Mentor-Coaching For Business Challenges: A Case Study
Blueprint Accounting Case Study
Are you feeling stuck in your business, unsure how to proceed with direction and clarity? If you feel paralyzed, frustrated, or overwhelmed with the current state of your business, hiring a mentor-coach can be a helpful way to push through the challenges you face.
Mentor-coaches such as myself utilize professional experience, insight, and proven past success to help you get where you want to go. At Reconciled, my prospective clients—both in-person and remote—typically reach out to me when it is clear that they are stuck in some way. Perhaps they are stuck in the growth of their business, stuck in figuring out their next steps, stuck in ineffective business relationships, or overwhelmed by day-to-day decision-making with little time to look at long-term strategy.
For insight into how a mentor-coaching relationship can work, let’s look at a Reconciled success story: Brian and Sean of Blueprint Accounting based out of Ottawa, Canada. This case study highlights the presenting problems Blueprint came in with and how, in my role as mentor-coach, I helped Blueprint meet these needs and move forward confidently. BackgroundBrian started Blueprint Accounting and soon brought co-founder Sean, who he had worked with at a previous company, on board. Soon after, Brian and I met on a networking app in September 2016. They followed Reconciled’s growth and two years later Sean reached out to meet in person. When we met, he disclosed that he was impressed with Reconciled’s vision and direction, as well as my character and approachable manner. I later connected with Brian & Sean at a tech event in Ottawa, where they expressed a dedication to elevating Blueprint’s growth. The co-founders and I entered into an official mentor-coaching relationship in 2018, and it continues today.
Goals
When I first started working with Brian and Sean, they knew they wanted to grow Blueprint but needed help setting specific goals to grow their firm strategically. As former co-workers, Brian and Sean needed guidance on how to work together as business partners, and also sought insight into how to structure their online service business.
The Mentoring Process
First, we discussed how to develop a concrete vision for Blueprint.
I talked Brian and Sean through the process of crafting an effective and aligned vision statement for their brand. This included ensuring that their vision statement was clear and tangible.
Next, we worked to establish clarity in their roles as co-founders.
I helped Brian and Sean map out their distinct roles within Blueprint, emphasizing the unique strengths each co-founder brings to the table and how to lead from these strengths.
We then established some concrete goals and benchmarks for the firm.
Looking at the next three years, I helped Brian and Sean quantify what they hope to achieve. This included defining how many customers they aim to have, the number of employees on board, and Blueprint’s top line revenue goals. We also mapped out the evolution of their own roles as co-founders and which areas of responsibility they would still oversee. Committed to these benchmarks, Brian and Sean have nearly reached the halfway mark, and are well on their way to achieving their established goals.
Finally, we worked to set up proper operations procedures for Blueprint.
With Brian and Sean’s goals of hiring their first employee and scaling for growth, we worked together to establish the processes they would need to be set up to scale. We talked about the co-founders’ initial areas of responsibility, and how they could eventually delegate these as they hire and grow.
Most of my mentor-coach engagements have been a leadership team of two, akin to the dynamic at Blueprint Accounting. The challenges Brian and Sean brought to the table—to get on the same page as co-founders—are quite common.
As Brian described their dynamic, “We both have our individual personalities. We don’t agree 100% of the time on topics we discuss at any level of the business. We're aligned on where we want to go but how we get there is a different story, which is where the disagreements can happen.” The automatic tendency for individuals who have worked together previously to assume that their shared history will lead to seamless co-leadership can lead to clashes over completely divergent leadership directions. If two leaders are operating on their own wavelengths altogether, this can lead to being inconsistent—or even altogether stuck.
For this reason, much of the mentor-coaching guidance I provide helps co-founders come together, communicate, and ultimately ensure that both leaders are truly working from the same page to elevate their brand. The two must not be just owners and partners in their own right, but also actively work together within their owner-partner dynamic.
Some questions I ask to bring leaders into harmony:
What is the problem at hand? Are you in agreement as to what the presenting problem is?
How do you feel you should go about solving this problem? Do you agree on how to proceed?
Are you on the same page when it comes to the role you will play throughout the process of solving this problem?
Through the mentor-coaching relationship, I aim to facilitate an atmosphere in which clients can bring their attention to the problems at hand and feel safe enough to discuss any roadblocks or conflict that may arise on the journey to solving them.
Visible Results
Since we established our mentor-coaching relationship almost two years ago, Brian and Sean have seen substantial results. They have successfully established Blueprint as a known brand in the Canadian service provider market, and have structured their business to bring on team members who can manage certain tasks while the two leaders focus on their areas of strength.
According to Brian, “[Through mentoring], we really focused on our decision-making so that we could plan better and move toward our goals. One important takeaway was around the idea where the decisions we make should align with our goals and strategic direction. An option may look promising because it has a great expected ROI, but if it's not aligned with our strategic direction then all it does is slow us down to reaching our goals.”
They have also promoted themselves as key thought leaders in the industry, hosting webinars and actively engaging in a variety of other ways. The team has significantly grown their revenue and customer base, and the co-founders have a better dynamic of working together and capitalizing on their strengths while being aware of their own—and each other’s—weaknesses. This awareness and accountability prevents the team from getting stuck, so they can push through any challenges that arise along the way.