The 5 Minute Mentor

Welcome to the first in a series of monthly blog posts entitled “The 5 minute mentor’.  My hope is if you spend 5 minutes reading these posts you will learn something useful that you can apply to your business.

My background is in the creative service based sector (having run my own marketing and design agency for 11 years).  Since selling my business in 2003, I have been supporting businesses for the past 9 years and I suppose you could call me a business coach.  However, I have learned that businesses need different types of support at different times.  For example, when making big business decisions, a coaching or questioning style is the best approach yet that style can also be frustrating when working on more pragmatic areas of a business (such as helping define structures) because it can move the business forward more slowly.  In this case a mentoring approach is the best style to use.  Here you can be a little more directive and share some of your experience, especially when you have done similar kinds of work with other clients. If the remit is to help a team to work more effectively together and be more aligned, then a facilitated approach works best.  

So whilst many would call me a business coach, I am in fact all of the above.  So rather than tell people I am a business coach, I just say, “I help your business grow”.

So these blog posts are going to be short sharp words of advice based on my experience of supporting many different types of business over the past 8 years and also my 11 years of starting, growing and selling my own business. I am going to discuss everything from creating a business vision, defining your company values to writing roles & responsibilities and running appraisals.

Next month we are going to discuss the real value of getting some external support and also look at how long a company should engage with a coach for.

Rob
(robert@dacostacoaching.co.uk)

If you want to contribute to the Chamber blog, contact us on hannah@brightonchamber.co.uk