The advantages of mentors are huge If you are looking to start an online business. They can save you time, money and frustration by providing experience based stepping stones to your goals. After all they’ve done what you want to do. They’ve found the pitfalls, the shortcuts and the right and wrong ways to do things. They are well worth investing in as I hope the following analogies will show. This isn’t a blog about carpentry but to use an awful pun its a good way to frame it.
One of my passions is writing playing and recording music with my partner. We have a small studio – a spare room – which doubles a a sound recording room and a video studio. It has a green wall for chroma key work and houses my mixing speakers and music gear. I’ve recently been reading up on acoustic treatments for rooms so decided it was time to make some acoustic panels.
After a bit of research on Youtube I got all the materials together. I had some memory foam and some carpet underlay which I sandwiched together and cut into 4 panels. Then I bought some fabric to cover them and some strip wood to make frames for them. I also bought a tenon saw and a mitre block to cut 45 degree angles in the wood for neat corners and some strong wood glue. All set!
One of the advantages of mentors is that they can stop from you from making early mistakes that compound as you continue. That’s what happened next…
Here’s One Way Of Framing It
Having relied purely on Amazon reviews, I soon found that the mitre block I bought wasn’t very accurate. I had frames but the corners were far from perfect. But a bigger problems were yet to appear. The damn glue – a big and popular brand – just didn’t work. I dug out some panel pins and superglue and eventually got frames that held together.
Then with the end in sight I discovered my worst rookie error: When cutting the angles to form the frames I hadn’t taken into account that this would affect the measurements I’d taken. The foam panels were now too big. This might not have been a big deal if I’d chosen less flimsy wood for the frames. But as I tried to squeeze them in my frames buckled and the corners came undone.
I’m clearly a terrible carpenter but I am quite a good problem solver. I recut the foam panels and decided that rather than have the wooden frames visible as I’d planned, I’d just cover them with fabric. So the job got done. They look pretty good and do what they should. I know that as a mentor, an experienced carpenter would have shown me how to do it better, quicker and cheaper.
That’s just my most recent example of the advantages of mentors. I had a number of mentors while learning to play guitar. I’ve had photography mentors, driving mentors and internet business mentors.
I’ll talk a bit about the latter as their mentorship has probably had the most profound effect on my life to date.
The Advantages Of Mentors In An Online Business Startup
So many people – and I was one of them – jump into starting an online business for all the wrong reasons and in all the wrong ways. Things aren’t as bad as they were 10 or 20years ago but there is still a lot of false promise and hype around “making money online”. At its worst this includes scams, well meaning but short lived business opportunities and dodgy ideas about gaming the system.
Most people now are savvy enough to avoid that stuff but many still have unrealistic expectations about an internet business. They think its just a matter of putting up website, filling it with products and throwing money at advertising.
Ironically it actually is kind of like that but there are a hundred steps along the way each with potential land mines on them. This is exactly where the advantages of mentors become obvious. If you pick the right ones.
The right mentors in this game have been around long enough to have become and remain very successful (success leaves footprints) They’ve negotiated the numerous hurdles and obstacles put in their way by advertising and social platforms – the life blood of an online business. They have studied the psychology of buying and selling on the internet. They’ve developed the systems used to automate as much of the process as possible. In short they are where you want to be.
When Its Time To Get Serious Get Mentors
Like most people starting out in this industry I fumbled around with various things before I found my mentors. The results were, like my wood working, shoddy and short lived. I realised I’d been listening to chancers and charlatans. They would never lead me to a sustainable internet income much less the dream lifestyle they dangled like a carrot. I needed to get serious.
Fortunately I had met some people along the way who were worth listening to and could prove it. One of them pointed me to a series of free videos by an organisation called Six Figure Mentors. I thought the “Six Figure” bit was a little cheesy sounding but was intrigued enough by the “Mentors” bit to sign up for the videos.
As they arrived in my inbox one at time over a week I knew I was onto a winner. They introduced me to a couple of guys who had been building separate 6 figure internet businesses for several years. They’d met and teamed up to create an online membership platform to mentor and educate new digital entrepreneurs.
I liked the holistic set up they had built. Run as an online community SFM provided the aforementioned mentorship and training but also digital systems, tools, resources and support. Best of all from my point of view they offered very lucrative affiliate partnerships. You could earn as you learned by promoting their business as an affiliate without being tied to them in any way. The tools, training and resources could be applied to marketing any product or service online.
Meet The Mentors That Changed Everything For Me
If this sounds like what you have been looking for the best way to learn more is to subscribe to the latest version of the organisation’s video series. Now called simply Mentors they have introduced some amazing new curriculums and updates throughout the pandemic. Just click on the banner below to get to the sign up page. Maybe I’ll see you on the other side.
