Why you’re at risk of failing in your online business
Chances are you’ve consumed a lot of blogs, podcasts, ebooks, video courses, seminars, calls and lots of other Guru-to-Student materials. Chances are also pretty good that you’ve implemented everything exactly you heard exactly as you understood it and gotten almost nowhere. What’s missing? Why is it that all of these fool-proof systems out there seem to leave almost everyone behind earning almost nothing? Why do 98% of people fail to make any money?
What’s missing? Well if you’ve done well in any job, you probably owe a lot of thanks to other experienced coworkers, your boss, and maybe even the CEO. It sounds strange, but you might have missed the value of what these people have done for you! The support environment in any good company is HUGE. It provides:
- Good people to emulate
- Established proven systems that work for people like you
- Professional oversight and management
- Friends and team support
- Formal and informal training
- Room to make mistakes, but clear consequences of utter failure
- Lots of safety nets to keep you on track and productive
- Easy next steps to get an income boost (even if it’s not much!)
From day one in a good company, you’re always surrounded by the tools you need to do what you need to do and there’s someone there to make you do it! Even in jobs with lots of leeway and freedom, the end goals are always set and managed by an authority figure who ultimately needs you to be successful (even if it doesn’t seem that way all the time!)
What does that have to do with running your own online business?
Well, when you’re on your own and taking courses from your training sources on-high, you get none of those benefits you enjoyed as an employee. You get no support. No mentors. No structure. No boss. No leadership. You don’t know if you’re going down completely the wrong path. You don’t know if what you’re trying is solid, but just needs some tuning to get results. Or, to put it more bluntly, you have no other stakeholders that care about your success and no one is keeping an eye out for you!
Mentors: The Missing Piece
When you’re going it alone, you never know if what you’re doing is the right next step. We rarely do this in normal life, however. When we need to test our assumptions and find the best path in something unfamiliar, we often seek the professional advice of lawyers, accountants, bankers, financial planners, personal trainers, etc.
Why is it that we only settle for mass distributed online business training courses? Having personal mentors that care about your success and can help you along the way is a critical part of life. You should not settle only for hands-off online training for what might be the most important step of your life!
Where to Find Mentors
Here’s a partial list of places to begin finding mentors to help you out in your business. Feel free to drop in some comments if you have some other ideas!
SCORE - Non profit volunteer mentorship options
Meetup.org – Find nearby online business community
David Archer says:
I have found SCORE basically useless. I have gotten feedback from four different counselors, none of which was very helpful. I think the problem is that SCORE consists of RETIRED executives, their knowledge may be a bit outdated.
I got one who said what I was doing was against all principles of business, and a few other things, but no helpful advice of what I might do instead.
13th May 2009 at 2:48 pm
shaun says:
@David
Thanks for the feedback. I tried it for a short period of time for some accounting, hiring and other similar advice and found it good for that. I didn’t go to them for any current strategy issues, so your opinion here is extremely valuable. Thanks!
13th May 2009 at 3:37 pm
Todd L says:
One place I’ve found good mentors is LinkedIn. That network is packed with people locally and international that you can message and eventually build a relationship with. You can find someone with the exact successes in life and try to be a mentee to them.
13th May 2009 at 2:42 pm
Nick Chertock says:
I would say Facebook and Twitter can be useful for finding mentors as well but you have to sift through a lot of agressive marketing to get to people who will just have meaningful interactions for mutual benefit.
The overriding concept of all networking is ‘givers gain’. Offer what you can to others who you want to learn from. That’s what I’m trying to do.
13th May 2009 at 1:33 am