In business, mentors are critical for help in progressing through a professional journey. They can help someone navigate decisions with insights that come from experience.
The question of how to know when to find a mentor is a bit off because you likely will need one at any given time when much of your journey is ahead of you. Even when you’ve done well and are established because there are still many questions about how to manage money, conflicts between work and family, and much more.
Edward Fernandez, president and CEO of CRE investment platform 1031 Crowdfunding, argues for both formal mentors and also transactional ones that can be more like teachers.
“I was a former commodities broker,” he tells GlobeSt.com. He had clients that had a Las Vegas gambler’s fever. “I would have wives call and say, ‘Ed can you make them stop?’ I would fire them, and they would go elsewhere. I didn’t want to be a part of that anymore.” Out of work for eight months, he was approached through his church by a businessman who owned industrial real estate and took a job with him.
“I learned how to purchase real estate through the team,” he says. “What LLCs and special entities were. How to do securities. I learned a lot about purchasing assets. I also learned about the accounting practices. We started going into the public arena with public REITs and learned how to build an accounting team that would be able to handle Sarbanes-Oxley, et cetera.”
“My mentors really taught me a lot of discipline about processes: hiring the right people, having the right talent in place, utilizing the right software so you can track opportunities, being more efficient in your accounting,” he adds.
Mentors can be invaluable in understanding major principles and large overviews, but they can’t do everything for you. “Most of the time the mentors are very busy people,” Fernandez says. “They can’t handhold the entire process.”
That is why you constantly need to find more transactional learning opportunities with experts in various details of business. Think of them as mini-mentoring sessions. “On the micro level, it should be your responsibility to be a sponge,” says Fernandez, because major mentors don’t have the time to teach everything someone needs to learn. Also, if they’re advanced enough in their careers, they may not be in touch with the latest developments, tools, and techniques that line-of-business people are likely to be.
Finding a main mentor is a difficult task. “There has to be a trust factor,” says Fernandez. “A mentor is going to talk into your life and you have to be willing to be vulnerable so they have that ability. Can I trust you with the information I’ll be sharing with you and not relate it to the world?” Look for someone 10 or 15 years older who has been down the path ahead of you.
“As far as being a mentor myself, since I’ve been doing a podcast, I’ve found a lot of young men reaching out to me,” he adds “It is important to you take the mentor’s time very seriously. If you agree on certain things, then take action and show progress. If you’re going to take somebody’s time, make sure you use it wisely so that mentor can see you are taking it seriously so you can continue to be mentored by that individual.”
Also, you might need different mentors at varying times in your career and life. “I’ve had really two key mentors in the real estate space,” says Fernandez. “I have had a now for the last ten years when it comes to life. Once you learn all these things from those mentors and you start becoming wealthy, wealth can change you. How do you tackle life with this drastic change in life with good quality in life, not quantity. How do I not lose my marriage? How do I not screw up my kids? How do I invest my money? How do I spend? You can’t figure it out based on failures because failures can be catastrophic and have impact on your family.”