If your business is more than a year old and you could use regular access to a relevant business mentor for an entire year – at no cost to yourself - it can be arranged.
If you have been or are successful in running your business and are interested in giving your time to share the skills and insights you’ve acquired – this too can be arranged.
Business Mentoring is a partnership between Highlands and islands Enterprise, Scottish Chambers of Commerce, and Highlands and Islands Partnership Programme.
Having a mentor
From our own experience, there is a problem that small businesses in particular suffer from and it is one that actively blocks development: time.
Doing what you do and keeping it afloat eats every second you’ve got leaves little or no time for planning the stabilisation and development of what you’ve been building up.
This programme offers you a chance to sign up for short intensive bursts of assistance – a few hours a month with a business mentor appropriate to your business or to your development needs.
This is deliverable and usable assistance that has the potential to support a young or a stalled business over the next growth threshold.
Margaret Jacobsen, the project Executive for the scheme, says: ‘ Some businesses may have gone stale, may not be too sure how to make the best of new technologies, they may just want a critical friend who will look at their management and talk it over. Any size of business could benefit from having a mentor.
‘Having a business mentor can help you develop key business skills and build your confidence. Business mentors can improve your knowledge, ability and confidence and can help you develop a stronger and more sustainable business.’
The Business Mentoring scheme is a free, confidential service for businesses that have been in operation for at least a year.
If you feel it could help you in your business and would like to talk it over, contact Margaret Jacobsen:
- by phone: 07833177862
- by email: mjacobsen@businessmentoringscotland.org
Becoming a mentor
Business mentors don’t need to be qualified trainers or highly skilled in the core activity of a business with which they are working.
They do need to be interested in sharing their skills and the results of their own successful experience. They need to be ready to give a few hours a month for a year to work with the small business with which they are paired.
The reward is personal renewal – the reinvigoration of seeing new businesses working in different fields, meeting new people hungry to learn from you, offering new challenges, watching their success and knowing you’ve been a part of it.
Monthly meetings are face-to-face, sometimes by email, depending on what will work from one month to the next.
Mentoring businesses is a significant contribution to the development of the local economies a country like Scotland needs to see succeed.
If you would like to be involved in this exciting programme – which has been going since 2001, seeing over 3,000 companies across Scotland with good reason to be grateful to their mentors – please contact the Project Executive, Margaret Jacobsen, using the contacts given above. She will be glad to hear from you – and so will the businesses you go on to work with.
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