Do Business Owners Need Professional Development and Mentoring?

In the professional world, sometimes the only limits to your career are the ones you set for yourself.

When you lead a successful business it can be easy to think that you’ve learned all you need to learn. Ensuring your staff are trained and developed on a regular basis can feel as if it closes any gaps in your own knowledge.

But is this enough? When searching for opportunities to develop and mentor your work force, are you considering yourself?

In reality, no matter your success, even business owners should be seeking professional development opportunities on a regular basis. Taking advice and mentoring from someone with more developed knowledge is how people learn and better themselves.

So, what can business owners gain from engaging with professional development and mentoring opportunities for themselves.

Business can grow overnight, more so now than any period before. As a business grows it will naturally take on more staff. Or you may utilise new services, software or technology, to keep things running smoothly from day to day.

As the person in charge, you must ask yourself a simple question; do you understand every what and every why of your business?

Do you understand the role of each staff member and how they contribute to your company?

Do you understand – and can you use – the services, software or technology that your business has adopted?

If you engage with professional development you can broaden your understanding of your business, your staff and your own goals. In turn, you can make more contributions than you could before.

We all have our weaknesses. Some are easier to identify than others-like knowing if we’re slow to start new projects, or we don’t handle conflict well. The harder you find it to identify any weakness in yourself, the more likely you need help in addressing it.

With professional development and mentoring, you can gain advice and insight into how to examine yourself and look for weaknesses you may be missing. As well as updating old skills, or developing new ones, you will also be sending a powerful message to your staff.

They will see you working to be the best you can be, and will be inspired to follow your example and work harder to develop themselves.

As a business owner, it’s most likely that you have completed many of the tasks you set yourself over your career.

But you won’t have achieved everything. This is normal, of course. Success sometimes means setting aside plans or ideas that may be too big or complex to achieve. Or ideas we do not have the skills and abilities to complete.

A common mistake made by business owners is assuming those ideas and plans can never be revisited.

But with professional development and the guidance of a skilled mentor, you can revisit and implement the things you may have been unable to before.

As we discussed earlier, it is important for a business owner to show their staff the importance of constant professional development. But it is not just your staff who should see you are always learning.

The crux of any good business is building trust with your clients. Clients will not go into business with you if they don’t feel you are trustworthy and in business, this is earned through possessing the right skills and knowledge.

With that in mind, consider how easy it is to access information in the digital age.

Clients and customers can research your product or service at the touch of a button, and in great detail. If you haven’t advanced or developed your skills since you first trained, you will eventually come across a client who knows more than you.

If you engage with professional development, or following the guidance of a mentor, you are far less likely to fall behind, or be surprised for by an unexpected question.

The connection between a lack of development opportunities and a high rate of staff turnover is very well known.

But even a well trained staff can see high turnover if their work space and working practices are still behind the times.

As the business owner if you have let neglected your own development it could mean your working methods, or the equipment your staff uses is out of date. This can impact productivity and profits as your staff is in constant flux. But it can also impact sustainability as your way of working will only become more irrelevant. You may find yourself so far behind the competition, there is no hope of catching up.

As we have examined, business owners have as much responsibility to develop themselves as they do to develop their work force. Eazi-Apps mentoring programme is offered to all new partners and aims to ensure business owners are constantly developing right along with their staff.

We focus both on honing the skills you already have, such as time management or lead generation, while ensuring you develop new skills in app design and function.

At Eazi-Apps, we respect the years of skills and experience that you possess. Our aim is to build on what you can already do to ensure you the best possible chance at success. To find out more contact us today.