How to find a Mentor or an Advisor for your start-up to help you with your entrepreneurship journey

If you have read this article “Here is your Cheat code for your Entrepreneurship journey”, you would know how can mentor or people with expertise can help you achieve your goals faster, effectively and efficiently.

It’s hard to believe how you or people can just leave such a chance to increase your success probability just because some people think it is difficult, why would they help us or they don’t know how to get started.

This article is to help you about, how to go and find mentor, and what you need to prepare to bring them onboard.

It’s surprising to see how easy it can be if you go systematic about this process as below.

Be Aware of yourself and your business

• What is your vision and mission?
• What are your strengths and weakness?
• At what stage is your business is, and what challenges you are facing?
• What are your USP and who are your competitions?
• What are your goals and milestone for at least 6 months if not 1 year?
• Who are your customers?
• What are you willing to compensate with, for the value provide by the mentor?

Your expectation from the mentor (Be aware of your future mentor)

• What kind of skills/connections/experience they should possess?
• Research about where could they be (see platforms below)?
• How you could reach them (Connection request, email, call, website message)?
• What would they need or like? (Bartering, Money, Attribute for recognition, happiness from volunteering)

Things to do before reaching out to potential mentor

• A pitch about yourself and your business for the mentor.
• What are your expectations and what you can do for them?
• Follow them on social media especially LinkedIn and Twitter
• Engage with their content on social media if any (Comment and like)

Things to do after reaching out to mentor

• Thank you note (email/in-person) for their time
• Create reminders on calendar to do regular follow-up with them
• Keep Engaging with their content on social media if any (Comment and like)

Platforms where mentors could be found

• LinkedIn
• Bumble, Twitter
• Mentorship network like Coffeemug.ai, Skyisthelimit, Mentorkart
• Ask to your network and go old school like word of mouth
• Meetups/Conferences like startup weekend
• Programs like incubators/accelerators

Mistakes to avoid

• Blindly trusting what the potential mentor says and what they can do
• Talking to them disrespectfully
• Going to them without above preparation and lose your first impression
• Thinking mentors should only work for free
• Thinking they will steal the idea
• Sharing everything with them unnecessarily. (Share with them what is needed, no more, no less and in chunks if it doesn’t hamper their process)

Do let us know if you find this article helpful or if you feel something is missing, so we can improve and help other better.

We wish you best of the luck for finding the right mentor for you and your business.

Until we meet again.

Cheers!