Why Engage a Business Mentor to Support You in These Difficult Times?

04th Aug , 2020

by Christine Cartney

Countless COVID-19 impacted business leaders could benefit from the support of a business mentor or coach from International Business Mentors can provide.

In the current challenging conditions, business on your own can be difficult, especially when you’re trying to ensure your business’ survival or maximise its potential. There are numerous strategies and approaches you can take and many issues to deal with.

A close relationship with a business mentor or coach from International Business Mentors gives you access to confidential support and lets you tap into their broad business experience. You get honest, confidential feedback and an independent sounding board.

How Business Mentoring Can Help

Business mentoring can help find common concerns on strategic issues among business leaders, including:

1. Maintaining safe environments for their people, customers, and suppliers
2. Improving service and looking after customers
3. Focus on how to retain their best people
4. Consistent and clear communication to their people, customers, suppliers and community
5. Growing revenue faster
6. Getting sufficient sales and marketing effort and CRM activity
7. Improving cashflow
8. Looking critically at cost structures for quick wins
9. Developing what the future will look like for the business
10. Planning for post-crisis organisation, marketing and sales efforts and operations
11. Dealing with and ramping up morale and productivity at all levels
12. Setting up efficient, collaborative and productive remote working
13. Re-focusing and refining the business’s focus, purpose, values and mission
14. Improving quality and speed of decision-making at all levels
15. Reassessing risks and containment strategies
16. Emphasising and developing better performance and leadership

The issues above and many more are currently challenging business leaders, but help is available from a business mentor who can provide confidential support.

Highlighting one difficult area for leadership is the focus on looking after and retaining key staff. This can be emotionally draining, as many staff are valued, long-standing, loyal colleagues with excellent work performance history, who may have become demoralised, less productive or making poor judgements due to stress. Further, some key staff have unfortunately become surplus to requirement as the COVID-19 crisis has deepened and market requirements have changed.

During COVID-19, the supports from governments have been highly welcomed by the community at large and business leaders in particular. These have critically supported people and businesses to maintain their businesses and jobs. However, these supports will eventually be phased out. And given the inevitable changes required in business strategy, there will be difficult decision-making due to the significantly altered staffing requirements for many businesses. Potential changes in staff requirements may be significant in specific businesses. This change in staff requirements will be driven by shifts in demand by customers and by required changes to the mix of skills, experience and numbers of staff needed to operate and adapt. Business leaders will need to deal effectively with the new emerging economic reality of their business sectors and markets by quickly adapting their business organisations, including people, to compete in the post COVID-19 competitive environment. Strategic shifting provides the best opportunity to remain afloat.

Examples of Strategic Shifts

Strategic shifts impacting organisational structures and people can include:

• Increased demand for online buying and therefore a greater need for more people in online marketing, operational and delivery skills
• Operational changes will flow from the increased flexible workforce continuing to work remotely
• Operational structural changes due to a significant reduction in demand for bricks and mortar office space and the potential reductions in related office staff

Arrange Business Mentoring Today

At International Business Mentors, we individually match business mentors and business coaches to each business leader. Your business mentor or coach will then work with you to clarify your major issues or concerns and help you towards the best possible solutions.

To select the right business mentor of business coach to support you, we match you to their relevant experience, background, skills, and the all-important personal fit with you. Our business mentoring and coaching professionals must also meet our very strict criteria, including experience with all facets of business and ethical standards.

If you need to be confidentially challenged and supported in these difficult times, call us now to get support from a business mentor or coach.