I've been a business coach for twelve years, and before that I spent thirty years in the corporate world, a lot of it in marketing. So I come at this with a fairly long runway behind me. I'm probably the oldest mentor on the platform, and I say that as a good thing. I bridged the gap from the pre-internet generation to whatever we are today. I didn't just bridge it, I lived through it and managed to transform while holding on to the things I still consider valuable, the human interaction, how we used to do things before everything moved online. I like to inject those pieces into every conversation I have.

Coaching is a paid gig, and the dynamics of getting paid to share your experience are very different from doing it freely. I'm fortunate at this point in my life to choose the activities that give me fulfillment, and mentoring is one of them.

Because everybody skips it. People come to me with strategy questions, is this the right way to launch a product, is this the right go-to-market. I understand the excitement of launching, I can relate to it, but they skip over the most critical piece. So I tell them: take a deep breath, take two steps back. What's a marketing plan in simple terms? It's your roadmap to growth. Write it down. Look at it. Challenge it. Once you feel comfortable, then follow it.

The example I give everyone is the flight plan. Every pilot, from the most experienced one to the brand new one, has to file a flight plan before they get in the plane and take off. The marketing plan is your flight plan for the business. So when people come to me with a strategy, I almost always direct them back to the basics first: do the basics really well, then use that as a stepping stone to tap into all the technology and knowledge we have in marketing today. The marketing plan is the most underutilized tool I know of, and it's the best practice nobody does.

The follow-up. It's the one thing people drop in sales and in pretty much any activity. They'll do something but never follow up. They'll have a great meeting with action points and then run to the next meeting and nobody circles back. It's been ingrained in how I was trained and how I trained others, so I follow up with each mentee about a week after our session.

We always end a session with at least one or two action points, and a week later I ask: did you do it, do you have any follow-up questions I can help with. Just last week I went through almost all of my past mentees, picked the ones I remembered were particularly challenged, and reconnected with them. Haven't heard from you in a while, just checking how things are going. I think that matters a lot, because our mentees get advice from four or five mentors at once, and it can be overwhelming. Which one do you listen to when they all say something different? The follow-up is where you actually help them sort it out.

A good mentee has the same trait as a good leader: the courage and humility to recognize they don't know something, and that it's okay to ask for help. That's number one, and it's the smartest way to get better. The second thing is the follow-up, and this is on the mentee as much as the mentor. You can run around and have ten sessions and collect a pile of free advice, and that's great, but what did you actually do with it? Free advice is only valuable if you use it. Not if you walk away saying wow, that was amazing and cheap, and then change nothing.

My favorite saying covers it: you can bring a person to knowledge, but you cannot make them think. What we do as mentors is bring you to knowledge, give you the perspective and the experience, the trials and the fails and the wins. I can't make you take action. That part is on you. So if you're on the platform, actually use what you get. If you think everyone else is wrong and you're right, none of this works.