Mentors mix inspiration and brutality

By VIKKI BLAND

Business mentor Alison Quesnel has been helping New Zealand businesses for 11 years, yet she remembers her first client vividly.

"I went to help a retail store that was losing money. But the store's books hadn't been updated for six months and I had no idea what was happening.

"I started with the basic stuff, like asking the owner what he paid himself and what his overheads were.

"His first statement was, 'I don't pay myself', and his first question was, 'What's an overhead?"'

Quesnel is a business mentor for Business in the Community (BITC), a mostly privately funded organisation that offers free mentoring for small businesses.

To qualify for a mentor you must have been in business for more than six months and have fewer than 25 employees.

Last year nearly 5000 businesses, mainly small- and medium-sized, were helped.

Mentors such as Quesnel are required to be experienced in business but willing to work for free. Many are still working, with some fully or semi-retired.

Ray Schofield, chief executive of BITC, says some mentors find the work keeps them sharp.

"Mentors have a desire to help and to pass on skills accumulated over the years."

Quesnel says people in small businesses lose their objectivity and have trouble letting go of tasks.

She recalls an Irishwoman whose story resembles "the old woman who lived in a shoe" nursery rhyme.

"She had this wonderful bread business in her downstairs industrial kitchen. But she had quite a few children and she was just exhausted.

"She would get up at 2am to make the loaves, then get the kids to school and deliver the loaves all across town."

Quesnel says the woman had to be persuaded to let a courier do the deliveries.

"Small businesses can't walk down a corridor and bounce ideas off equal peers, so they get too close to their businesses and develop traditional weaknesses in areas like sales and marketing, purchasing, cashflow and research."

Mentor David Griffiths recalls helping a man who spent $200,000 on equipment for making tableware, but did not bother to research his market.

"He couldn't sell a thing because a competitor had the market completely sewn up. It was astounding."

Griffiths focused on export opportunities and the owner has since secured contracts in the United States.

But not all businesses are as fortunate.

Mentor Ron Entwisle says he still feels gloomy thinking about a service-station owner he was called in to assist.

"As soon as I saw his books, I told him to close his doors. He'd purchased a service station but the previous owner had kept the more profitable workshop.

"He was borrowing from his family to pay rent, and taking them down with him."

While the man took Entwisle's advice with good grace, it does not always happen that way.

Colin Bass, who runs a small business workshop company as well as mentoring for BITC, remembers a business full of potential and running well, but which could not keep staff.

"As a business grows, people skills become more important.

"This business owner was demanding and insensitive. His communication and people management skills were lacking, to say the least.

"In the end I couldn't do him any good because he wouldn't change his dogmatic ways with people."

Quesnel says women are generally more open to business mentoring, but both sexes tend to leave it too late.

"We always say to people, 'Don't come to us when you're in trouble - come to us before that'."

Quesnel has also struck dogmatism.

"I went to mentor a husband-and-wife team whose business problems were affecting their marriage. But the husband just folded his arms across his chest and refused to listen.

"The business failed."

Griffiths has never forgotten an inspiring blind man who knew when to ask for help.

"He'd launched his own healthcare business and was doing well, but wanted to get away from management and back to being a medical practitioner.

"We worked out a way for a few of his staff to take over management and he achieved his goal. It was very satisfying."

The mentors say small businesses generally do not understand their target markets, and ask friends and relatives for advice.

"They tend to tell the business owner what they want to hear," says Quesnel. "But a mentor has the freedom to be brutal."

She says too many New Zealand businesses do not know where their strengths are, do not understand price structuring, procrastinate, become stuck inside a business and work in it rather than on it, and completely miss the mark on marketing.

Entwisle agrees: "New Zealanders undersell themselves and are just no good at blowing their own trumpet."

He says business education in New Zealand is deficient compared with places such as Europe which combine trade and management training.

So what are New Zealand businesses good at?

According to the mentors, innovation and finding gaps in markets.

Bass is impressed by people who create small businesses for lifestyle reasons. Formerly salaried workers take their skills outside of an organisation and are creative in how they do it.

Adds mentor Trevor Smith: "We are some distance from international markets.

"Kiwis are clever in moving away from mass-produced products. They know they need a special characteristic to be successful."

Mentors' resumes

* Colin Bass provides workshops for small business. He was previously self-employed and did a stint with New Zealand Post.

* Ron Entwisle is semi-retired. Formerly a chartered accountant, he spent 22 years with IBM in finance and marketing, and has also worked as a human resources manager and run a small business.

* David Griffiths is semi-retired. Formerly an accountant, he was managing director of a leading furniture manufacturer.

* Alison Quesnel is the general manager of Blackmores Group. She was previously a marketing manager and director in Britain's health food sector.

* Trevor Smith, now semi-retired, was CEO of lab supplies company Salmond Smith Biolab.