In this dedicated blog, National Enterprise Network Chief Executive Dawn Whiteley offers her thoughts on mentoring following the launch of the new government initiative Get Mentoring on Wednesday 16th November 2011.
Yesterday saw the launch of Get Mentoring, a new initiative to get a further 10,000 mentors recruited, trained and deployed to support start-up and small businesses to develop and grow. These mentors will be added to those already registered through the Government’s mentorsme.co.uk portal which was launched back in July.
I’ve been asked many times over the last few months what are my views on this and so here they are! Here at National Enterprise Network we are firm believers in the value of mentoring as an important contribution to a strong, vibrant and sustainable enterprise economy and that is why we and our members are happy to be a national partner in the new Get Mentoring project. Mentors can contribute to business survival, growth and expansion at all stages of the business lifecycle from start-up and can indeed help businesses which are going through periods of difficulty. Volunteer mentors can provide valuable additional resources of knowledge, skills and experience to the business support framework. Volunteer mentoring also provides an opportunity for the mentor to develop their own skills and knowledge which in turn can be brought back into their employing organisation.
We do believe however, that mentoring is but one component of an holistic business support service, and to be as successful as possible, we firmly believe that mentors should be integrated into a mainstream business support organisation. This will enable specialist resources to be brought to play when necessary and can provide valuable support to mentors by way of CPD and networking. We were originally concerned about the extent of training and development which would be integrated into the Government’s plans and so we are pleased to support this new initiative, we do believe though that there are still bridges to cross in terms of the specific connections with local support which could bring additional value and support to the clients being supported.
But, this is where the mentoring services delivered by organisations like those in membership of our network come in, many of our members deliver paid for or free mentoring services and many of them will be taking the opportunity to list those services on the mentorsme.co.uk portal. In these cases, the clients accessing that support can ensure that they will receive the best possible mentoring and the best possible access to other support that is needed at the right times as their businesses develop.
We have heard Mark Prisk say that these volunteer mentors will replace the 1600 advisers currently working in Business Links across the country and this picks up my biggest concern about the whole concept behind the Government’s initiative. We must be very clear; the skills of running a successful business or indeed of providing business advice are very different from those of a mentor! A bad mentor could be worse than no mentor at all!
There are many and various definitions, but in my view a mentor works with a person inside the business to improve performance, using a non-directive approach, over a medium to long term. This contrasts with a coach, who adopts a directive approach to building skills; and advisers and trainers who deliver information, knowledge and skills.
We should resist the temptation to confuse these roles as they are all very different and bring differing value at different stages of a business and to its owner’s development and growth.
We have also heard it said on many occasions that the best people to support businesses are those that are already in business – and this leads me onto another bugbear with the current rhetoric. For many years there has been a mandatory requirement to have run a business as a key element of adviser recruitment – this has been the case for enterprise agencies, Business Links and many other enterprise support organisations. In many cases, recruitment has also involved an intensive assessment process to ensure that those employed are absolutely the right people for the job. So the suggestion that all these professional and experienced people are somehow deficient purely because they are employed via some form of Government funding and therefore some sort of pseudo civil servant undermines all the good work that they have done, whether it chimes with the current thinking about how business support should be delivered or not.
I’m by no means saying that all business support provided through Government funding has been perfect – it hasn’t – but commeth the hour commeth the man – later this month, our clients in particular, those pre-start clients who are unclear what support they need, who don’t understand the importance, nor value of it and are likely to be unwilling or unable to pay, will miss that support and by the Government’s own research they are the ones who will be impacted upon most by the removal of face to face support, but who with the right help and encouragement could benefit the most and that goes for the economy too.
Thanks goodness National Enterprise Network members will still be around to offer their help where it is needed!
You can read more from Dawn on Twitter here (@WhiteleyDawn) or follow the latest news from National Enterprise Network on our main Twitter account here (@NatEntNet).
Dawn
You have made some important and incisive points about the reality of support for business and enterprise, and I would like to expand on a couple of your points about mentoring and ‘advice’ in general and also on the current goverment’s business support policy.
Firstly mentoring, advising, coaching and counselling of business owner managers is nothing new, in fact these practices pre-date the formation of the enterprise agencies themselves back in the late 1970s. The difference over the following 30 years has been that delivery of business intervention and support measures such as these became organised on a more formal, more recognised and more packaged basis through the enterprise agencies and other similar organisations. This also allowed standards to be established and measured, and some nationally recognised accreditation of advisers/mentors through the likes of SFEDI.
Over those thirty years nothing has really changed in terms of demand (from aspiring start ups and existing owner managers) and supply (ie availability) of advice, training, or mentoring through agencies or individually accredited practitioners (many of whom worked freelance for the agencies). But what has changed over the decades and will continue to change over the years to come is how business support is funded by local and national government and what name is attached to it by policy makers.
Secondly when Prisk refers to 1500 state paid business advisers baing replaced by the new mentors this is indeed misleading. The reality is that in nine English regions 1500 of Business Link employees may well have lost their jobs, perhaps an average of 170 people per region. But I would hazard a guess that less than 10% of those were ‘employed’ as business advisers. The reality is that business support in the form of advice and mentoring which was ‘branded’ as Business Link has been delivered substantially under contract by the accredited employees of enterprise agencies and many hundreds of other independent enterprise practitioners.
Over the last 20 years results have show that 80% of those start ups or existing owner managers who have tapped into formal support are still trading after three years. However the figures for start ups in general, including those that recieve no early stage support indicate a failure rate of up to 80% who are no longer trading after three years, many of those failing in a matter of months.
The problem with current business support policy is the emphasis on growth. Very few small and micro-firms have the capability or indeed the aspiration for any meaningful growth. The smallest of firms, the self-employed freelancers, micro-traders, part-time enterprises and pre-start ups need support, which for 90% of them, will primarily be about survival.
Formalised and organised support needs to be about ensuring that the majority of them are still trading after three years. Mentoring alone will not achieve that, no matter what training mentors recieve, or what their background and business history is.
Start up and micro-business support requires individually tailored intervention which might include face-to-face advice, might include training courses, might include help with sourcing and applying for micro-finance, and might include mentoring/coaching.
But if the ability to provide that tailored support based on individual business needs is substantially watered down or is no longer available then survival rates will plunge and failures will escalate.
Other than having tens of thousands of ‘trained’ volunteer mentors, how will that benefit the economy?
Colin Weatherspoon
Managing Director
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