Mentorship is essential to help all professionals and businesses to grow. But for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), mentorship is especially important to help ensure success, maximize return on investment (ROI), and increase profitability.
Every entrepreneur, founder, and leader is likely familiar with statistics about the success rate of new businesses. The data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics has not changed much over the last 30 years: 20% of new businesses fail within 2 years, 45% within 5 years, and 65% within 10 years. Only 25% of new businesses survive 15 years or longer (Source).
SMBs, however, face different challenges and greater risks of failure. Half of small businesses fail within 5 years (Source). Because of the challenges small to medium-sized businesses face, new business creation is at a near 40-year low, according to U.S. Census data (Source).
Mentorship can help businesses succeed and scale because of the many benefits it provides individual contributors, teams, and organizations as a whole.
Mentorship for SMB leaders
When entrepreneurs don’t have the guidance they need to overcome early obstacles, those obstacles multiply rapidly, become insurmountable, and lead to failure.
92% of small business owners feel that mentors directly accelerated their growth and helped the survival of their business (Source). But, more than half – 63% – of business owners do not have professional guidance when starting their businesses, yet 89% of small business owners without mentors wish they had one (Source). Mentors offer expert advice, industry insights, and unique perspectives to help their mentees make real-time decisions to help them overcome challenges – most of which are never predictable.
And, because leaders of SMBs often wear many hats, mentorship gives them the exact guidance and information they need. With mentors, leaders of small to medium-sized businesses can quickly ramp up their success and be agile to adapt to their business’s ever-changing, and quickly-changing needs – no matter what hats they’re wearing that day.
Often, leaders can’t wait to make important decisions that have profound outcomes. Mentorship provides real-time solutions for leaders to solve problems in the moment. Using their industry insights, expert advice, and years of experience, mentors can help develop the exact solutions their mentees need to jump over hurdles as they race towards their goals – in real time.
No leader is born with all the answers, no matter how much education, training, and experience they have. Mentorship can help leaders identify knowledge gaps and be more effective managers, avoiding one of the main causes SMBs fail: management and leadership failures.
When SMB leaders assemble a personal advisory board of many mentors, the knowledge base they can access expands exponentially. Rather than rely on the perspectives, ideas, and experiences of one individual – leaders can benefit from a chorus of diverse voices, which sometimes may be at dissonance with each other, in order to develop solutions that harmonize best with their business’s needs.
In some cases, executive management of SMBs may be so immersed in the day-to-day operations of their organizations, that they may fail to identify customer needs, how to market their products and services effectively, operational inefficiencies, or even larger market trends that are inhibiting growth.
For newer companies, mentorship helps leaders develop long-term vision and sustainability. For more mature organizations, mentorship ensures they are not part of the 75% that close after 15 years.
Mentorship for SMB teams to increase profitability
Mentorship makes teams stronger. Stronger teams build stronger organizations.
Traditionally, when thinking of mentorship, many people tend to think more about one-on-one interactions between mentors and mentees. As a result, we don’t maximize the potential mentorship has to build teams, improve organizations, and increase profitability.
Furthermore, perhaps because of mentorships between exceptionally successful individuals like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, we often think mentorship is only needed at the executive, enterprise level.
Mentorship benefits all professionals at every level of their career development and whatever their role in an organization, and in organizations of all sizes. Everyone from a company’s senior leaders, middle managers, all the way down to the newest employees should have mentors.
Mentorship creates a culture of knowledge sharing and continuous learning that make it the most powerful tool for upskilling. When employees are better equipped to fill their roles and grow, the company grows as well.
In addition, mentorship helps build employee-employer trust, attract top talent, increase retention, assist with onboarding, ensure cultural alignment, assist with leadership development and succession planning, and improve diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts. (Read more about the benefits of mentorship for individuals and organizations here.)
With so many benefits to individual employees and organizational people culture, it’s no surprise that 91% of people who have a mentor are satisfied with their jobs, with 57% saying they are “very satisfied” (Source). But, only 37% of professionals have mentors (Source).
Every organization wants to have happy workers and healthy people culture. And, more satisfied, productive teams perform better, and increase productivity and profitability.
70% of businesses increased productivity through mentoring (Source)
84% of CEOs said their mentors helped them avoid costly mistakes (Source)
55% of businesses report that mentoring had a positive impact on profits (Source)
Companies with mentorship programs profit 18% more than average since 2020 (Source)
Companies without mentorship programs profit 45% less than average since 2020 (Source)
Mars, Inc., which reported more than $45B in sales in 2021, studied 125 teams within its global operations to determine how to build better, stronger team dynamics. Using their learnings, the company tested team-building programs with the Mars Petcare China division in 2012, resulting in 33% growth, including 60% among one of the division’s primary brands. The division’s general manager claims that working together contributed “massively” to these successes, and as a result, the newly developed framework for team building was implemented throughout the company (Source).
The ROI of mentorship for SMBs
Mentorship has become a best business practice among leading organizations across all industries. In fact, 100% of Fortune 50 companies have mentorship programs (Source), and 71% of all organizations implement mentoring programs (Source).
Companies that are the most successful find the most creative, cost-effective, high ROI ways to access knowledge. Some organizations have the resources to hire costly agencies, consultants, industry experts, augmenting internal and external mentorship programs to maximize learnings.
For many small to medium-sized businesses, these options are cost prohibitive – especially during early stages of development and growth when advice and guidance are most needed.
Mentorship is every SMB’s secret weapon to accessing the latest industry information, trends, and insights. Unlike alternatives, mentorship relies on existing human capital to improve productivity, increase profits, and ensure a business’s longevity – without the need to hire additional experts.
Ensure SMB success with Uptnoch™
Mentorship is imperative to help small to medium-sized businesses develop their people, build stronger teams, and become more profitable. That’s why, regardless of size, 71% of all organizations have mentoring programs (Source).
When leaders of SMBs are already wearing so many hats, perhaps the idea of implementing yet another program, product, or service seems overwhelming. Luckily, mentorship is made easy through digital mentorship platforms that create self-sustaining ecosystems to grow your employees and organizations.
76% of organizations with mentorship programs are using mentoring software to streamline program administration, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development in London (Source).
Uptnoch™ is the leading mentorship platform for professionals and organizations to grow. Uptnoch™ provides turnkey solutions for organizations of any size to instantly implement mentorship programs, track their results, and optimize their programs.
In minutes, any business can create a network on Uptnoch™ and watch it grow. Program admins can decide who participates in your program and the pool of mentors available. Some programs may want to include only participants internal to their organizations, while others may want to have a more expansive pool of mentors available through global network of leaders on Upnotch™.
For small to medium-sized businesses, tapping into the open, global community of professionals at Uptnoch™ is perhaps one of the biggest value ads. In seconds, SMB leaders – and employees at every level and stage of their career – can access the solutions they need for success through the Uptnoch™ network, and on any device.
Are you ready to make mentorship the secret weapon that ensures your business’s success?
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