Suppose I decide to set myself up as a business mentor

Suppose for a moment I decided to set myself up as a business mentor. I buy a domain, create a bunch of pages and set up an autoresponder to build a list of prospects.

Six months later, nothing has happened. Not a single call. No one on my email list. No one en-route through my epic sales funnel, and no income.

Sound familiar? What went wrong?

I enter ‘business mentor’ in Google and two things become apparent:

1. There must be plenty of money in it (there are 3 ads above the fold, and 3 below).

2. I can’t find a single mentor on the first two pages of organic results. It’s all business support organisations.

So I click on the top advert. It brings up some kind of mentoring software. I have no idea what it’s trying to sell. Probably a new SaaS business that somehow won a 7 figure funding round and has no idea what they’re doing.

I click on the second ad, that’s a little better. It’s an individual who claims to have been ranked in the top 30 business coaches globally for 5 years. They have a powerful guarantee (agree the ROI with them and they’ll make up whatever the difference is if you don’t reach the target in 6 months).

The third ad is a “heart centered” business mentor, but has no guarantee (the “we’ll only work together if we’re a fit” approach).

So now I get it. I’m going to need to run ads with a super strong guarantee. However, I still have no idea if any of these people actually make money (maybe the one with the strong guarantee won the lottery, who knows).

The real problem with this niche is the same one every unsuccessful business has faced. Lack of customer focus. If I were looking for a mentor, I wouldn’t be looking for a ‘business mentor’. I’d be looking for a god-like superstar. Someone who could prove in an instant it would be criminal not to hire them.

To make any business work, we must focus on who we serve and why we serve them. To focus on anything else results in nothing. Try answering these questions and you’ll be way ahead of most people:

1. Who is your audience?
2. What is their problem?
3. How are you going to guarantee to fix it?
4. How fast?

People who are confident of their abilities, know who their audience is, know their audience’s top problems, have a solution that 100% works, and can do it faster than anyone else.

PS. Speed only matters when you’re in a commodity market. For top professionals, their specialisms put them in commodity markets of one. Priceless.