Mentoring is a process of cultivation. A great mentor won’t try to tell you all of the answers but will instead help a young start-up or entrepreneur formulate their own answers and solutions. A mentor accomplishes this by sharing their past experience and gained knowledge in dealing with the challenges being faced by the young start-up. The mentor will then help facilitate the young-start up in thinking about their own problems and how they can develop their own unique solutions.

Mentoring refers to a wide range of activities and can happen in many different circumstances. Mentoring can be informal or formal, public or private, and open or closed. For example, informal mentoring could occur when a student visits a former professor to gain some advice or insight. That professor, on the other hand, might seek some formal mentoring from the commercialization expert at the University’s Technology Transfer Office (TTO) to commercialize his research.

This contrasts with “coaching” by which many coaches will teach specific skills and also try to offer straight-jacket answers. Business coaches certainly provide value and can help start-ups with specific skills, such as making a pitch to investors. Yet outside of specific skill-sets, the overall impact of a “coach” can be limited, or even detrimental. The learning style of a coach tends to emphasis very specific actions and solutions, aka “text-book answers.” Yet, for better or worse, “text-book” solutions seldom work in dynamic and fast-changing business environments.

Mentoring typically occurs in one of two forms; “naturally” or “planned.” Natural mentoring occurs when an entrepreneur (or team of entrepreneurs) find an advisor through their social networks and personal connections. Often times, the entrepreneur will not even be looking for a mentor but will instead “stumble” across one. Forms of payment for natural mentoring will vary widely, ranging from being free, to costing substantial amounts of equity or money paid to fees.

Mentoring also occurs through structured mentoring programs. These programs are set up to match the appropriate mentor with the appropriate mentee(s). Most of the time, these two parties will have little or no prior history. Mentor programs usually require payments either in the form of money or equity, though non-profit and national-service variants of these programs have been set-up to provide services for free or at a substantially reduced cost.

When necessary, a Mentor will provide training and coaching, however the emphasis always remains on helping the mentee to come up with their own solutions. A mentor might help the mentee build a presentation for investors, for example, and like a coach, a mentor will show the mentee all of the ground-rules and foundations of writing a great presentation. This presentation will focus less on textbook skills, however, and more on building using the mentee’s strengths and developing a “customized game plan.” The mentor will then help the mentee move to the next stage by helping the mentee locate potential investors and supporters.

This is where a mentor comes in. While a mentor will help a mentee think about and form specific solutions, the emphasis is on helping the mentee come up with their own solution. Mentors use their previous experience and gained-knowledge to build and present real-life “case-studies” that are closely related to the problems being faced by the start-up entrepreneurs. The mentor will work to guide the entrepreneurial team through the whole process but will also allow the team to work through the issues themselves.

Funders often view the lack of experience of a young start-up team as a hazard and great ideas can be side-lined by a lack of experience and a pragmatic approach. For example, Management issues such as cash flow can derail a project in its early stages resulting in the failure to bring the idea to market and a loss on the investor’s part. Problem is, those inexperienced teams are often the people with the best ideas. Fresh and innovative ideas often come from people with no business experience, whether it’s a senior researcher at a university, or a group of fresh college graduates.

A mentor can help inexperienced teams by sharing their own experience and helping the mentor team address their weakness in business and economic knowledge. Mentors usually have experience working through the same or similar problems and can build a sort of “case study” for the mentee to think about and work through. Mentors then help the mentee examine and solve their own problem, but the emphasis is always on helping the mentee come up with their own solution. Mentors can provide input for a whole range of areas, including marketing, operations, supply, product design, and everything else.

Mentors also provide the value of an outside perspective. Using this outside perspective and their own experience and knowledge, a mentor can help you understand how your business relates to other parties. How will your investors view this project? What might make them uneasy about the project? How will customers view your product or service? What types of things will affect their decision to purchase or not purchase your good? Having outside perspectives for your project will be essential and perhaps none will be more valuable than the perspective provided by an experienced and steady mentor.

And make no mistake, great mentors are not “yes men.” A great mentor should believe in your product or project, but that does not mean that they will agree with every single idea you come up. Remember, mentors are there to help you cultivate your idea, and sometimes that means challenging your assumptions, questioning your business model, and pushing you to greater heights. It is important for the mentee to understand that this is a process of critique, not criticism, and the long term goal is build a stronger business and/or product.

Often times the process of critiquing a new idea can be difficult, but it is important to remember that your mentor is always trying to propel you to the next level. No business has ever been successful based on the vision of just one man. Even great entrepreneurs and business leaders, like the late Steve Jobs, relied on the input of others in order to build their highly-profitable enterprises. For example, most of the design genius that has propelled Apple into the world’s largest electronics company come from Jonathan Ive

Starting a new business or launching a new project is no easy task. A lot of people have great ideas, but only a few will master the market and make it big. Think about the computing revolution. They were one of hundreds of computer and electronic manufacturing companies during the birth of the industry in the 1970s and 80s. Yet out of those hundreds of companies only a handful, including Microsoft, Apple, HP, and Dell, made it big.

A coach will coach, but a mentor will cultivate the entrepreneurial team involved in the start-up phase. A lot of coach’s like to tell you that they know the answer, but the truth is, each start-up will be unique and there is almost always more than one right answer.