Most owners try to work out how to scale a business the same way: by trial and error, one expensive mistake at a time, over a decade or more. It's the slowest possible route, and it's also the default because finding a good business advisor to help you can take more deliberate effort than simply muddling through on your own. The most successful business owners I have worked with were almost never the most naturally talented or smartest people in the room, they were the ones who found someone who had already walked the specific path they were trying to walk, and had the humility to ask them for help, actually listen, and most crucially of all, implement what they said.

Don't waste years figuring this out alone. The right business advisor will change the trajectory of your business and life faster than anything else available. The trouble is most people have a vague, generic idea of what a business advisor is, and that vagueness is exactly what stops them from finding a real one.

How to spot a good business advisor

A good business advisor is someone who has already achieved in business what you're trying to achieve. Not someone older than you, not someone with an impressive title, not a generic business coach working from a course they bought. Someone who has actually walked the specific path, made the specific mistakes, and come out the other side with results you'd genuinely want for yourself.

This is a meaningfully different relationship from most of what gets called business advisory. A consultant tells you what the textbook says, a business coach asks good questions and helps you find your own answers, however a true business advisor does something closer to handing you the map they drew themselves, mistakes and all, because they've actually been where you're standing. That distinction matters enormously when the terrain gets difficult, because a consultant can guess at what might work, while a true business advisor already knows, from direct experience, what did and what didn't.

Why finding a good business advisor can compress a decade into a year

The value of a real business advisor isn't purely motivational, though it is that when that's needed. At heart the value of a good business advisor is when it comes to the practical. Someone who has already built what you're trying to build has seen the specific problem you're facing many times before, in many different businesses, and can usually recognise it within minutes rather than requiring you to discover it the hard way over months or even years. That pattern recognition alone is worth more than most formal education, because it's built from direct, repeated exposure to exactly this kind of situation rather than from mere theory.

A real business advisor will also tell you the uncomfortable thing nobody else around you is willing to say. My own business mentor, Ed Chan, said something to me early on that I still think about to this day: “I can't change your firm unless I change you first.” That's not the kind of thing an employee, a peer, or a friend is likely to say to you directly, because it requires both the standing to say it credibly and the willingness to risk the relationship by saying something you may not want to hear. A business advisor who has actually built what you want to build has earned that standing, and a good one will use it.

Become a student worth mentoring

My hero Charlie Munger put it plainly: "if you want something in life, the best way to get it is to deserve it." The same logic applies to mentorship. Good business advisors are, almost by definition, in demand, and they're selective about who they invest real time in.

To get the most out of engaging a good business advisor, you only need three things:

1. Be prepared

Attend your meetings with a set agenda and be prepared. In the three years I took part in business mentoring I always came with a list of questions, a list of issues in my firm that I needed help with, and my year to date KPIs so we could track the health of the business.

2. Be humble

It means being honest about failures rather than only presenting the version of events that makes you look good, because a business advisor can only help with problems they're actually told about. Debate is healthy, especially when you're still getting your head around new ways of thinking about your business, but if you spend a lot of time pushing back on the business advisor's advice, either you haven't found a good business advisor or you simply have too much ego to be coachable.

3. Take action

Working with over 50 SMEs, it has really stood out to me the ones that made the most progress were the ones who implemented everything we discussed in our monthly board meetings. It means actually implementing what's suggested, rather than nodding along and continuing to do things the old way.

How to find a good business advisor

Start by being specific about what you're actually trying to achieve, not a vague sense of “more success,” but the particular outcome: a business of a certain size, a certain kind of freedom, a specific transition you're trying to make. Then look for someone who has genuinely built that outcome for themselves and also for others, not someone who merely talks about it convincingly. The difference between the two becomes obvious quickly once you start asking specific questions about how they actually did it.

It's also worth reading, not as a replacement for a real mentor, but as a way of learning to recognise one. A great place to start is the book the Trillion Dollar Coach, which is about Bill Campbell, the coach and mentor behind Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt. Reading this short book will give you incite into how a genuine mentor actually operates.

The most successful people I know all share the same pattern: they found an expert who had done what they wanted to do, and they learned from them deliberately and consistently, rather than passively hoping to absorb wisdom through occasional contact.