Welcome to

The Association of Business Mentors

Welcome to the Association of Business Mentors. The aim of this not-for-profit Association is to
create a database of credible, successful mentors so that business owners can feel confident when
seeking a business mentor. All members of the association have been carefully screened, ensuring
that you will receive a professional service and that your chosen mentor has a proven record of
successful mentoring. Please look at the profiles of our members where you will be able to find out
all about them, their experience, areas of expertise and testimonials from REAL clients (we check
these too).

All our members are required to sign up to a code of ethics, are encouraged to undertake regular training, and share best practice. The entire emphasis for our members is on their client’s success.

As you can see on your right, we also run regular articles from our members which are of great
interest to business owners.

Kerrie’s Column

14 May 2012

I have to run straight into the feedback of The Mentoring Workshop with Mark Prisk on Wednesday 9^th last week. Held at BIS, Victoria Street, there was an eclectic mix of industry pioneers from BBA representatives to those at the helm of Mentoring Organisations, smaller firms and SFEDI. Gaby and I represented The Association of Business Mentors.

The Minister opened the Workshop and took a few questions. He covered the fact that he had been in business and had mentored during this time and outlined the benefits this brought to himself and his company as well as to the ‘mentee’ (he did this for free).

The targeted results for the Get Mentoring Scheme, currently releasing thousands of ‘Mentors’ into the business world after a morning’s training are ‘To enable every business in the UK access to a Mentor’.

It was obvious that there is a Marketing requirement to fill here. All these Mentors need to find businesses to mentor should this scheme have any effect at all. It was repeatedly mentioned that we, in the room, were out there finding clients and the insinuation was that we should have something to do with feeding the pipeline.

There was a fair bit of table work involved, the feedback from which was very interesting. Two strong points were the need clarify what Mentoring really is! There was disparity as to the limit of guidance and advice a Mentor should provide which led to the difference between Mentors, Coaches and Counsellors and actually a Mentor is sometimes all three!

The second point was the lack of funding to deliver. This was met with a question back to the room ‘What should I do first? supply or demand’ ? 

Now I would have thought that possibly this would have been thought through at the beginning of such a scheme where over £2 million has been invested?

The fact is that there should have been a two pronged approach here. We already have a multitude of high calibre Mentoring organisations and individual Mentors helping businesses with a variety of support. Perhaps engaging with them to aid delivery reach with existing proficient Mentors would have been  an option and then allocating delivery funds to recipients would have been another.

Overall I get the point but sadly the roll out of the funds to achieve the targets I think they are trying to achieve is misguided.

What I did come away thinking though was that this is definitely a time for an Association of Business Mentors to provide a platform for us all to club together and make our opinion count but above all that we should crack on as perhaps government schemes could be making it harder for us.

Kerrie

30 April 2012 

Welcome to the first of my bi weekly columns where I shall be keeping you up to date on Association news, general mentoring industry news and possibly a comment or two.

Firstly I wanted to outline who is actively involved in the association other than myself. Jonathan Phafl from The Rockstar Mentoring Group, Gaby Marcon from Shine, People and Places and Dawn Gomes in charge of all admin and updates Dawn@associationofbusinessmentors.org

Training

Gaby is driving the training arm of the ABM and through Shine we are now an accredited SFEDI Awards Centre. Gaby is running several mornings for the ‘Get Mentoring’ scheme both in Birmingham and London in May 2012. We want to be very clear here that despite this being a service paid for by the government our mission to protect credible mentoring is paramount. Sadly we have heard that there has been an absence of any qualifying procedure applied to those being accepted on Get Mentoring and as a result there are quite a few ‘new mentors’ out there who could possibly do more damage than good.

Other News

New legal partner, Fisher Meredith will be providing benefits to members in the legal arena and hold an Information morning on topics that Mentors need to be aware of for the best interests of their clients. Date TBA.

Franchise Development Service FDS will be holding a similar morning on 27^th or 28^th June on the power of growth with the franchise method.

Please register your interest for either or both : enquiries@associationofbusinessmentor...

I am really looking forward to the mentoring workshop hosted by Mark Prisk at BIS on 9^th May. Due to his commercial background Mark believes that mentoring is a key element in kicking enterprise into action I just hope that the mentoring project which includes Mentorsme.co.uk and Get Mentoring reach the right audience with a big dose of the desired effect. I wonder how they shall monitor such effect hopefully to be broached at the workshop. I shall report back in two weeks.

Kerrie