400 How To Find Your First Mentor

Hey, team, have you ever heard somebody talking about their journey and they're like, oh, and I had this, this mentor that was so foundational to my success and it made such a big difference. And you hear him talk about this and you're like, that sounds really nice. I wish I had one of those. I know I felt that way. So today we're talking about mentorship. How do you, how do you get a mentor? Track them down. This has been a hard thing for me, but we're going to share some ideas from a recent discussion that I had with the hope of you finding somebody who can offer you some shortcuts in 2025. Come on in, let's. Today we're talking about mentorship. I ran a little, little meetup in Boston late last year. It's actually super fun. Like this last minute thing that we put together, bless your hearts, like 35 people turned up. I just, all I, all I did was post on LinkedIn, hey, we're going to do meetup in Boston in like a week. Like 35 people turn up. That is so cool. Isn't the Internet wild? And a great time was had by all, by all accounts. But one of the unexpected talking points that came up was mentorship and how to, how to find a mentor. Because if you've never had one, like, I could tell you, I got no idea. Right? At least that was my thinking was where do you even begin to find that? And that's kind of where the discussion went for folks who had, had found really helpful mentors, mentors before, and just sharing some ideas on how to get there. Because there's always somebody ahead of you on the journey and almost always someone that could probably, probably be helping you. But when you hear the stories, it's very much like happenstance, some connection that they had and this person just worked out to end up being a mentor. But like, if you're trying to sort of manifest that what are the things that we should be doing? And I got seven thoughts for you, many of which came out of that discussion that at the very least ought to increase the likelihood that you could find someone who, who could help you. First up, number one, number one, don't start by asking somebody if they'll mentor you. Almost always, that's not the move. If they're, if it's still like a stranger, dangerous situation where they don't really know anything about you and you don't have any context, you don't start by DMing somebody and asking them to make this commitment for you that's this is probably not going to work out. I don't know that anybody's actively getting out of bed and going, I would love to find somebody to mentor today. It's something that ought to be a little more organic. But interestingly, offering like, support and being part of a community like that is actually has a lot of really positive benefits to mental health. Like, it turns out giving help is a very core aspect of like, people feeling fulfilled. Like, it's not enough to just be given handouts all day. Actually reciprocating play is plays a really big role in folks's happiness and overall satisfaction. So number one, don't just like go out and start YOLO asking a bunch of people to mentor you. Even if you see a person and you're like, boy, it would be nice if they were my mentor. If you're building a relationship with them, the place to start is not asking them to be a mentor. Probably number two, if you're thinking about, well, who would even be the right person to mentor me? If we're thinking about the professional context. And that's a very specific type of mentor. So there's all sorts of mentors we should probably have in our lives from how to be a good father. You know, for me, I mean, every domain of your life, from being a good human to, you know, spiritual things to service. I mean, there's all sorts of different angles on entrepreneurship. I'm just going to talk. I'm just going to talk about stuff within the accounting domain. When you think about who that right person is, it's somebody that is a step or two ahead of you. It's probably not those people who are your idols, like the biggest, most impressive people out there. It like, let's think more humbly because oftentimes those aren't the people who can best help you. It's the folks who are like just ahead of you on that journey. In all likelihood, as you continue to grow, they're going to continue to grow too. And, and will be just kind of a bit ahead of you on that. And what they're going to have to offer you is going to be more relevant to the stage that you're at. Once you get a certain point past where someone else is it, it is very hard to get your mind back into that space. Like, it. It's very hard for me to imagine right now being somebody new to the accounting profession. And so I don't know that I have tremendous advice for that type of person. You look at Logan graph what Logan's doing helping people create new firms like Logan's. Three, three years removed from him launching his own firm. I've never launched my own firm. I, I bought a firm that was a team of about 30 at the time. And I did that because I knew enough about myself to know that I didn't want to do the technical stuff. I wanted to be in the non client facing role. And that's a lot easier to do when you're buying a mature firm rather than rolling your own from scratch. But Logan's only a few years into that, so he's intimately aware of all the emotions and concerns and all that that you have when you're launching a new firm. Whereas I, I just pretend, I pretend to know what all that's about. So consider like, where is this person on their journey relative to me? If they're still pretty close, that's probably someone that's going to be a good fit. Also, it doesn't have to be somebody that is like massively visible. For every Logan there is, for every Jason, there is, there's a thousand people who are not out there shilling their wares on social media and running a podcast and all these different things. Like, there's a whole lot of people that have a lot to offer that are not out there in the public eye. Number three, hopefully it's somebody that's already at least kind of sort of in your network. If you don't have any connection to this person at all that it's, it's going to be hard to start to build that connection with them. Which is just another argument for being visible and being out in the world and hanging with the folks, investing the time and, and being with the folks that can get you to that next thing, whatever that looks like for you. A lot of people are just chronic lurkers that, that don't engage for whatever reason. Maybe you think you're too busy or this or that, but that's ultimately a, a, a big old trap to be too busy to do the things that are going to ultimately get you to be unbusy. Like that's, that's something that just fundamentally can't happen. Otherwise you're not ever going to like brute force your way out of that situation. But it's, you know, yet another argument for the value of visibility. Man, in 2025. I railed on this last week on the podcast, but in 2025, your opportunities and all that are just a product of who knows that you exist. If the only people who know you exist are those that you already work with and those who the people you already work with refer you to. Can you build a business around that? Probably. Especially in the accounting space, there's just such a demand for what we do. But you're playing in an itty bitty pool when opening that up to the larger world. And all the people who are out there just exposes you to so many more opportunities and higher quality opportunities and lower quality opportunities both. But until you're willing to like engage and be a part of the conversation and, and be out there so that people know that you exist, you're going to be a stranger. Like that person's not going to know who you are. And we all get so much inbound from stranger weirdos. Like in all reality, you're not going to stand out from those sort of anonymous outreaches. Right. Number four, don't fixate on not having anything to offer them. That's kind of the beauty of mentorship, in my opinion is in some ways it is one sided, but in other ways, being a mentor and having the opportunity to mentor somebody, that's also like a really rewarding gift too. To the point we talked about earlier, that's something that is tremendously rewarding for people. It's not enough to just receive, receive, receive. Like giving can be even more rewarding than, than receiving. My kid, we're just coming off of Christmas. My kids don't understand that. And they have far too many grandparents give far too many gifts at Christmas to truly understand that the joy comes from giving. That's probably the big upside of a bunch of divorces in your family is you just got grandparents for days, everybody's trying to outdo each other, and you just get showered with gifts. I digress. But don't get stuck on the fact that you like. In all likelihood, you're probably not going to have anything to offer these people. That's not how mentorship works. It doesn't have to be like that. The whole reason that they may do this to begin with is that being a mentor can be a really rewarding thing. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. Hey, it's New Year's time, people turn it up to the gym in record numbers. And if you ate like I did over the holidays, oh boy, is it time to cut back. I'm not proud of, but you know one area of our firms that we don't talk about being lean enough with the information we put in front of our clients. Good golly, the reports we run from our tax software, from our accounting Ledgers. You actually think the clients look at that? They sure don't. I can't even get them to read my email, let alone go through a 60 page report. And so if that balance sheet and profit loss is not something that your client's actually going to make sense of, or God forbid, the report from, I don't know, your team tax planning software, your bna, Gross. If they're not gonna make sense of that, maybe it's time for a better way to put information in front of your client. AKA LifeFlow's new financial dashboards. They can be as sweaty or as simplified as you like. You can connect them with a QBO or a Xero file so they'll pull that data in automatically and you can augment them with any sort of additional information you want to. I'm a big notion nerd. It's the closest thing I've seen to notion for financial stuff. Pretty cool. Okay. We did actually a demo of the new financial dashboard stuff on the YouTube channel recently. Just go search Jason on firms live flow simple financial dashboard YouTube video. Just pop that in the YouTube search bar, you'll find it. Or check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Teamup. The people who help you find talented accountants in the Philippines but hire them directly. Very common progression I see from Frank, who lean into offshore hiring for the first time as they turn to like some offshore megacorp and it's like this big skyscraper where they put folks in there and they're maybe scared about security things and all that. Understandably, the first time they work with people offshore and they're like, oh yeah, give me this big sanitized environment where they like strip search everybody before they go into work at the beginning of the day and they leave. And it's like this is fundamentally more secure than the way that we do our work onshore. Like I can understand how this works, but before you know it, you're paying this group like you're paying them as much money to employ those people as you're actually paying the people. And when 50 cents of every dollar that you pay goes to some other company instead of the actual person you employ, that's just a bummer, man. That's just a bummer. So a lot of firms I know transition to just hiring people directly. That is what Team up specializes in. No, no middle people. You're just engaging that person to work with you the same way you would somebody onshore. And 100% of that money is going straight to the person one hundo dollar out of your pocket, dollar into their pocket. Guess it wouldn't be a dollar. It'd be whatever the local currency is. You get the idea. To learn more about team up, check out the link down in the show notes. Thought number five. When you do it, when you make the ask. Oh, when you do that scary thing, get specific about two things about the scope about of what you're asking them to do. If I just say, hey, Mike, are you willing to be my mentor? The answer is probably going to be no, because they have no idea what that means to you. And it's almost like putting a name on a. Maybe this is a. This might be a bigger thing for dudes. I don't, I can't speak to how this is for anyone who's not a dude, but I could definitely say for dudes, like, putting a name on the relationship makes it kind of weird and kind of uncomfortable. Right. But it is worth both defining the scope. Like, hey, would you be down to talk once a month? But also to be specific about your goals. Because if somebody says, yes, I will mentor you, they are assuming some pressure to ensure that they can actually be helpful, which you're probably not thinking about when you're asking that person, hey, will you be my mentor? What they feel on the other side of that is like, it's two things. It's, don't want to make that commitment, but it's also, can I actually be helpful to this person? Like, we are all made of the same insecure molecules where you somehow find what ought to be flattering, being asked to mentor somebody. Like, you will still find a way to turn that into like, can I actually be helpful to that person at all? Know that they're going to be dealing with that. And so if you can be clear about your goals and that person can see, like, yes, that's something that I have at least a bit of mastery of, or I'm further ahead than that person. Then I think it will be more likely that they will, they will help you out. Just don't come in and say, will you be my mentor? Like, get more specific than that. Find a very low stakes way to start. And this probably should not be the first time. It definitely shouldn't. It should not be the first time that you've talked with them before. It's like, have you had some conversations and gotten a lot of value from it? Like, were the vibes positive? That's probably where you circle back and you're like, I feel weird asking this, but Would you be down to do this once a month? Like, you are just, uh, Your experience is such a tremendous resource to me. There is, like, a degree of mentorship that's been missing in my development. I know this is weird, but would you be down to, like, hop on a call every month or so to just kind of talk through things? I specifically want to work on xyz. And if. If that person feels like they have some capabilities there, or at least more capabilities than you, and at this point, maybe you have shown your ineptitude in those things, then it's much more likely that I think they'll be like, sure, happy to. Number six, don't be afraid to shoot lots of shots. You miss every shot you don't take. As Abraham Lincoln said, we are such babies. We are so afraid of rejection, man. If you think of the, like, the compounding benefits of. Of being less afraid of rejection and all the extra shots that you take between now and the end of your life, I know that we get this and we aspire to that, and we're like, I know, I know, I know. I should do more. So, like, do it. Just do it. And then number seven, the last one. And this is probably the hardest thing. And then why you're. You're a little. Little sweaty right now. What makes you nervous about it as much as you can, try not to be afraid of them saying no. Is a person really going to think badly of you if you ask them to be your mentor? Imagine if you're on the other side of the coin. Someone that you've chatted with a couple of times comes to you, and they're like, I super respect, like, your brain and the things that you know. And is there, there any way we could do this kind of on a standing basis and I could pick your brain? And. And I. I kind of. I just feel like I need a mentor right now. If somebody asked you that, what would your reaction be? It'd be a whole bunch of things, right? It would probably be flattery. It would be imposter syndrome. Like, buddy, if you knew all the things that I don't know, you surely wouldn't be asking me this. It would be honestly, probably a little bit impressed by that person that they just did that scary thing and asked. Wouldn't you be like, I would like? I. I think in most cases you would be, like, slightly impressed that they had the gumption to make that ask. So you know what? They won't think. They won't think badly of you if they say no. And that's our fear, is that we're going to ask that person and they're going to be like, no, dummy, they're not going to do that. And if they did, wouldn't want that person to be your mentor anyways. Right. So, like, if, if you, if the shoe's on the other foot and that person makes the ask of you and you're like, yeah, no, that's actually kind of impressive that they ask. Doesn't mean I want to do it necessarily. That's probably going to be the response of anyone who would have been a worthwhile mentor as well. Like, that actually kind of took some guts to ask. So what do we take from that? We take from that. We don't need to be afraid of them saying no. They very much. Like, they may turn you down, certainly. But the risk of them thinking you are dumb, I don't know, whatever word you want to assign to it by you asking and them saying no, like, that's not something that we really need to be concerned of. Again, big prerequisite for, like, these points to be able to land is, are you visible? Do you exist? My gosh, everybody has something to offer the world. You really, really do. And there's so much magic and bumping up against other people that do this stuff and ironing, sharpening iron and all that that these days, like, simply by being visible and out there, you have such an advantage to other people who are not. So to recap, number one, don't like cold ask people to mentor you. Don't start with that. If you see somebody where you're like, dang, that person seems sharp. I would love to have that relationship with them. If you've never even talked with them before, do not start there. Number two, don't go after, like the proverbial gods in a specific domain. Go after the person that's like one or two steps ahead of you. They're going to have the most relevant input toward for what you're doing. Number three, in a perfect world, they're already kind of in your network. And if they're not now, find a way to get them in your network. Like, who else are they connected with? Are you hanging out in the same crowds? Those are the. Those are going to be the best people anyways, because you kind of already have that common thread. If you see somebody with like, you know, thought leader on LinkedIn or podcast, podcast or some sort of creator, maybe a speaker, somebody going around and doing this stuff, if you don't know anything about them, honestly, a lot of those people are maniacs. Take it from me. Like they, they are not all good people. They are not all what they would seem to be in terms of their expertise and their capabilities of doing the things that they're talking about doing. And if you don't have any connection with them to where like, you know, you're kind of hanging around with the same people and the reality is you just, you don't know enough about them to know would they actually be capable of doing this or not? There is, and you know this, but there is such an abundance of BS thought leadership even in our space, in all spaces, I imagine from people who are like, yeah, I know how to do this thing and they're awful at that thing. They really are. And it's easy for me to say cuz I don't run an accounting firm. Okay, number four, don't fixate on not having anything to offer them. That's not the point of mentorship. Number five, define the scope and your goals. How, what, what is the request you're making of them. Being a mentor is very vague, vague, vague. And also what are you trying to achieve? Like what, what do you think they can help you with? Number six, shoot lots of shots. Don't be afraid to go out there and talk with multiple people. You can have multiple mentors. Try to bias towards asking more rather than less and you're greatly increasing the likelihood that you'll find a meaningful relationship there. Then number seven, don't be afraid of them saying no because they will probably respect you more for everybody asking. And it could even be the sort of thing where 12 months later, like it circles back around and they're like, hey, I got some more time now. Like, would this still be helpful to you? It's a scary thing, right? It's funny having kids and you see the insecurities of, of kids meeting other kids and walking into school and kind of their body language and I, I have three different kids, to be clear, different kids. Three different, not three of the same kids, but I have three different kids. And they all have very different social skills and comfort levels. And, and you're like, look at those little kids, they're so cute. They're all so different. And they have their own things they're good at and things they're not good at. And you're like, dude, you're the exact same way. That never changes. Adults are the same way. Walking into a room and by and large accountants. I think this is a hard thing for us to have a comfort level doing this sort of thing, but it is so worthwhile and you know that. So get over yourself, get out there and do it. If you've had a great mentor relationship in the past, pop a note down in the comments with like, how did you meet that person? Any tips you would share for somebody that is looking for that individual and don't be scared to go out and do it. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks for hanging.