Business mentoring

A business mentor can help you develop a stronger and more sustainable business. Mentored businesses and organisations report many benefits, including increases in turnover and productivity as a direct result of engaging with a mentor.

As successful business people, they understand the challenges you face as a business owner or leader of your organisation. They are volunteers who give their time freely. By providing an impartial view, they can help you stand back from your business and look at the 'big picture', identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. They can offer information and insights, provide counsel, caution against potential pitfalls, and help build your confidence.

Mentors typically have a broad network of contacts built up over their careers, so can often make useful introductions for you.

The mentor's role is to support, develop, stimulate and challenge. An experienced mentor can help you to:

• develop key business skills
• improve your problem-solving abilities
• build your confidence
• develop your leadership skills
• widen your network of business contacts.

However having a business mentor won't automatically fix all your business problems. Mentors are not consultants and they don't take the place of existing professional advisers.

If you have many years of experience in business, you could bring real value through volunteering to mentor ambitious businesses. By acting as a sounding board, you could help to support, develop, stimulate and challenge the leaders of businesses or social enterprises, by providing encouragement and confidential, objective feedback.

The skills you will need include:

• the ability to listen and empathise
• respect for other people's views
• experience of the issues and challenges faced by growing businesses and organisations
• the ability to offer encouragement and empathy
• a supportive and hands-off approach that allows others to make their own decisions
• a willingness to volunteer your time, knowledge and skills.

Mentoring is challenging and stimulating for both parties. You'll feel considerable satisfaction when your mentee reports back progress and improvements on the issues and challenges that they are addressing. You'll also have the added satisfaction that you are giving something back and supporting the Scottish economy.

Many mentors also find it is a rewarding way to continue their own personal development by:

• honing their coaching skills
• widening their contacts
• developing a new perspective on their own business.

Scottish Business Mentoring matches experienced mentors with ambitious business people. The service is delivered across Scotland through a partnership between the Scottish Chambers of Commerce and UK Finance - a trade association for the banking and finance industry. There is no cost to use the service.

They have over 900 mentors and carefully select a mentor with the right skills and experience to support the mentee’s business development objectives and ambitions.

Mentoring can be through monthly meetings for a couple of hours to help work through strategic objectives and ambitions. Mentors can also be at the end of the phone to support as a sounding board and encourage mentees when things get tough.

Sometimes mentoring works on a one-to-one basis or as part of a group, where eight or ten companies meet to discuss common issues and share knowledge and resources under the guidance of a shared mentor. Either way, you can benefit from the insight, support and experience of a successful business person.

You can find out more by calling Scottish Business Mentoring on 0141 444 7500, emailing mentoring@scottishchambers.org.uk or by visiting the Scottish Business Mentoring website.

Business Gateway runs events covering all areas of running a business. You can also talk to an adviser by calling 0300 013 4753.