WHAT IS THE ROLE OF A START-UP ADVISOR IN BUSINESS?

5 roles of Start-up Advisors in business

1. Guidance and support:

Startup advisors usually offer monthly guidance and support to a mentee (or pupils) to help them develop professionally. This may include sharing experiences, career advice, resources, ideas, events and resources, advising and teaching specific job skills to effectively guide on how to deal with professional challenges or to hire your team.

2. Skills development and growth:

An advisor may help a mentee to develop specific skills and knowledge required for his/her job, or advisory board role or to advance in any early stage part of his/her career. It consists of training sessions, regular feedback and learning opportunities in the advisory field of expertise.

Why do you need a Startup Advisor?

As the saying goes, “There is no substitute for experience”. Therefore, if you do not have a lot of experience in a given area, you may not know what board decision to make or at the very least want to soundboard and check your thinking and decisions with an external, independent party. That is why it is always advisable to have a person on board your advisory board or the advisory board or company board who has already fought the same battles.

Advisors can help you see what lies around the corner and evaluate a decision with all risk factors in mind.

A startup Advisor will be your greatest ally!



Not only to develop your leadership capabilities and elevate your performance in the role but also to further develop your startup. With startup advisors, you can lay the guard down, s/he is not a Director and is not evaluating your performance. 

However, finding, hiring and choosing a Startup Advisor to hire is no easy task. It must be someone you trust, someone that has the connections and the right experience, someone that can commit the time to see you succeed.

In this article, we will not only talk about the ideal characteristics that investors equity, advisors and mentorship should have but also explain what are the benefits to investors equity and your startup to partner with startup investors equity and advisors, and what steps you need investors equity and advisors to help take to do it.

What is start-up mentoring?

Startup investors, mentors and advisors are part of a relationship between startups, you, founders and a person with extensive experience and expertise in a given area: be it call it running startups or doing startups, scaling a startup, subject matter, domain area or core skills expertise.

A startup investor or advisor will offer you advice based on his deep industry knowledge or personal experiences, guidance, and support in the early stage and a different stage of growth for your company.



Meetings with an advisor can be face-to-face, via video calls, or a combination of both. The key is that each of these meetings gets you closer to your defined goals and objectives.

What are the differences between a Start-up Advisor and a Start-up Coach?

Although they may seem to be the same thing, and can sometimes be confused with each other, the reality is that there are some major differences between a Startup Advisor and a Startup Coach:

• A startup advisor focuses primarily on the mentee, the “racecar driver” and not the racecar.
• Strategy cannot succeed without culture and execution. Startup coaches, on the other hand, primarily focus on developing and optimizing startups.
• Another big difference is the time they can work with you. If you have a good relationship with a startup advisor, they can help you throughout the life of your Startup. On the other hand, startup coaches usually set a limit of 1 year.
• Also, while startup advisors are most driven by the development of the mentee, startup coaches are driven by the performance of the startup.

But the lines are often blurred. How do you separate the leader from the startup? They are so often intertwined that Startup Advisors from time to time guide startups decisions and startup coaches focused on the individual to drive the achievement of a startups outcome.

What are the Top 5 characteristics of a good Start-up Advisor?

While finding a Business Mentor may seem easy, it's much harder than you think. If you want to forge a long-term relationship with a Business Mentor that can help you scale new heights and be successful here are some of the characteristics that they should possess:

1. Enthusiasm

One of the main characteristics to look for in a Business Mentor is the enthusiasm to help.  The best mentors will let you know through their actions and commitments to you that they are truly excited to see you grow and succeed. They derive gratification from your success. It is their way of driving impact on those around them.

2. Active Listening

A Business Mentor is not an expert in everything. S/he may not know the market that you are in or the domain in which you specialize. A good Business Mentor is not someone who is set in her/his ways and ideas but one that asks insightful questions that leverage your own knowledge and thinking to get to the right answers. There is a mastery to be a good listener and to ask the right questions.

3. Honest Feedback

A good mentoring relationship is forged based on trust and empathy. For that reason, a good Business Mentor should collaboratively work with you to arrive at the actions that you should take to improve. A mentor tells you what you need to hear and not what you want to hear.

There is nothing more caring than providing radical candour. But while this sounds simple, it is not. The ways in which feedback is given are also important. A Business Mentor should help you see the “so what” and unlock the value behind a desired change. Instead, the feedback should be focused on preventing certain mistakes, or implementing actions to help correct them. They often roleplay with you specific conversations to help you get through difficult situations. 

4. Accountability

Developing a close relationship over time is inevitable. But a good mentor is the one that keeps the mentee accountable to:

• Send the agenda in advance
• Come prepared for the conversation
• Define actions and outcomes
• Provide updates on progress
• Recognize and celebrate progress.

5. Great Motivator

Entrepreneurship is like a rollercoaster with lots of highs and lots of lows. A Business Mentor should be someone who can motivate you to set new goals for yourself and for the company through association. A great mentor is like a mirror for her/his mentees in which they can reflect themselves to and learn from the experience of the mentor.

What is the role of a mentor in business?

While the process of finding advisors online may seem easy, it's much harder than you think. If you want to forge a deep, long-term relationship with and search online for a Startup Mentor that can help you scale new heights of growth and be successful here are some of the characteristics that they should possess:

The role of advisors in startups and companies mentorship is to guide founders and their mentees as they make crucial board decisions for their company. In addition to advising startups, the startups advisor network is in charge of motivating entrepreneurs and their mentees to develop the necessary skills to be successful entrepreneurs.

A good company advisor must have the ability to share his experience, expertise and industry knowledge well with his mentees. Advisors' advisors know quite a lot about the problems your startup's founders or company could potentially go through, so his mission is that when their mentees go through the same difficulties, they know exactly what to do.

Ideally, she/he should be capable of giving you free access to a list of contacts from your team or own tech industry, that helps you to make connections and open doors for your team or own tech industry or company founders.

5 Steps to find a Start-up Mentor

While the process of finding advisors online may seem easy, it's much harder than you think. If you want to forge a deep, long-term relationship with and search online for a Startup Mentor that can help you scale new heights of growth and be successful here are some of the characteristics that they should possess:

1. Characteristics of your ideal mentor

While we already talked about the ideal characteristics that a Startup Advisor should have, you should also think about what characteristics are best suited to your type of startup. Some aspects you should consider are:

• What is the market in which your Startup Advisor should have the most experience?
• Are you looking for someone who has experience managing a startup, expert in a specific domain, or is a leadership coach?
• How often do you want to have meetings with your advisor?
• Do you want to work with a person with whom you can have face-to-face meetings, or do you prefer virtual meetings?

2. Identify your potentials startup advisors

Knowing where you need help and are going helps you get there faster. Knowing what kind of a startup advisors you need help looking for is a very important step, but so is knowing who your potential startup advisor and startup founders and team are.

Nowadays, there are different free resources you can search and use to get in touch with potential startup founders and Startup advisors:

• Your own network
• Personal or professional referrals
• Professional associations
• Accelerators
• LinkedIn
• Thought leaders in your industry

As you find Startup Mentors who might be a good fit for startups for you, we advise you to add them to a list, as this will be a great help in the next step.

Refer to the Startup Mentorship Programs and Organizations article for a list of potential programs in Canada.

3. Contact potential advisors

This step is very important, as it will determine whether a Startup Advisor will want to sign on to work with you or not. Research, then search, research, search, research. Then ask a friend or a startup acquaintance for a referral.

A warm referral is far more likely to open doors. If that is not possible, our suggestion is to do it the old school way, pick up the phone and call. You are far more likely to create engagement and gauge sentiment over a call than over email.

Entrepreneurs usually receive hundreds of emails per day. Therefore, call, and do whatever it takes to stand out, in a good way. Contacting startup advisors, and hiring them through social or marketing networks to coordinate a meeting is the only marketing option.

LinkedIn and Twitter remain the two best marketing options. However, to pique the interest of companies in hiring a Startup Advisor, and these companies have a real chance of accepting to hire and work with you, you need to take into account certain key marketing aspects:

Don't bombard them with calls or messages. Chances are they have so many messages that they may not have been able to check yours. A good strategy is to contact call them once, then two weeks later and then monthly and finally once a month.

Be prepared. Once potential Startup Advisors respond to you, you should be ready to talk and convince them that working with founders for you is a good idea, so as not to waste their time. A good idea is to have some specific questions ready that he can answer in a meeting.



4. Agree on expectations with your mentor

If an expert agrees to sign on to be your Startup Advisor, you will have taken a crucial and big step towards elevating your performance.

Try to adjust events to their time. If a potential investor or Startup Mentor offers you a specific day and time to meet with you, make every effort to be free at that time. That way, the advisor won't have to fit events into your own schedule.

Before you can sign an agreement and start to talk about working together, it's a good idea to discuss some formal agreement details of mentoring agreement and sign an agreement:

• What are their expectations of the relationship? What would a solid relationship look like for them? 
• How will it take place? Virtual, face-to-face or a mix of both?
• What media does your advisor usually use?
• What are your and your advisors' expectations about the mentoring?

5. Maintain the relationship with your mentor

Finding a startup advisor is great. But the key to successful mentoring is coachability. The Startup Advisor is taking you on because they see potential in you.

The surest way to destroy collaborations is to not heed the advice of your advisor and to not be accountable. Here are some tips on how to drive the best outcome:

• Be flexible, be receptive and pay full attention to the advice. If an expert has decided to work with you, the least you can do is heed the advice he or she gives you. 
• Respect is key. Always make sure to stay true to the expectations that have been set before it begins. It may seem basic, but it can often happen that because the startup founder has asked for many more meetings than agreed, the Startup Mentor decides not to continue with the mentoring.
• Try to add mutual value. You should always try to ensure that he or she can also take away something of value from their role. Give back generously, every chance you get.