It became big in income but never had more than six employees. It was a sales agency in the wooden box and pallets industry. Many years later, when I started my own business, I realised that nearly everything useful that I’d learned about enterprise had come from my Dad as my business mentor.

He was an unlikely ace business mentor. My Dad left school at 14, picked everything up as he’d gone along, and was a complete eccentric, a showman and a storyteller who instinctively turned anything formal into a party. At football, Hull City, he had a seat just behind the Directors’ box so that he could hurl abuse and one-liners at them from start to finish. I wouldn’t sit with him.

Corporate Crackers

The point is that what I’d learned in Senior Management, even Managing Director, at two major American multinationals didn’t help me much in my own business. This was despite having received the very best business training and completed two Post Graduate Diplomas in HR Management and Business Administration. All this was next to useless in my own micro business as against the valuable help I gained from my mentors.

My business partner of twenty five years, Clare, felt the same thing. She hadn’t realised it at the time but her corporate jobs and training hadn’t prepared her for running her own business but what she’d learned from her Dad, who had his own property business, was invaluable.

No surprise then that we decided to have a mentor, another micro business owner, for our first couple of years in business. We gave him our corporate contacts and in return he asked us wise questions which stopped us doing many of the foolish things we were about to do. No money exchanged hands although a heck of a lot of money went behind the bar during our, frequently scheduled, mentoring sessions.

Sitting or Standing Up Mentors?

One of the many theories I have, which perversely academic research and government policy has yet to pick up on, is that if you’ve got a primarily ‘standing up’ business you’re best to have a mentor that has a ‘standing up’ business too. ‘Standing up’ businesses would include most building trades, cafes, shops, blues bands, chocolate makers, ice cream makers and micro-breweries.

Similarly if you’re in a ‘sitting down in an office’ type business then choose ‘a sitting down in an office’ type mentor. I’m definitely not saying only get a mentor from a similar trade or industry, only government and BigBiz think in sectors, but do get someone who really understands what you have to do each day.

Oh and beware of men in suits if you’ve got a ‘standing up’ business’ or you’re a woman. I’m sure there are exceptions to these rules of mine for choosing a mentor but there won’t be many.

Sir Jimmy Fixed It for Us Every Day

Wrestler, DJ, marathon runner, TV presenter, volunteer hospital porter and the greatest charity fund raiser of all time, Sir Jimmy Savile, died recently. He was buried in Scarborough, where I live. Thousands turned out to acknowledge his real achievements for the people of Britain both at his service in Leeds and his burial in Scarborough. He was truly a man of the people, an inspiration to many of us, and the very same person on the telly as he was in the cafes and streets of Scarborough.

He made us feel better about life and he genuinely helped many thousands of people through adversity. He was eccentric to the last. He was buried in one of his trademark track suits, in a gold coloured coffin placed at an angle in the grave, so that he ‘could see the sea’. He was also a highly successful micro business owner, millionaire and a cracking volunteer biz and personal mentor.

Two of his proudest possessions were on his mantelpiece in his Scarborough flat. They were individual letters from Princess Di and Prince Charles thanking him for his help to them, as an informal mentor.

Lots of my business owner friends seem a bit crazy. The craziness is often just appearance and behaviour that shows we’re our own boss with our own values, passion and beliefs. Some can wrongly view this, like Sir Jimmy Savile was viewed, as not professional or not to be taken seriously. We are passionate about what we do and it’s bloody hard work doing it but we can be very useful business mentors too.

Get Mentoring

My businesses have benefited a great deal from the handful of business mentors I’ve had down the years. Most of the mentoring I’ve had is over the phone or nowadays by Skype. I usually contact my mentor when I’ve got a problem or see an opportunity that I want to talk through before taking a decision. I’ve also had a great time and learned a lot as a mentor to others. I have had some training on being a better mentor and I’m going to do some more shortly.

There are lots of places around at the moment where you can find a mentor or get some training to become a better mentor yourself. One such place is the Institute of Enterprise and Entrepreneurs, which I help run, and you can find out more here about Get Mentoring – free mentor training and free mentors.

View the story “RARE Forum, The Drill Hall, London 3rd Nov 2011″ on Storify

We live in changing times. We live in times where the power of the consumer is rising and it is changing everything. We live in times where harnessing the power of relationships with our customers and our employees is becoming more and more key to our future growth and innovation.

Therefore, the onus on business leaders to learn, share ideas and network is rising as we think about how we grow our businesses.

There are many events in existence for businesses but these can be:

• Either for large or very small businesses;
• Organised by professional or trade associations and vendors of some sorts;
• Filled with talks/speakers that talk for around an hour that are ultimately trying to show you how smart they are or are trying to sell you something; and
• Don’t offer enough time for attendees to network, talk about and debate the issues that are presented.

Therefore, we thought it’d be great to develop and deliver an event for established small businesses, especially those with growing teams, across sectors.

In order to do this and to try and create a truly different event, we first started by describing the customer experience ie. what did we want the potential attendees to feel after they attended our event.

Here’s what we came up with:

Imagine this.

An event where you get to the end of the day and your attendance has solved a number of your most pressing problems, you have heard some great people speak, you have met a number of great contacts and your head is full of ideas for the future of your business. So much so, that when we hold the next one that you’ll want to bring a number of business contacts along it was so good.

Does that sound good?

Why did we do it this way? Well, rather than being lead by the features of our products or services, we started with the end in mind as we believe that is a better way to create something that will have an enduring emotional connection and value with our customers.

With that in mind we developed RARE Forum (www.rareforum.co.uk), an event that is:

• A place to share ideas, experiences and to discuss and debate the issues of the day;
• Not focused on selling anything (although there was be a price to attend);
• Filled with with a number of punchy 20min speaker slots (TED style) centred around a theme;
• Full of facilitated networking and debate;
• Where the whole day will be recorded (video) and made available via the website to the attendees for them to watch again at a later date or share with their team and contacts; and
• Where the output of discussions and answers to Qs posed by speakers will be collated and made available via a digital resource.

All this thinking and development was done earlier this year and I am pleased to say that on the 3rd November at The Drill Hall in Central London we held our first RARE Forum under the theme: ‘Business is Personal’. Talks over the course of the day covered subjects like:

• Business is personal and why it’s getting more so
• Unearthing killer customer insights
• The world is changing fast, how can we keep up and change with it
• How you can use your customers to help rally your troops?
• Creating a customer centric business
• What does being a leader mean in this new world?
• Generation Y and Z and the future of the talent pool
• What will our customers want in the future?

The day was a great success and was the first of many, we hope. We are now busy making plans for what happens next.

One of the things that we promised to do was to capture the ‘story of the day’ afterwards so that we could share that with the attendees as an aide-mémoire and as a way of capturing the essence of the day. You can check out the ‘story’ by following the link below. You really should take a look it as it includes all of the slides that the presenters used, pictures from the day, some sketches from our artist in residence and a whole set of tweets from our twitter hashtag: #rareforum. It’s also been done on Storify which means it looks pretty cool even if I do say so myself.

View the story “RARE Forum, The Drill Hall, London 3rd Nov 2011″ on Storify

For the team involved and myself personally it was a huge learning experience. Both exciting and scary in equal measure. What it did teach me, however, was that starting with the potential attendees, my customers, and what sort of experience and feeling I wanted to create for them helped give us a better understand of not what to do. But, more importantly, what not to do. Once we understood that we had a great platform to build from.

Another big lesson that I learnt is that if you want to make your business great, if you want to stand out from your competitors then you have to be willing to fail in public. However, done with the right intention and in the right way the actual risk of failure gets much, much smaller.

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These are just some of my daily tweets. Follow me on twitter for all of my updates.  – ST.

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These are just some of my daily tweets. Follow me on twitter for all of my updates.  – ST.

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These are just some of my daily tweets. Follow me on twitter for all of my updates.  – ST.

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These are just some of my daily tweets. Follow me on twitter for all of my updates.  – ST.

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These are just some of my daily tweets. Follow me on twitter for all of my updates.  – ST.

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These are just some of my daily tweets. Follow me on twitter for all of my updates.  – ST.

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These are just some of my daily tweets. Follow me on twitter for all of my updates.  – ST.