Get a leadership mentor who has led a team before
Vetted GrowthMentor mentors who have hired, delegated, and scaled teams. Every mentor below wrote their own take on the work.
- 62,000+
- Sessions booked
- 750+
- Vetted mentors
- 4.8/5
- Avg session rating
Peter Murphy Lewis
5.0 · +59 more
Blaine
Founder · Permit Hound
"I don't want to walk through an uncleared minefield without someone who has walked it before."
Hamel Shah
Co-Founder · CarrotsAndCake
"GrowthMentor enables us to swiftly get a world-class expert to give us guidance on any marketing issue or…"
Lena Sesardic
Product Manager
"Knowing I can always book a call to help me clarify what I'm doing is the best feeling in the world."
Minh
Solo Founder · SEOmatic
"I like to set my own strategies and then get help from experts to improve on them and check if I'm on the…"
Nicola Rubino
Growth Marketing Consultant · nicorubino
"It gave me fast access to expert-level insights that I couldn't get from academic research or user surveys…"
Annie Chen
Head of Marketing · DOWN Dating App
"Sometimes I'm stuck at one step and all I need is someone who can share experiences of what they did when…"
Carlos Terol
Co-Founder · Bagmaya
"I enjoy having pretty much instant access to a pool of worldwide, expert mentors who are keen to share their…"
Luka Karsten Breitig
Co-Founder · The Happy Beavers
"Imagine a world where everything you read was written by a subject-matter expert."
Flora Bui
Co-Founder · Acie
"My favorite thing about GrowthMentor is how it allows me to expand my network globally in a very short time…"
Maria Ledentsova
Digital Marketing Manager · magier
"Whatever problem I have, there's a friendly and incredibly helpful mentor ready to help."
Kate Bojkov
Head of Growth · EmbedSocial
"How quick and easy I can find somebody who had my problem and is willing to talk with me and openly share…"
Supriya Agarwal
Co-founder · BiosectRx
"Being able to connect with any expert across the globe at the click of a button. No network or previous…"
Anastasia Rubleva
Head of Growth · Rapid Dev
"I love the ability to receive valuable feedback from mentors who have been in the industry for decades."
Andrew McBurney
CEO & Co-founder · Review Robin
"You should cut out 99% of the things that you're thinking about."
The mentors, in their own words.
60 mentors available
Peter Murphy Lewis
🕸️Fractional Chief Marketing Officer | 📺 TV Host | 🎧 Podcaster |🐒 CSO Zoo | Founder 🚲 | 👠Ultra-Marathoner
As an executive, founder, and board member, I've scaled teams, set up systems around project management, and skilled up 100s of interns and mid-managers. I do have a strong opinion that you are born a leader, but those who are weak leaders can become strong leaders. It takes practice and self-awareness.
Serhat Hocazade
Hands-on GTM Leader ex Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn and Start-ups raised over $100M
Managed teams of 50+, balancing IC roles while handling budgets exceeding $20M. Focused on clear KPIs, transparent communication, and empowering people to own outcomes, driving growth and culture simultaneously.
Aggelos Mouzakitis
Private advisor to tech founders & solopreneurs · licensed psychotherapist
Effective leadership inspires and guides teams to achieve goals. Whether you're new or seasoned, my mentoring refines your style, communication, and team culture. Focusing on emotional intelligence, conflict resolution, and strategic vision, I help you lead with confidence and integrity. My aim is to develop your ability to motivate and empower your team for success.
Louis Camassa
Director of Product Management @ Rithum | Expertise in 0-to-1 & Scaling Enterprise SaaS | 2 Successful Exits
For startup founders struggling to inspire, true leadership is less about control and more about empowering your team. It's about trust, mentorship, and creating an environment where your team is motivated to excel. Great leaders foster loyalty and dedication, making others eager to follow. Focus on engaging and nurturing your team to unlock their full potential.
Karolina Szweda
leadership & confidence coach for introverts | previously pre-seed & seed marketing leader
As a qualified coach, I work with business professionals on enhancing leadership skills, particularly in confidence, communication, management and self-leadership. I love working with introverted and highly sensitive individuals for whom leadership is especially challenging.
Vivek Rajukumar
Online Marketplaces | Go To Market Strategy | Product Value Proposition | D2C Ecommerce | Zero to One
I have been in executive leadership roles for the past 8 years and would be happy to coach you to discover your leadership style to inspire your team and deliver high impact.
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Here's how it works.
Your request
""▍
Say what you're stuck on. We line up the right person.
A session
REC
Live, one on one
30 min
Talk to someone who's done it. Thirty minutes, recorded.
After the call
Nina Jung
Recording
You came in with
"1:1s with my team go nowhere."
You left with
"Cancel the status update, ask one real question."
08:50 / 30:00
Jump to the moment
Keep the recording, summary, and takeaways. Yours.
What a leadership mentor does
A leadership mentor has already made the jump you are making: from doing the work to being responsible for the people who do it. You get a 1:1 call with someone who has hired, delegated, and led a small team, and who can tell you which structural move to make next.
This is direction and a sounding board, not a management course. Most calls do some version of five things:
- Name the cause. "The team isn't working" becomes a named cause: a missing role, an unclear owner, a process nobody follows. You leave knowing which one it is.
- Get the first hire right. Which role to hire first is the question that changes everything downstream. A mentor helps you pick it, and helps you screen for it.
- Redesign your own role. The work that got you here is not the job anymore. A mentor helps you decide what to stop doing yourself and hand off.
- Delegate outcomes, not tasks. Handing off a checklist keeps you the bottleneck. Handing off an outcome frees you, and it is harder than it sounds.
- Fix the structure. Most team problems are structural, not motivational. A mentor helps you change who does what instead of working harder inside a broken setup.
You also leave with a record. After each call, the takeaways are written down for you, ready to keep or skip:
Harri ThomasLeadership sanity checkWrite down what only you can decide, then give every other call a named owner and a deadline.
Delegate the outcome and let the team miss twice before you step back in, that is where they learn to own it.
KeepSkipSchedule the conversation you have been avoiding this week, one direct sentence beats another month of drift.
KeepSkipSet one visible metric per person, so accountability is a number they own instead of you hovering over the work.
KeepSkipStepping from builder to leader
The most common reason people book a leadership call is a role transition. Someone who was good at the work is now responsible for people and direction, and the old playbook does not apply.
These are the jumps mentors see most:
- Senior IC to founder. you were a strong product manager or engineer, and now you own the whole company and the people in it.
- Freelancer to agency. you did great work solo, and now you have to build a team structure and figure out who does what.
- New leader at a new company. you just started somewhere senior and are managing the transition while learning the room.
- Individual contributor to head of. you are stepping into a head of growth or marketing role and leading people for the first time.
- Solo founder to a real team. you ran it alone, and now you are adding a CEO, a COO, or a leadership layer above the work.
Mentors start diagnosing before the call. A typical first exchange after you book:
Richard JohnsonHiring your first team
Going from doing it alone to staffing it is the hardest first move, and the question underneath it is almost always the same: which role do I hire first.
A mentor who has built a team helps you get the sequence and the screen right:
- Pick the first role on purpose. the right first hire is the one that removes your biggest constraint, not the one that feels most urgent this week.
- Build a filter for bad candidates. a repeatable hiring process that screens people out is worth more than a great job post that lets everyone in.
- Evaluate roles you cannot do yourself. hiring a CTO or a founding engineer when you are not technical is its own skill, and a mentor who has done it can tell you what good looks like.
- Plan to keep them. compensation, motivation, and retention are part of the hire, not a problem you solve later when someone is already halfway out.
Get the first role right and the next three get easier. Get it wrong and you spend months unwinding it.
two moves, in order
Pick the role against your constraint
hire for the loudest gap this week
hire the role that removes your biggest constraint
Build the screen before you post
a job post that lets everyone in
a repeatable filter that screens people out
A first hire that actually holds
The right role, screened the right way. Get it right and the next three hires get easier.
The order matters: name the constraint before you write the job post.
Learning to delegate
Most new leaders know they are the bottleneck. The hard part is doing something about it, which for people problems is harder than for tactics.
A mentor helps you hand off the right things in the right way:
- Delegate the outcome. give someone the result you want and the room to own it, instead of a script that keeps every decision routing back to you.
- Stop doing everything yourself. name the tasks only you can do, then build a path to hand off the rest so your role is leading, not covering gaps.
- Hold the team accountable. set the expectation, make it visible, and follow up, so accountability does not mean hovering over every step.
- Pick what gets your attention. a leader who tries to manage everything on their plate manages nothing well. A mentor helps you decide what to drop.
Scaling an agency team
A large part of this group is agency owners who hit the ceiling of doing all the delivery themselves. The work is good, the clients are happy, and the founder is the single point of failure.
A mentor who has scaled a services team helps you build the layer above yourself:
- Team structure. Move from a team of 4 to 15 that depends on you to a structure where the work ships without your hands on every account.
- Pricing and delivery model. Reprice and repackage so growth does not just mean more hours of your own time on more accounts.
- Focus the offer. Cut the service lines that scatter the team and commit to the offer you can deliver and sell repeatedly.
- Presence that sells without you. Build the site and proof so new clients arrive convinced, instead of every deal needing the founder in the room.
The goal is an agency that grows when you are not the one delivering, not a bigger version of you working more hours.
an agency that runs without you, x-rayed
Two pods of three, each with a lead who owns the client1. A delivery playbook the team runs without you in the thread2. Retainers repriced so a bigger month is not just more of your hours3. A site and case studies that close the next client before the first call4.
The account leads
Someone owns each client, not you. This is what takes you off the critical path.
The delivery playbook
The work ships to a process, not to your inbox. It survives your day off.
The pricing
Priced so a bigger month is not just a longer one for you.
The presence
New clients arrive convinced, so no deal needs the founder in the room.
Four parts of an agency that grows without you. The hard one is letting a lead own the client.
Process your team will follow
"I built the process and nobody follows it" is one of the most common operational complaints a leader brings to a call. The problem is rarely that the team is unwilling. The process usually does not fit how the work happens.
A mentor helps you build an operating model the team adopts:
- Write SOPs people use. reliable operations come from process built with the team and tied to real work, not a document handed down and ignored.
- Fix the system after fast growth. when rapid customer growth turns into operational chaos, the fix is structural, so a mentor helps you redesign the system, not just push harder.
- Run operations as you scale. the processes that worked at 5 people break at 25, and a mentor who has crossed that line can tell you what to put in place before it cracks.
- Manage up while you build it. as you scale, leading down and managing up to senior leadership become two different jobs, and a mentor helps you do both.
Neither end gets followed. Process the team helped write, tied to real work, is the part that sticks.
Leading marketing and sales
If you lead a small in-house team, the job changes from doing the work to getting results through other people. That shift trips up strong operators who were promoted for their own output.
A mentor who has run a function helps you lead it well:
- Lead a small marketing team. a team of 3 to 5 needs priorities and a focus number, not forty tasks split evenly across everyone.
- Run marketing operations as the growth lead. owning the marketing ops of a mid-size company means deciding what the team builds and what it stops chasing.
- Scale a sales or SDR team. scaling outbound through a small sales team means hitting targets through other people, which is a different skill than hitting them yourself.
- Hit revenue targets through the team. a mentor who has run a sales team can help you set the number, build the motion, and coach the people who carry it.
two moves, in order
Stop carrying the number yourself
out-work the team to hit the target
set one focus number the team owns
Coach the people who carry it
split forty tasks evenly across everyone
give each person one priority and hold it
Results through the team, not around it
You lead the function instead of being its top individual contributor. It scales past your own hours.
The order matters: name the number before you divide the work.
Leading remote teams
Leading a team you do not sit next to adds a layer most new leaders underestimate. Accountability, trust, and clarity all get harder across time zones and borders.
A mentor who has led distributed teams helps you make distance work:
- Manage across time zones. a team spread around the world needs rhythms and written clarity that an in-office team can get away without.
- Build accountability at a distance. you cannot manage by walking around, so a mentor helps you set outcomes and check-ins that hold without hovering.
- Lead a cross-border team. building with an international team raises questions about communication, culture, and structure that benefit from someone who has done it.
What holds a team you never sit next to is agreed outcomes and a written rhythm, checked on a schedule instead of by hovering.
When to book a call
You do not need a giant question. Bring the thing you would ask someone who has led a small team five times before. The most useful moments to book:
- You just became responsible for people. you got promoted, hired your first person, or stepped into a founder role, and the job suddenly changed.
- You are the bottleneck. everything routes through you, you know it, and you cannot figure out how to step out of the middle.
- You need to make a first hire. you are about to commit real money to a role and want a second opinion on which one and how to screen for it.
- The team isn't working and you can't see why. something is off, output is slow, and you want someone to walk it with you and name the cause.
- You have no peer to talk it through with. the call is often the first place a leader says the hard thing out loud to someone who has been there.
A focused 30 minutes with someone who has done it beats another month of carrying it alone.
What a mentor can help with
Leadership is broad, and so is the network. You are not limited to one kind of advisor. You can find someone who has done the specific thing you are stuck on:
- Building a team. First hires, the right hiring order, and a process that screens out the wrong people.
- Delegation and operating model. Handing off outcomes, redesigning your role, and getting out of the bottleneck.
- Operations and process. SOPs the team follows, scaling the system, and running ops as you grow.
- Remote and distributed teams. Accountability, rhythms, and trust across time zones and borders.
- Leading a function. Running a small marketing or sales team and hitting targets through other people.
- Founder mindset and getting unstuck. A sounding board for the isolation and self-doubt that come with the seat.
- Go-to-market and positioning. Who you are for, how you differentiate, and where growth comes from next.
- Scaling past the first stage. Crossing $1M ARR, growing the team, and managing the complexity that follows.
You can also run it in reverse: post what you are stuck on as a help request, and mentors raise their hands to take it.
What people book leadership calls about
Rarely what they end up solving. The ask on the booking form is usually a symptom, and a mentor who has led a team before recognizes the pattern underneath it. Three that come up again and again:
walked in as, walked out as
Walked in as
A performance problem
My best person is slipping.
Walked out as
An expectations problem
Nobody agreed what good looks like.
Walked in as
A motivation problem
The team seems checked out.
Walked out as
A clarity problem
They cannot see who owns what.
Walked in as
An authority problem
They won't listen to me.
Walked out as
A peer-transition problem
You skipped the reset conversation.
Three calls, one mechanic. The problem that leaves the room is never the one that walked in.
Why GrowthMentor
Every mentor on GrowthMentor is vetted before they are accepted. Fewer than 5% of applicants get in. They are founders and operators who have actually led teams, made the hard calls, and sat with the doubt, not influencers selling a management course.
Because the network is broad, you are not stuck with one advisor when the job spans hiring, delegation, and leading people. You can pressure-test a first hire this week, then talk through a hard conversation or a stalled team with a different specialist the next.
Calls this month
Book the fourth call, or the fortieth. Nothing on this receipt changes.
People who were exactly where you are.
GrowthMentor enables us to swiftly get a world-class expert to give us guidance on any marketing issue or question in a matter of days.
Hamel Shah · Co-Founder
Read Hamel's storyKnowing I can always book a call to help me clarify what I'm doing is the best feeling in the world.
Lena Sesardic · Product Manager
Read Lena's storyI like to set my own strategies and then get help from experts to improve on them and check if I'm on the right track.
Minh · Solo Founder
Read Minh's storyIt gave me fast access to expert-level insights that I couldn't get from academic research or user surveys alone.
Nicola Rubino · Growth Marketing Consultant
Read Nicola's storySometimes I'm stuck at one step and all I need is someone who can share experiences of what they did when they were in my situation.
Annie Chen · Head of Marketing
Read Annie's storyI enjoy having pretty much instant access to a pool of worldwide, expert mentors who are keen to share their expertise and help others.
Carlos Terol · Co-Founder
Read Carlos's storyAsk ChatGPT
Don’t take our word for it.
Ask ChatGPT what it really knows about leadership mentors and GrowthMentor, then decide for yourself.
Before you join
What people ask before their first call.
This is exactly who most people on this page are. You were good at the work, and now you are responsible for people and direction. A mentor who has made the same jump can tell you what the new job is, what to stop doing yourself, and which move to make first.
The right first hire is the one that removes your biggest constraint, not the one that feels most urgent this week. A mentor who has built a team helps you name that constraint and pick the role against it, so you do not spend months unwinding a hire made in a panic.
A repeatable process that filters people out is worth more than a great job post that lets everyone in. A mentor who has hired for the role you need can help you design the screen, the questions, and the signals that separate a strong candidate from a good interview.
Most leaders delegate a process and stay in the loop on every decision, which keeps them the bottleneck. The move is to delegate the outcome and give the person room to own it. A mentor helps you decide what to hand off and how to check in without hovering.
Accountability is set expectations, made visible, with steady follow-up, not hovering over every step. A mentor who has managed people can help you build that rhythm so the team owns its results and you get your attention back for the work only you can do.
Yes. You do not need a management title to lead well. Most people who book are founders and operators who became responsible for a team without ever being taught how. Bring the specific situation and you will leave with a plan you can act on this week.
The ceiling is usually that you are the single point of failure on every account. A mentor who has scaled a services team can help you restructure delivery, reprice so growth does not just mean more of your own hours, and focus the offer so the work ships without your hands on it.
Process gets ignored when it does not fit how the work happens. A mentor helps you build the operating model with the team and tie it to real work, so the SOPs get used, and helps you redesign the system when fast growth turns into chaos.
Leading a team you do not sit next to needs written clarity, rhythms, and outcome-based accountability that an in-office team can get away without. A mentor who has led across time zones and borders can tell you what to put in place so distance stops costing you trust and speed.
Yes, and it is more common than you think. New leaders often privately wonder whether they belong in the chair. A good mentor is a sounding board as much as a tactician, someone who has carried the same doubt and can help you get unstuck on both the decision and the feeling around it.
A course teaches frameworks and a coach works on you over months. A mentor gives you a practitioner's straight opinion on your specific situation, in real time, with no upsell. They have led a small team like yours and can tell you which structural move to make right now.
Bring one specific situation: the hire you are weighing, the person you cannot manage, the bottleneck you cannot step out of. GrowthMentor is a membership, so once you are a member, calls are included and most mentors offer their time for free. Browse the mentors above, read their reviews, and book a 30-minute video call directly on their calendar.
Still have questions? See all FAQs →
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