What I Learned From Mentoring Young Entrepreneurs

By Lawrence

I just started mentoring a few small business owners on pro bono basis who have been growing their businesses steadily but stuck without growth in last couple of years. Piling on top, they have endless amount of work that they have to handle themselves leaving them exhausted all the time. The worst part though is that they borrowed money from the banks. Servicing the debts alone making these hardworking individuals no hope of profiting from their businesses.

When One Is Overwhelmed By Work, There Is No Big Picture

Running a small business as tradesmen requires the entrepreneur to be well rounded in many skills outside of their crafts. For many people, however, they start a business with just a subset of what is needed. This makes it difficult for these individuals to grow their businesses quickly as they have to keep making mistakes on things they have not think about.

Learning from mistakes is costly. Even if the individual is very resourceful and hardworking, the increase in revenue are often offset by more mistakes. It is like a trader who never learned to cut losses quickly so every once in a while he gets hit by a huge loss that offset most of his profits that take months to accumulate.

Mistakes can exhaust a person’s will power to perform better. They are big emotional blows that can kill the entrepreneurial spirit of the business owners. The big picture will become blur, the original vision will be lost and the only thing left is the fear of the next mistake happening soon.

Small Changes To Break The Downward Spiral

Based on these individuals situations, I chose to focus on performance boost and clarity of mind over overhaul their complete working schedules or business plans. The reason for doing so is that when a person is so exhausted, sudden change in work schedule can often leads to mistakes and accidents. That is absolutely the last thing I want to see.

To improve their mind stability, I recommended meditation and breathing exercise to them and have them practice daily before and after work. If possible, during lunch and coffee break as well. Since not everyone are receptive to the same type of meditation and breathing exercise, they all ended up practicing different routines.

For performance boost, instead of making them to work harder or doing things faster, I told them to nap 15 to 20 minutes once or twice during the day.

Very unconventional business consulting advices, right?

After just several weeks of this minor change to their daily routines, they are all very happy to report that they can now finish their work faster and suddenly they can see things more clearly which helped them to make fewer mistakes.

Bottom line improvements from the change is 5% to 15%. The improvement is minor, but it means being profitable now comparing to no hope in sight just weeks ago. This gives these small business owners a boost in their confidence and confidence in me that they will be able to do even better in the future.

Joy of Helping Others

As I slowly changing my life style from trading focus to working on helping others, I find the satisfaction coming from helping others very different from trading success. The surprising thing to me is that there are so many people out there who are overwhelmed by their jobs and businesses. By looking at their problems from a different angle and telling them that they need to pay more attention to themselves can already make huge impacts on their lives.

Often hardworking people know that they need help, but they do not know the tools to facilitate the change. They do not even have time for reading books to help themselves. It turns out my skill set in training traders can help these entrepreneurs too. At the end of the day, trading is running a business so I guess I have a lot more to offer them from my experience in trading and running other businesses.

Coaching / Mentoring Service For Retail Traders