August is the best time for founders to find a business mentor

August is an underrated opportunity for business leaders. With employees and clients often taking time off, the usual pace of meetings and decisions tends to ease, creating a rare chance to step back from the day-to-day and consider the opportunities and challenges as we head into the final third of this year and start to think about 2027.

This is where professional business mentoring can be particularly valuable. Business mentoring is a professional relationship in which an experienced businessperson works with an entrepreneur, business owner or leader to support the growth of their business. Within this structured relationship, a mentor brings their own experience alongside coaching and practical business tools, helping business owners work through challenges, make decisions and identify opportunities.

All too often mentoring is seen as something businesses turn to when they have a problem. In reality, it can be just as valuable, if not more, when a business is performing well and its leader is thinking about what comes next.

Our research into professional business mentoring found that 42% of business leaders believe they would have missed growth opportunities without the support of a mentor. More than a third also said they would have lost market share to competitors without that support. These findings suggest that mentoring can play an important role in helping leaders look ahead, identify opportunities and make decisions before they become urgent problems.

One of our affiliate members, Adam Clarke, sees this in his work with founders and senior leaders. He has found that leaders can become so absorbed in the day-to-day demands of running their business that they lose sight of what they are trying to achieve next. As Adam puts it, “Often the best time to engage a mentor is when things are going well and you’re preparing for the next stage of growth.”

For Adam, that does not mean telling a business owner what to do. His role as a mentor is to challenge assumptions and use his own experience to help a mentee work through their own decisions. He describes this as being a “critical friend”, helping leaders to step outside the business they are immersed in and see it differently.

Mentoring is not simply about having someone to talk through problems with. Its value comes from combining that space to reflect with practical experience, challenge and tools that can help a business owner move from thinking about a problem to doing something about it.

That ability to step outside the business is particularly valuable in August. With fewer meetings and competing demands, leaders have more opportunity to take stock of where they are, where they want to go and what might be getting in the way. The quieter summer period creates the space to have conversations that are often difficult to make time for when the day-to-day takes over.