Financial Advise

Mentors, Advisors and Coaches. What are they and why do you need them?

Mentors

Mentors are people who can be role models for you. These people may be living a life similar to how you want to live or have gone through trials and tribulations you may have to go through. They can be someone you meet with in person on a regular basis or “virtual mentors” who are people whose works you read and lives you study and learn from.

You can think of a mentor as a role model. Choose mentors who you would like to emulate for various aspects of your life. Having multiple mentors is a must because as you improve in your development, you will likely need to change some mentors for another that will take you to the next level.

Advisors

Like mentors, advisors have experience in achieving what you want to achieve. Unlike mentors, their role is more formal and expertise more focused.

Whereas a mentor offers value through their experiences and wisdom, advisors offer value through giving specific feedback about specific questions. You may get lunch with a mentor and gain years worth of wisdom but an advisor is better engaged through a pointed phone call, an email with a set of questions, or semi-regular update meetings.

You want an advisor because they know more about a specific area that you are trying to learn more about. A startup advisor may have built a company similar to the one you are building, or has experience in certain investments, or has technical expertise you need to help expedite your own growth. The expertise of an advisor should be relied on to help you avoid common problems and pitfalls.

Coaches

Unlike mentors and advisors, the primary benefit of coaches are to facilitate learning, focus, and results. Coaches are trained in the strategies for achieving the results specific to their domain of coaching. Although they may not have experienced generating the results you want for themselves, they should have experience generating these results in other people or organizations.

Coaches usually operate in their own specific domains. Athletic coaches are the most common heard about, but there are coaches trained in management, relationships, careers, financial or a number of other areas.

Good coaches will help you clarify your goals, focus on what you need to do, and find the best strategies for achieving those goals. Unlike advisors, the role of the coach is not to feed you information but to provide the proper resources for you to make the improvements you want.

Depending on what you want to achieve you could have many or few of each type throughout your lifetime. Successful people have or had at least one of each type during their journey to the top, and you should too. In many cases they will have answers to questions that you haven’t even thought to ask yet.

In the interest of transparency, I am a Financial Coach with many years of being mentored, coached and advised myself. It’s been a heck of a journey for me and I would be happy to sit down with you and talk about your goals and how you can achieve them for you and your family.

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