A second pair of eyes for the person at the top. Regular, structured and practical mentoring for owners, managing directors and senior teams of SMEs that are growing, or trying to.
The owner is expected to have the answers, and the people they would normally test ideas on are employees, family members or the bank. None of them can be completely neutral. A mentor can.
An experienced, independent person to test ideas on, outside the business, the family and the bank.
Make better decisions with less second-guessing, with someone to ask the hard questions first.
Build the habits and structure a larger business needs, one agreed action at a time.
Practical support without handing your judgement over to someone else.
The three terms get used loosely, so it is worth being clear about the difference.
Project work. A consultant studies a specific problem, recommends a solution and sometimes implements it. Our business consultancy in Preston works this way.
Mostly about drawing out your own thinking through questions. A good coach does not need to know your industry or have run a business.
Sits between the two. A mentor draws on their own experience of running and growing businesses, asks hard questions and offers a view when it is useful, over months rather than weeks.
Most growing companies need each of these at different times. Part of the first conversation is working out which one fits where you are now.
Every business is different, but certain issues come up again and again once a company passes a dozen or so staff.
Working out which decisions only the owner can make, and building the people and processes to handle the rest.
Promoting good technical people into management roles, and supporting them once they get there.
A simple annual plan with a handful of measures reviewed monthly, so that decisions rest on more than gut feel.
Moving from founder-led selling to a repeatable process, and knowing what your marketing returns. Our guide to measuring marketing ROI without a big team covers one part of this.
A new site, a key hire, an acquisition or outside investment. Someone to pressure-test the thinking before you commit.
We agree the focus and what good looks like in six to 12 months' time.
A typical pattern is one session of two to three hours each month, with short calls in between when something urgent comes up.
Each session ends with agreed actions, and the next one starts by reviewing them. That simple discipline is often where much of the value lies: it is easy to put off the difficult tasks when nobody is going to ask about them.
Sessions often become less frequent as the business and its leadership team mature, and we review the arrangement regularly.
Most run for at least six months, because the value builds over time. Many continue for a year or more, with sessions becoming less frequent as the business and its leadership team mature. There is no long lock-in, and we review the arrangement regularly.
Sector knowledge helps, but most of the challenges of growing an SME are common across industries: people, cash, priorities and sales. Where specialist knowledge matters, we will say so and can bring in trusted partners.
Fees depend on the frequency and format of sessions. We agree a fixed monthly arrangement in advance, so you know exactly what you are committing to. The first conversation is free.
At the time of writing, the government-backed Help to Grow: Management course for eligible SMEs includes ten hours of one-to-one mentoring alongside its 12-week leadership programme, with most of the cost funded by government. It is delivered by business schools across the UK, including in Lancashire. It is a useful starting point; private mentoring tends to be longer term and more closely tailored to the business.
Yes. Mentoring only works if you can be frank about the business, the numbers and the people. We do not share anything discussed in sessions without your agreement.
If you run a growing company and would value an experienced, independent view, get in touch. We will talk through where the business is, what you want from mentoring and whether we are the right fit for you.