Peaking from giants’ shoulders

A good mentor is much like the coach of a successful football team, the executive director of the Council of Small Business of Australia (COSBOA), Peter Strong, suggests.

“They’re there to push you to reach your goals and to help you work at your peak performance,” he says. “A lot of people who use coaches are high achievers. They will use a coach to help them reach their goals.”

On this year’s BRW Fast Starters list, which identifies the fastest growing start-ups in Australia, 65 per cent of business owners did not have a business mentor or coach. While some owners have one, others choose to go it alone. Some choose a less formal approach and rely on friends or a family member.

Strong says that a family member or friend can sometimes work, but this can also be dangerous as they may end up doing the job for the person or they may give advice in areas in which they don’t necessarily have expertise.

He says the best mentor is someone who helps clients find their way rather than telling them what to do.

BRW Fast Starter entrant Richard Turner says his father Alan played an instrumental role when he and his brother Greg started their first business in 1987. The pair founded Regency Food Services, a food distribution business with annual turnover of $25 million to $30 million. They sold the company 12 years later.

“Dad was an entrepreneur himself and he had some old-fashioned, hard-and-fast golden rules which he passed on to us,” Turner says. “He had a successful meat wholesaling business in the 1950s – it grew to be one of the largest meat wholesaling companies in Adelaide.”

Today, things are a little different for Turner. In 2006, he founded renewable energy company Zen Technology and, until recently, didn’t see the need for a mentor. However, the rapid growth of his business – its annual revenue is forecast to reach $80 million next year – has meant a change of mind.

“I haven’t used a mentor to get me to the level of where I am at the moment,” Turner says. “I’ve had the experience of running a business of about $30 million, but now Zen is heading into uncharted waters. I haven’t had the experience of running an $80 million company or $200 million, which is where we aim to be in a couple of years.”

This year, Turner has engaged Raymond Spencer as his mentor, chairman of the board at Zen and a shareholder. “I wanted a mentor who was passionate about business and who had the experience of working with a company turning over hundreds of millions,” Turner says. “Raymond has owned and operated very successful businesses, which he later sold.”

Turner feels that Spencer’s experience will be invaluable in helping the business to grow and that he is already reaping the benefits of his involvement.

“The first thing he did was to help me recognise my weakness, and this was in the operational aspect of the business,” Turner says. “My strength is in the vision and business strategy.”

Spencer suggested Turner hire a chief operating officer and he since has. “Perhaps in the longer term we would have identified the need for one ourselves,” Turner says. “But [Spencer] immediately saw the need and helped us recognise that we lacked this person in our company.”

The director of @theboardtable, Virginia Hickey, consults to several boards of directors on corporate governance. She also mentors and says that a good mentor or coach acts as a trusted adviser.

“To be a good mentor, you need to put aside your ego and remember that you’re focusing on developing other people and not pontificating,” Hickey says. “A mentor must have a proven record for developing other people and for it to work, there must be real commitment from both sides.”

She adds that mentoring needs to be mentee driven. Mentees must first ask themselves what they want from the relationship.

Where mentoring goes wrong, Hickey says, is when the mentor is not well-attuned to what the mentee wants from the relationship or the two have different agendas. “It’s not about telling the mentee what to do, but rather this relationship is about providing encouraging personal insight.”

Hickey says things can also go wrong when the relationship is not a good match. “Be careful and take the time to choose the right match of personality and experience you want,” she says.

“It can go wrong if mentoring is forced on the mentee by a manager or organisation, or where the mentee doesn’t want it or doesn’t consider the mentor to be the right person. The relationship is between the two people. It’s about trust and confidentiality.”

Another of this year’s Fast Starters, the principal of Corality Financial Group, Rickard Warnelid, had no luck in finding a mentor until he found someone who understood his business.

Warnelid met his mentor, Mikal Schreji, two years ago when Schreji was visiting Australia for a business conference. Since then, the pair have had weekly sessions over Skype during which they discuss growth strategies and big picture problems and opportunities.

“After achieving the targets I had set up for my business, I knew that if I wanted to grow it more, I needed someone who had experience,” Warnelid says. With this in mind, he interviewed several business mentors and coaches with no luck – he felt none of them had the experience that he was after.

But in Schreji, Warnelid found someone who ran a similar business and had 10 more years’ experience. “I felt he understood me – we had similar processes and programs,” he says. “I didn’t so much want a professional coach as much as I wanted someone who had done this before.”

Warnelid says it’s easy for business owners to stay in their comfort zone and remain insular. A good mentor can take an objective look at the business.

“It’s important to find someone you trust, someone that you don’t see day to day, because they can take an external look at the business rather than being too involved,” he says. “Of course you can always develop your skills with your colleagues but typically these discussions evolve around current challenges, financial models, clients and new business opportunities.”

He has gained much from his relationship with Schreji. “It’s been extremely rewarding to work with a mentor who can help me grow and manage my business better in the long run,” he says.

“Every now and then things go wrong and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with work. You can get absorbed by the issues and lose focus on what’s more important in the long term. A good mentor assists in keeping you calm in these situations while helping you solve the problems and remain on track to reach the long-term targets.”

For those owners who have not yet ventured into mentor territory, COSBOA’s Strong says there is another trend amongst small business owners of talking and providing feedback amongst themselves. “When times are tough, people begin talking about some of the problems they’re facing, whereas when things are good, they don’t tend to talk on about their success,” he says.

These gatherings are more informal than structured meetings with coaches or mentors, he adds.

“I’m seeing more business owners talking amongst themselves. For example you’ll often find a group of retailers or owners of home base businesses discussing business amongst themselves, because they understand the nature of their particular businesses.”

BRW

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