Lex DeVille
Sweeping Shadows From Dreams
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Hello everyone
I would like to hear your opinion on buying the help of a mentor to start my first business.
I am currently working with a mentor, but he is building his business and he is still groping a lot to find himself. Does he have the ideal profile to be a good mentor from there? How do you recognize them?
He publicly boasts of having me fall into these marketing pitfalls of which he has the secret. But I have the impression that I am dealing with an bad deal more than a well-established marketing strategy. I'm also afraid that my business will also be built on these failings.
I paid him 4000 euros for his help. How do I know if it is a good investment?
I'm not like him, but I don't have any experience and he talks a lot about these successes.
I need an external opinion that by definition is more objective. Could you help me, please?
Thanking you in advance.
Sincerely. Sebastian.
In my opinion (because you asked for it) if you haven't started a business on your own without a mentor, then hiring a mentor is a waste of both your time and money.
You don't need a mentor to start a business. You need abilities in critical thought and decision making. A mentor should help you reach the next level in business, not hold your hand and tell you what to do and how to start.
Free business mentoring to help you start a business:
Step 1: Find a problem to solve. Any problem.
Step 2: Research the market and decide if a solution might be worth pursuing.
Step 3: Form a solution
Step 4: Offer the solution to the market for money
Step 5: Grow, fail, quit, start again, etc.
Here's what that process looked like in my first business:
Step 1: Problem: People want a unique gift for adults who like Lego.
Step 2: Market: Anyone who knows someone who likes Lego.
Step 3: Solution: I will learn to build Lego portraits as unique gifts.
Step 4: Offer: I offered my portraits through local fall festivals and later on Etsy for money.
Step 5: People paid for my portraits. I grew, but I eventually failed because I was new to business. I quit that business. I decided on another business. I started again and again and again.
I have had one key mentor along the way who helped me get to the next level after my second business failed. There were several others over the years who helped in other ways. I paid exactly $0.00 for any of these.
Use your next 4k euros to do something that can produce actual results for you. It's a risk, but it's also a risk to throw away $4k euros on a mentor who can never force you to take even a baby step toward real results. Whether you hire a mentor or not, you can't escape the learning curve.