Mentoring for people who want experienced thinking, perspective, challenge and practical support alongside them.
Bring what you’re building.
Let’s work out what it needs next.
You might need another angle. You might need to sense-check a decision, find a missing piece, work out where to get the rocket fuel or hear someone say, “Actually, this stacks up. Go.”
You don’t need to know exactly what you need before we talk
You don’t need a mentor because you don’t know what you’re doing.
You might want one because none of us can see everything from inside our own business, work or ideas.
Good mentoring can bring a question you hadn’t thought to ask. A pattern you hadn’t spotted. Experience from somewhere completely different. A challenge to an assumption that has quietly (or rather loudly) become “just how things are”.
Or it might confirm that you’re already heading in exactly the right direction and it’s time to stop tinkering and find the rocket fuel.
You know your business better than I ever will.
I’m not here to make you do things my way.
You bring the context I can never have. I bring experience, perspective, ideas, challenge and another pair of eyes.
Success is yours to define.
And if I challenge something and you go away, think it through properly and decide what I said was something that’s not appropriate to put on a website.
Excellent.
You thought it through.
No guru. No formula. No hidden next level.
Come with the polished plan, the scribbled notes, the spreadsheet, the half-formed thought or the thing you haven’t quite worked out how to explain yet.
We’ll start from where you actually are.
The most common thing people say?
I hadn’t thought of it that way…
What might you bring to mentoring?
Mentoring doesn’t need to begin with a crisis or a perfectly formed question. You might bring something exciting, something complicated, something you’re weighing up, or just a nagging sense that another perspective would be useful.
A business you’re shaping
Ideas, offers, pricing, customers, opportunities, sustainability and all the bits that refuse to behave like the business-plan template said they would.
Something you’re considering
An investment, collaboration, change of direction, new offer or possibility that deserves more than a guess.
Whatever it is you keep circling
You’ve thought about it. Quite a lot, actually. Another perspective might help you decide what happens next.
The gloriously hard-to-categorise thing
“I don’t think you’ll have worked with anyone else who does this…”
FABULOUS!
Look at you go!
Mentoring isn’t about collecting advice and nodding thoughtfully at it. The useful bit is what happens next – making a decision, trying something, changing course, sticking with what’s working or finally getting the thing out into the world.
Progress doesn’t have to be dramatic to matter. It just needs to be real.
I get an unreasonable amount of joy from watching mentees take off in the direction they’ve chosen.
That doesn’t have to mean the moon.
Sometimes it’s one step towards next door.
It might be testing the idea. Changing the price. Making the call. Saying no. Finding the missing piece. Discovering something doesn’t work and learning from it.
Or realising that, actually, you were already on the right path and it’s time to get on with it.
Ways mentoring can work
There’s more than one way to have a mentor in your corner.
Individual mentoring
For business owners, founders and people who want experienced thinking alongside them as ideas, decisions and real life unfold.
It can be occasional or more continuous. We’ll work out what would actually be useful before you sign up for anything.
mentoring for organisations
Mentoring shaped around the person, their role and what they’re navigating at work.
This can be particularly useful where neurodivergence, disability, accessibility or workplace transition add another layer to what someone is navigating.
You don’t need to decide which box you belong in before we speak.
No pedestal. I’d fall off it.
I’ve mentored 200+ businesses and run several of my own, despite apparently believing for years that I’d mostly got bored, changed direction and lurched towards the next interesting thing.
I’ve made some excellent decisions.
I’ve also spent money I absolutely shouldn’t have, trusted people I shouldn’t have, lost money because of it, wanted to pack everything in and had days when running a business has been utterly brilliant.
I deliberately don’t niche by industry.
The variety is part of what makes the work interesting, and useful. Different businesses bring different questions, and ideas from one world can be surprisingly helpful in another.
I particularly love the conversations that begin:
“I don’t think you’ll have worked with anyone else who does this…”
You may be right.
Although businesses involving drums for camel-mounted bagpipe bands and silver tips for ceremonial military goat horns have set the bar fairly high.
Experience matters. So does keeping it current.
Mentoring is an unregulated profession, so I choose to take the responsibility seriously. I keep learning, undertake regular CPD and reflective practice, and bring experience from working with businesses, organisations and people in all sorts of settings.
The logos below are a snapshot of some of the qualifications, professional bodies, programmes, organisations and businesses that have been part of that journey.
Not a definitive list. That would need a much bigger graphic.
Bring the thing
The developed plan. The half-formed thought. The business that’s flying. The thing that needs rocket fuel. The decision you haven’t made yet.
Or the thing you don’t yet know you need to think about.
You don’t need to know whether mentoring is definitely the right answer.
We’ll start with a conversation.
If coaching, supervision, consultancy or somebody else would serve you better, I’ll say so.