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At the beginning of your mentor engagement, you would expect him to help you with the fundamentals – your idea, your business model, your strategy. But beyond that when it comes to executing, there are a myriad ways in which a mentor can help improve the quality of your actions. The following examples are meant to illustrate how valuable mentoring can be when it succeeds.

1. Dealing with discontinuous change while scaling – situations change rapidly at a fast growing startup. Problems not seen before, arise – this requires great awareness which a mentor can help provide. Beyond that your mentor will have the problem solving skills to help you with direct, actionable advice and support.

2. An important but subtle change when scaling, is that the appropriate leadership style changes with scale. This can hard to foresee and even harder to implement as leadership style is closely linked to your inner self. A mentor can help you make this transition. One such critical transition is hiring a COO. Suddenly you need to learn to delegate, set up performance indicators and get good at reviewing performance.

3. Moving from founder-led selling to sales hires is a tricky challenge. It is extremely important to succeed with this and at the same time it’s quite hard. It takes a lot of preparation. Your mentor will have the experience to help you achieve this step by step.

4. A mentor will help you focus on customer benefits rather than product features. This is a fundamental reorientation that needs to percolate down into your product strategy, design and development processes. It can be especially useful for entrepreneurs who are in love with their product.

5. A mentor can dramatically enhance the quality of the business plan. He can make sure that all the moving parts are covered. For example, he can help you discern how fixed and variable costs will change as you increase throughput, add locations, add products.

6. A mentor can teach you how to run the business by the numbers. At size predictability becomes key for investor confidence and share price.

7. Making the Board work – with help from your mentor you can channel the collective wisdom of senior members in your board into cohesive action.

8. At a personal level a mentor is a confidant – he provides a shoulder to cry on and help you deal with anxiety and self-doubt.

9. A mentor can help you understand where your investors are coming from and set up a more productive and collaborative environment with your investors.

10. Right size the vision – a mentor encourages big picture thinking. This may lead you to dramatically upscale the vision of what the business is capable of achieving. At other times your mentor can provide a reality check and help test fantasies you may be beholden to.

The idea of mentoring startups has received mixed reviews from founders. Discussions in startup groups evoke strong reactions on this subject. Indeed, on many occasions it has not been effective for founders nor satisfying for mentors.

But when it works, mentoring can make a fundamental impact on the fortunes of your startup. As per this article in Forbes, “…mentored founders increased startup revenue by 83% as compared to only 16% for non-mentored entrepreneurs. Furthermore, the study shows that entrepreneurs are less likely to execute on their ideas without a mentor. 42% of mentored businesses started as opposed to 29% without a mentor.”

Just like everything else, mentoring succeeds only when the conditions are right. Before anything else, you must be serious about seeking to be mentored. It will require significant commitment of time from you – the most precious resource your startup has. Don’t go in with an opportunistic mindset.

There are many kinds of mentors with different approaches and skills. Choosing the right mentor can make all the difference. Here we look beyond the obvious factors – experience, proven track record, large network.

As an entrepreneur here are eight things you may want to consider when looking for a mentor.

1. Match of expectations between you and your mentor

It is important that you agree with the mentor on what to expect from the relationship. In some cases, you may expect the mentor to immediately start opening doors to customers or bringing in investors. This is a clear and specific requirement that only some mentors are capable of delivering. You may also expect that the mentor stays out of the way for everything else. This is best made clear upfront as many mentors find this condition unworkable.

If you are looking for answers and guidance for specific questions, rather than looking for a ‘mentor’ as the term is used, you may be better served by subject matter experts.

2. Don’t Expect Instant Results

Don’t assume, for example, that getting a mentor will immediately bring in new customers. This hardly ever happens. Even when the mentor is able to bring in sales connects, it must be understood that “from connect to sale” is quite a distance, especially in B2B sales. Some entrepreneurs believe that their offering is perfect and meeting a prospect is all that is required. Rarely is this true. If the entrepreneur is unable to recognise this, with or without a mentor, he is bound to fail.

3. It’s best structured as a long term arrangement

Mentoring works best when you are looking for genuine, sustained, quality advice and guidance on how to grow their business, in all its aspects. As you grow, you face discontinuous changes. These need you to rapidly change your mindset and approach based on situation. A mentor can help you become aware of this and reduce errors in execution. In the least, a good mentor should be able to help you build a sound strategy and a robust business plan. More importantly, he should help you improve the quality of your decisions and actions.

4. Personality Match

This is fundamentally a long term relationship of trust and mutual respect. An intense give and take happens in successful mentoring relationships. This can work only if you and your mentor can connect at a personal level. This requires that you share core values and your styles don’t conflict. It requires willingness to listen from both sides. Are you ready?

5. Humility

A good mentor never assumes that he knows more than the entrepreneur. He is willing to admit that he may be wrong. He does not insist that the entrepreneur execute his ideas. He looks to influence rather than instruct.

Likewise, a ‘mentorable’ entrepreneur is one who actively listens and is able to integrate ideas from the mentor into his own understanding. Be prepared to be challenged on everything. If this makes the entrepreneur feel irritated or even insulted, it’s a red flag. Do an internal check for yourself.

6. Keep your own counsel

When an entrepreneur is in awe of the mentor and blindly follows advise, it may lead to unintended results. Sometimes mentors seek to dazzle you. This creates overly high expectations from the engagement. Watch out for this. A wise entrepreneur is one who receives advise from his mentor but decides for himself what to do.

7. Get out of that armchair

Often mentoring engagements are setup as a series of regularly scheduled meetings. Such an arrangement may succeed if the meetings work towards a clear end goal – such as a strategy for upselling, a plan for expanding to a new city etc. Free flowing discussions without a specific objective in mind are usually a waste of time. Weekly or biweekly would be ideal; a month is too long.

It helps when your mentor recognizes that there are certain occasions in the life of the startup that have extraordinary impact on its’ destiny. Giving you a block of time when you need it – say to prepare for that sales pitch to a marquee customer or to help you rehearse for that investor presentation, or being there for your product strategy discussions, may do much more than weeks of “armchair mentoring”.

Over time you may get more from your mentor – a public advocate of your startup, your influencer in your digital marketing strategy and so on, even a shoulder to cry on!

Here is an interesting article at entrepreneur.com – ‘Why Entrepreneurs Need Mentors and How to Find Them’