In advance of our next mentoring event taking place at Hogan Lovell’s on 9th March – signup here if you’d like to get mentoring advice, or if you fancy being a mentor yourself – we get the thoughts of Paul Massey (founder of mentorwell.com), who’s helping us organise the event, on the value of good mentors.

“Build a team, draft a business plan, find a mentor, pitch to investors, launch a minimum viable product, iterate, generate publicity, monetise”. Technology entrepreneurs are likely to draw on a fairly standard lexicon to help set out early goals. However, the path of each entrepreneur is anything but standard. There are few career paths that can match the diversity of opportunity, the challenges and the demands on time facing entrepreneurs.

Maximising the return on time is a key skill of a busy entrepreneur. How do good entrepreneurs seem to achieve so much growth in so little time? One answer is a focus on activities with multiple positive outcomes and an ability to identify tasks that matter. For example, many entrepreneurs instinctively focus upon funding. For others, the focus is on designing products that unlock multiple markets. The value derived from a successful round of funding or a new product are relatively easy to measure. Apple’s latest quarterly results show that Apple sold 17.07 million iphones over the period – time well spent. A round of funding may secure a year’s runway for a startup prior to launch.

The impact of mentoring is harder to value. However, spending time with mentors remains a key part of many entrepreneurs’ time. There is a widely perceived value in both formal mentoring programs and informal ad hoc mentoring relationships nurtured by entrepreneurs. The story goes that if something feels like it is doing you good then it probably is. However, as Tim Grimsditch points out in this great article in the Kernel, entrepreneurs need to filter good mentoring from bad or distracting advice.

Entrepreneurs may be happy to trust their instinct about the value of mentoring. However, unpicking that value may mean that time can be invested in nurturing a particularly valuable relationship or identifying new connections through joining a mentoring scheme such as that hosted by TechCity or trying an application such as http://linkoutapp.com/ (a startup that attended a previous TechCity mentoring event). Sure you might stumble upon a prize piece of advice during your journey as an entrepreneur. However, entrepreneurs can create and unlock value from mentoring relationships by establishing a level of trust, setting expectations and keeping track of goals against earlier benchmarks.

Policy makers and investors can also benefit from investment in measuring value but this is far from easy on many of the allocated budgets. Government programmes involving mentoring such as the New Enterprise Allowance are operating on difficult levels of funding and can often only afford to employ relatively crude metrics such as the number of mentors trained or the number of new businesses started by a group of previously unemployed people. In this age of data and networks, we have not yet tested the limits of what can be achieved.

And there is value for mentors themselves and companies that establish their own mentoring programs, but I will leave those for another time!

You can sign up to the TechCity mentoring program as a mentor or mentee at http://www.mentorwell.com/17-TechCity+Mentoring. The next event is taking place on 9^th March.