The benefits of hiring a mentor for your Newborn Care Specialist business are numerous. Starting a business can be scary and confusing. A mentor can ease your mind by teaching you all you need to know to do it right!

Benefits of Hiring a Mentor For Your NCS Business

Every aspect of being a Newborn Care Specialist requires a certain level of expertise. That includes running the business portion of your enterprise. Many individuals become well-trained and experienced in the NCS field. But they struggle when it comes to successfully running their businesses. Usually, this is simply because they lack the specific experience required. This is when it is wise to seek the help of someone who has been down that road before you. As your mentor, they can share the knowledge, wisdom, and business acumen they have gained through experience, and help you benefit from their expertise.

What Is a Mentor?

The perfect mentor for your Newborn Care Specialist business is someone who understands both aspects of your business. They need to understand your work as an NCS, as well as what it takes to successfully promote and run an NCS business. There are many individuals who prefer to use their NCS skills with an agency where they don’t have to worry about the business-end of a practice. But if you prefer the idea of running your own operation and perhaps even having your own staff at some point down the road, there are many requirements, both legal and professional that you will need to address. A mentor can guide you through the mazes that may seem so daunting at first.

When you are selecting the mentor you need, keep in mind that you aren’t just looking for an an experienced individual to learn from. This is also a person that you will need to feel comfortable working with on a regular basis. You will be sharing the hopes and plans for your enterprise with this person. Having a good relationship with your mentor can remove a lot of the tension from this teacher-student scenario. You don’t have to be best friends, but there must be a level of mutual respect in order for the relationship to be successful and productive.

Why Is a Mentor Important?

There is a saying, that there is no point in “reinventing the wheel”. Hiring a mentor is one good way to avoid doing that. Learning from your own mistakes is how many people learn. But when you hire a mentor, you get the chance to learn from the mistakes of others instead. This generally involves a lot less time and discomfort. Having a mentor means taking advantage of the knowledge and experience that they have accumulated. Your mentor will be well-acquainted with the problems and pitfalls that others have run into. They can successfully guide you around them, ensuring better success at starting and running your business.

A mentor can help teach you how to best manage your time between actually working with clients and running your business. It is very easy to focus too much on one and not enough on the other. But this can be a recipe for disaster. Once you find that balance with the help of your mentor, you are one step closer to enjoying ongoing personal success in your field.

When running a business, there are always legal requirements that you will need to be familiar with. You need to know about business licenses and insurance to protect both you and your business. If you hire anyone, you need to understand employment laws that must be followed. A mentor will be well familiar with these aspects of your business or they can refer you to legal or tax professionals that can help. This can be invaluable as you learn to work within “the system”.

Why Is My Mentor Charging Me?

There are many reasons a mentor may charge for their services. First of all, many mentors also have their own businesses to run. Taking time away from that business to teach you may be viewed as an expense for them. This expense needs to be recovered. A mentor may also charge you because they are sharing their experience with you. This experience was gained over years of them learning all the ins and outs of having their own NCS business. You are paying to learn from their experiences and the mistakes they made along the way. This experience is beyond value and despite the cost of paying for a mentor, learning from them will save you money and time in the long run.

Although sharing their personal knowledge is innately valuable, many mentors have also spent a lot of their own money and time taking classes. They’ve attended seminars, workshops, and done private research to get where they are. When you pay your mentor, you are benefiting from all the knowledge they have paid for along the way, as well.

The Next Steps

Every aspect of being an NCS requires an expertise that is difficult to quantify. By selecting the right mentor for you and your needs, you will be adding another level to your expertise. Taking advantage of the knowledge of others is a wonderful way to give yourself an advantage over your competition. While they struggle to obtain the experience needed to be successful, your mentor will be guiding you around most of these struggles and provided you with a serious “leg up” along the way. As you apply what you learn from your mentor, you may find yourself becoming more and more in demand. This may lead to expanding your client base, which in turn will lead to growing your staff and your business. Your mentor will be there through each of these stages, offering advice and counsel to keep your expansions manageable.

And perhaps one day down the road, you will decide to share your own knowledge as a Newborn Care Specialist Business owner, and mentor someone just like you.

To learn more about being mentored by founders Haleigh or Brittany, and instructor Joanna, please email [email protected].