Here’s a standard entrepreneurial journey.
You have a business idea and you try to run the business on a small scale. Once it starts making some money, you scale it up. If you lose money, you either scale it back down or go back to the drawing board by changing the business idea… right? Some might even go back to employment or the lucky ones may retire.
Many of us struggle to deal with this process as the journey is rather lonely and challenging. We tend to dream big but we remain unsure if we will achieve it.
I do come across this situation very often. If the journey is so lonely and challenging, what should we do? My answer is pretty simple. Get a partner or a teacher; when everyone tells you to be innovative and think outside of the box, you have to ask yourself – can you? If you can then it’s alright, but what if you can’t?
This is the reason why more and more business coaches and mentors are lately mushrooming everywhere – to tell you that they can help you in this lonely and challenging journey. Since the idea of business coaching and mentorship isn’t new, why wasn’t it popular in the past? Let’s take a look at what makes entrepreneurs of the present to opt for coaching or mentorship.
- Nowadays, entrepreneurs are a bit lucky, they start businesses with good support from the triple Fs (family, friends, and fools). They do have the extra budget to hire a business coach.
- Many of these entrepreneurs are very young. They have a unique idea but they don’t really know how and where to start to execute this idea (coz most of them don’t even has working experience). Thus they need someone to guide them to materialise their idea.
- Influence by others who benefited from business coaching and mentorship.
Nevertheless, SMEs select their mentor based on very unique criteria (which I kind of disagree), here you go, he or she:-
- should be cheap, best if it is free
- must be from my industry or has experience in my industry
- must be very resourceful and can solve all my problems (sounds like Mr/Ms Google or Mr/Ms Wikipedia right?)
With these criteria, is it really possible for you to find your ideal mentor? This is just ridiculous.
We should back-track a little and identify the reason why you needed help in the first place.
Do you need the mentor to help you solving a problem or to teach you how to solve a problem?
If you just want a problem solved, get a specialist (lawyer, accountant, consultant, etc). You don’t need a coach.
The true purpose of getting a coach is because you want to learn how to tackle a problem; it’s to improve your ability in solving problems. if everything is done by them, you don’t really need a coach.
In my many years of working with SMEs and Stratups, I find the teaching, coaching and mentorship approaches aren’t really effective, coz I find that it will create “reliance effect”, i.e., they tend to rely on the coach/mentor, worst when it didn’t work well, they will blame their coaches/mentors. Instead, I personally find the “caddying” approach is more effective, in this case, I am referring to Business Caddying.
What is a business caddy?
In essence, it is very much like a golf caddy. Whenever I play in a new or familiar golf course, I always ask for a caddy. I’m a very good golfer, my handicap is very high and my scores are consistently above 100 (it’s ok if you don’t get the joke). Firstly, caddies don’t teach you what to do, they have clear eyes on the condition of the course on that day; they understand the weather, green speed, layout, pin position, incoming obstacles; they assess your ability and style in play. Most importantly, they are there every day and they are golfers too.
Thus, when I started my own business coaching platform, I decided to adopt the caddying concept instead of the traditional coaching approach. For a very simple reason, we wanna walk with our clients instead of teach them. Just like a golf caddy, business caddies are familiar with the ins-and-outs of the business world. We too are entrepreneurs.
iCOMMUNITY is a business coaching platform that adopts the caddying concept, we build a community environment for SMEs with the introduction of a business caddy in a format of group meetings with the business caddy. I believe information are easily available now as compared to before, teaching is getting harder and harder, we might as well focus in building an ecosystem, provide experiential learning instead of keep develop new contents which we cannot guarantee the relevance. Click here to visit our website or click here for more details on how we do things around here.
From the day you choose to be an entrepreneur, let it be known that this is a one-way street. No U-turns. It’s very important that you’re not wasting time making silly mistakes along your journey. If you can do it yourself, by all means, go ahead; if you need guidance, don’t hesitate. Find a good caddy. Just remember that the entrepreneurial journey is lonely but you are not alone.