure. It had loads of shiny stars, often doing the wrong things.
So the thing with being a mentee is to be honest, be open and be clear about what you're trying to get out of it and what skills you have.
Don't try and pretend. An authentic relationship will build a real rapport that can lead to personal growth, would be my assessment of that.
And don't be frightened to shine either. It's OK to be amazing.
Caitriona: Thank you. Chris has a question. How long should you have a mentor for?
Mark: Entirely dependent on the process and the project. Some of the personal mentoring I've done has gone on 10-plus years.
If there are specific process parameters, then the mentor would potentially run for the length of the programme. But it is a longer-term relationship.
I guess what happens is the frequency and the interaction reduces. So it's a bit like how long is a piece of string. With a specific project, I could give a more quantitative answer to that.
Caitriona: Thank you. We're just coming to the end of the session now, but we do have time for one final question, and that's from Richard.
Where and how do you advertise your services, and what recommendations would you offer other mentors?
Mark: That's the question, isn't it? I involve myself in Help to Grow. I'm a volunteer mentor on that. On Enterprise Nation, I'm an adviser.
The people and the local community plug in. I'm old school, and I used to sell cars. So for me, it's attending face-to-face networking. It's attending events.
It's about being part of online networking events as well. For me, I'm very much focused on my local community. I'm from Yorkshire, and Barnsley is the centre of the known universe, so I'm trying to expand the greatness of Barnsley.
There's also a lot of focus on development in my area, so it's a really good place for me to work. But I also have mentors across the globe, so wherever.
Caitriona: Thank you so much, Mark.
We've just come to the end of the session now, but thank you so much for your presentation.
Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. We'll share the recording and further resources in a follow-up email this afternoon.
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