Michael Taylor on mentoring with GrowthMentor

Mentor story

Midas · 249 sessions

“People treat mentorship like charity. I don't. It's selfish: you get just as much out of these calls as the mentee, and it has to go both ways.”

Michael Taylor

Prompt Engineer & Growth Marketer · Vexpower

United Kingdom · Jun 2026

Growth Marketing Data SciencePrompt Engineering

The Work

Tell us about what you do and how you got here.

I'm a data-driven, technical marketer. I built and ran an agency with around 50 people, and for years my world was paid ads, content, conversion, the whole growth picture, with a lot of experiments behind it. These days I'm co-founder at Vexpower, and I've gone deep on prompt engineering and the technical, data side of marketing.

When I was running the agency I had 50 people always asking me questions, relying on my advice, striking my ego, laughing at my jokes. Then I left, and suddenly I didn't have any of that, and I missed it a lot more than I expected. GrowthMentor became that for me. Diving in, solving interesting problems with people, but on my terms. A lot less impactful than the agency grind, but all the good parts with none of the bad parts.

Why Mentor

What made you join GrowthMentor in the first place?

Honestly it was that emotional gap right after I left the agency. I went from 50 people relying on me to nobody, and I missed the back-and-forth more than I thought I would. So GrowthMentor was a kind of emotional support network, a way to keep diving into interesting problems with people without the bad parts of the grind.

And I'll be straight that the bigger reason is selfish. The most rewarding thing is staying plugged in. It's really easy, especially for someone like me who overthinks everything, to go down a path of building products nobody uses and writing content nobody reads, putting stuff into the world that isn't based in reality. Mentoring grounds you. As you get more senior you get really divorced from reality unless you keep touching base with people at every level, junior, entry, all the way up through management. My most rewarding calls are the ones where I learn a new insight or run into a type of problem I didn't realize people were having.

Who They Help

You say the calls go both ways. What do you actually get out of them?

A lot of people think of mentorship like, oh, you've got to give back, it's charity. I don't see it that way at all. It's selfish motivation, and you get just as much out of these calls as everyone else is getting. It has to be bilaterally valuable, otherwise it's not sustainable, especially over the length of time I've been doing this.

There's another thing that happens when you meet your heroes through this kind of work. I've worked with super smart people I really looked up to, and when you actually meet them you realize they're not gods, they're not that much more intelligent than other people I've worked with. There's a random element to success. Plenty of people are doing the right things and just haven't got there yet, and some people did the wrong things and succeeded anyway. Once you realize the bar is much lower than you think, you can self-evaluate and see that most of your own ideas are better than you realized.

A Standout Session

A lot of your calls sound less like growth and more like therapy. What's going on there?

There's a phrase I heard once, I think from Brian Balfour, that growth is optional. The feeling behind it is that almost always when a company or a person isn't growing, it's because they're self-sabotaging in some way. So even though we're talking about growth, half the time it really feels like a therapy session. It's discovering what limiting belief you have, what intrusive thoughts and anxieties are stopping you, the things you're afraid to do. Usually you already know the right thing to do, and it's just a case of uncovering that and working through it, telling you it's okay.

When I ran the agency, half my job was exactly this. I'd talk to a client, find out what they were upset about, then talk to the team member who already had the right answer in their head but was nervous to present it, unsure if it was valid. So I'd basically just say what they would have said, but louder and with more experience. The client goes, good job Mike, that's perfect, glad you got involved. I almost feel like I'm cheating because I'm repeating what the strategist told me, but it's an arbitrage that works.

Inside the Platform

What's the most common piece of actionable advice you give?

Decompose the problem. Break it into smaller pieces, because it's much easier to solve once it's broken down to size. You start with a big vague problem, like we're not growing, and there are a hundred reasons why. So you break it down to the funnel. How many people know about you, of those how many visit the site, of those how many buy, of those how many come back and buy again. Once you categorize it, you suddenly see the weak part. Plenty of people know about us, plenty visit, we're just not converting. Solving how to improve conversion on one page is far more manageable than solving we're not growing fast enough.

The acronym I love is MECE, mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. A funnel is MECE: nothing can sit in two stages at once, and if you account for every stage you've accounted for everybody. Once you have that map of mutually exclusive buckets, you've done some real strategy work. Strategy comes from military campaigns, and you'd never run a campaign without a map of the territory. Where can you go, where's the enemy weak, where's the enemy strong. Without a map, you're going to lose that battle.

What They Got Back

You wrote a blog post called ICE scoring would get you killed on the battlefield. What did you mean?

I wrote that back when I was at Ladder. The problem with ICE scoring, where you throw a bunch of tactics in a spreadsheet and sort by impact, cost and ease, is that stack ranking tactics isn't a strategy. You wouldn't fight a war by going, okay, mortars are three points effective and cost one point in ammunition, so I'll just keep doing mortars because that's the highest ROI.

Real strategy is sequence and leverage. You do an area of bombardment first to take out the turrets, then once the mortar fire is finished you send in the troops to cut the line, then the tanks roll in to smash through. These things have to happen in order, based on leverage. The context changes every time you execute a tactic, so you have to think about how the situation will shift once you've done it. You don't get any of that when you're just stack ranking things on a list.

The Filter

What makes a good mentee, and have you ever had a difficult one?

These calls are about energy transference. I can come off a call drained or buzzing, and it really depends on how much energy the mentee brings. If they're keen to solve their own problem, if they show up with here's what I tried, here's what else I tried, I must be missing something, can you see it, then the more detail and energy they give me, the more energy I feel back, and I really want to help them. I come off that call excited to put energy into my own projects. It's exponential. The opposite is pulling teeth, dragging information out of someone who's deflated, and everyone gets like that sometimes, but it's worth getting your head right before you get on the call.

The one real problem I've had, across 200-plus calls, was a mentee who started treating me like I was their paid client, like I owed them something. They'd book every week and open with, I tried what you said and it didn't work, so now explain why you were wrong. And I'm thinking, I'm giving you advice for free here, can you chill out. If I actually knew exactly how to grow your business, I'd be doing your job and getting paid for it. Advice isn't a guarantee, it's probabilities. Like poker tips improve your odds of winning, but I'm not at the table and I don't have a stake in your game. You shouldn't take advice as a guarantee of success.

The Verdict