How to find a good business advisor (and why it's the fastest way to scale)

Most business owners learn how to scale their business the hard way, working it out by trial and error, one expensive mistake at a time. The problem is it's the slowest route there is. Finding the right business advisor takes deliberate effort, and muddling through on your own feels easier even though it isn't.

The most successful business owners I've worked with were rarely the most talented or the smartest people in the room. What they did was find someone who had already walked the path they were on then they had the humility to ask for help, the discipline to listen, and, most importantly, the follow-through to act on what they heard.

You don't have to spend years working this out alone. The right advisor can change the direction of your business, and your life, faster than anything else you can buy. The catch is most people only have a vague idea of what a business advisor is, and that vagueness is exactly what stops them finding a good one.

What a good business advisor looks like

A good business advisor has already achieved what you're trying to achieve. That doesn't mean someone older than you, someone with an impressive title, or a coach running a program they bought off the shelf. It means someone who has walked your specific path, made the specific mistakes, and come out the other side with results you'd want for yourself.

That's a very different relationship from most of what gets sold as business advice. A consultant tells you what the textbook says, a coach asks good questions and helps you find your own answers, but a true business advisor hands you the map they drew themselves, mistakes and all, because they've stood where you're standing.

The difference between a good business advisor and a mere consultant is most apparent when things get hard; a consultant can only guess at what might work, whereas a business advisor who has been there already knows what worked and what didn't.

How the right advisor can turn a decade into a single year

A good business advisor can be motivating when you need it, but that isn't where most of the value comes from. The real value is practical.

Someone who has built what you're building has seen your problem many times before, across many different businesses. They can usually spot it in minutes, when you might otherwise spend months or years finding the answer the hard way. That pattern recognition is worth more than most formal education, because it comes from seeing the same situation again and again, not from theory.

A good business advisor will also tell you the uncomfortable things nobody else around you will say. Early on, my own mentor told me something I still think about: "I can't change your firm unless I change you first." An employee, a peer or a friend is unlikely to say that to your face. It takes the standing to say it credibly and the willingness to risk the relationship. A business advisor who has built what you want to build has earned that standing, and a good one will use it.

Become a student worth mentoring

Charlie Munger, one of my heroes, put it simply: "To get what you want, you have to deserve what you want." Mentorship works the same way. Good business advisors are in demand, and they're selective about who gets their time.

You need three things to get the most out of a good business advisor:

1. You need to come prepared

Arrive at every meeting with a clear agenda. In the three years I was mentored, I always brought a list of questions, the issues in my firm I needed help with, and my year-to-date KPIs so we could track how the business was going.

2. You need to stay humble

Be honest about what's going wrong, not just the story that makes you look good. A good business advisor can only help with the problems you tell them about. Some debate is healthy, especially while you're getting used to new ways of thinking about your business, but if you're constantly pushing back on the advice, either you've picked the wrong advisor or your ego is getting in the way of being coached.

3. You need to take action

I've worked with more than 50 SMEs. The ones that made the most progress had one thing in common: they put into practice what we agreed in our monthly board meetings. Nodding along and then carrying on the old way changes nothing and just wastes everyone's time.

How to find the right business advisor

Start by getting specific about what you want. "More success" is too vague. Name the outcome: a business of a certain size, a certain kind of freedom, or a particular transition you're trying to make. Then look for someone who has built that outcome, for themselves and for others, rather than someone who just talks about it well. You'll quickly see the difference once you start asking detailed questions about how they did it.

Reading helps too. It won't replace a real business advisor, but it will teach you what a good one looks like. A great place to start is Trillion Dollar Coach, about Bill Campbell, the coach behind Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt and many of Silicon Valley's best-known leaders. It's a short book, and it gives real insight into how a mentor ralationship actually works.

The most successful people I know all follow the same pattern; they found an expert who had already done what they wanted to do, and they learned from that person deliberately and consistently.

We work with business owners to build the leadership, systems and teams they need to scale, so the business runs on more than just the founder's time and effort.