What I've learned about business mentoring from getting it wrong
- Graeme Jeremy
- 14 hours ago
- 7 min read
I've spent a lot of my career helping people solve problems, what's taken me longer to understand is that helping isn't always about having the answer. In fact, some of the most useful lessons I've learned about mentoring have come from getting it wrong. I first became a business owner at a pretty young age, by the time I was 17 I'd already had a go at market stalls, freelance contracting, building cybercafés and developing websites, at the age of 18 I bought out my father's previous business partner in a food import and manufacturing business. I was young, confident and, if I'm being completely honest, pretty cocky - I was also the boss. Looking back, there are plenty of things I would do differently.
When I thought being the boss meant having the answers
My part of the business was focused on the kitchen and manufacturing operation, while my father looked after sales and logistics. The people working in the factory weren't new to the business. Some had been there for years and had helped get it through difficult periods.
Then I arrived, the boss's son, very young, very direct and having just displaced the previous business partner. It wasn't exactly the easiest introduction, I remember people asking me questions like:"What should I do next, Graeme?" At the time, I interpreted some of those questions as passive aggression. My internal monologue was like:"I'm the youngest person here and even I know what needs doing. Why don't you?" I clearly wanted to fix the behaviours but at times just I wanted to get rid of everyone and start again.
With a couple' decades of hindsight, I can now see how much I didn't understand. I should have started by listening, I should have tried to understand what those people had been through, what they knew about the business and why they behaved the way they did. I should have recognised the value of people who had cared enough about the business to stick with it. And when someone asked me "What should I do next?", I could have used the opportunity to develop their judgement rather than simply giving them another instruction. I don't think I was a terrible manager, I was just a very inexperienced one. But with hindsight, I was developing dependency when I could have been developing capability.
The other side: the business mentoring I didn't know I needed
I've also experienced the other side of mentoring, not having someone to challenge my thinking when I really needed it. The recession was the biggest example for me, looking back, the risk in my businesses was actually fairly predictable. Too much depended on B2B customers reaching the point where their own internal capacity was exhausted before they needed the services I provided. I was effectively putting all my eggs in one basket, I didn't see it coming, by the time the problem was clear to me, there was no room left to mitigate it.
I believe that having an experienced business mentor before that happened could have changed the situation and outcome considerably for me and my employees. Not because the mentor would necessarily have predicted the recession either. But because they might have asked me the question I wasn't asking myself: What happens if the assumptions your business relies on stop being true? Sometimes the value of an experienced person isn't that they know what is going to happen. It's that they've seen enough patterns to know which questions are worth asking.
When I realised someone didn't need my experience
Years later, at the National Composites Centre, I had a very different experience. I was particularly keen on placement students and graduates. I'd built a large team, much of it made up of contractors, and I liked having people around who were bright-eyed, curious and willing to bring unexpected ideas into the department. We'd generally have people in the team mentor them, and occasionally they would come to me. I remember one graduate who was working on a procurement exercise under a tight deadline. I don't remember the exact procurement now, but it was the typical industrial and construction-related work we were doing at the time.
He came to me and asked what he should do, I knew the answer, but this time, I didn't give it to him. I asked him what options he'd considered, what were the risks? What would happen if he took one route rather than another? We talked through it for a few minutes and eventually he arrived at the answer himself. As he left, he said: "Thank you. I guess I didn't actually need to speak to you." And he was right. He didn't need my experience that day, he needed someone to help him think.
That was a small interaction, but it stayed with me. I'd spent years building experience and knowledge, and it would have been very easy to demonstrate that by simply telling him what to do. Instead, the most useful thing I could offer was to help him trust his own judgement. I think that was probably the point where I started to understand mentoring differently.
Sometimes people do need your experience
Of course, that doesn't mean experience isn't useful, a year or so ago I met someone who wanted to start his own commercial vehicle repair and maintenance business. We'd literally met that day, he'd offered to help me recover my son's motorbike after an accident, and we spent the journey there and back talking.
He had plenty of the usual concerns; finance, equipment, operations, growth and all the other things that come with starting a business. But there was one thing he seemed particularly stuck on, he hadn't decided what type of company he should set up. My reaction was fairly straightforward, it's just a piece of paper. The business would exist the moment he decided to take a job, place an advert, buy a tool or start telling people what he did, registering with HMRC or companies house was the easy bit.
Eventually we got on a call, shared screens and registered the company together. I still have the message thread congratulating him when the Companies House entry went live. He went on to establish his business and is now enjoying being his own boss. Sometimes mentoring isn't about asking a clever question. Sometimes someone just needs a little practical help and enough confidence to take the first step.
So what is mentoring actually about?
I think I've gradually come to understand that good mentoring is less about having answers and more about knowing what the other person actually needs. Sometimes they need a question, sometimes they need a challenge, sometimes they need your experience, sometimes they just need someone to listen, and sometimes they already know the answer but don't yet trust themselves enough to act on it.
The difficult part is knowing which one you're dealing with, that requires listening properly rather than listening for the opportunity to respond. It requires being prepared to challenge someone without taking ownership away from them, and it requires enough experience to know when your own experience is relevant, and just as importantly when it isn't. Perhaps most importantly, it requires being comfortable not being the smartest person in the conversation. That is something 18-year-old me would have really struggled with.
Why I'm doing this more deliberately now
This is one of the reasons I decided to develop my mentoring practice more deliberately this year. I've completed the Association of Business Mentors' Effective Business Mentoring programme, joined the ABM and have now onboarded as a volunteer mentor through the Government's Help to Grow: Management programme 2026-2027.
The Help to Grow programme uses experienced volunteer mentors to provide one-to-one support to SME leaders as they put what they've learned into practice. I don't see this as suddenly making me a mentor, I've been doing versions of it for years. What it has done is give me the opportunity to formalise something I've learned through experience, and to reflect on how much my own approach has changed. The irony isn't lost on me, at 18, I thought my job was to have the answers. Now, one of the things I value most is helping someone work out which questions they should be asking.
From mentoring to leadership advisory
It's also one of the reasons I've recently introduced Leadership & Executive Advisory through Jeremy Associates. The work isn't identical to mentoring, but there is an important overlap. Sometimes organisations need someone to come in and lead a transformation. Sometimes they need someone to solve a particular problem. And sometimes a leader doesn't need someone to take the problem away at all. They need an experienced, independent person alongside them who can challenge their thinking, provide perspective and help turn uncertainty into confident decisions. That's the space I'm increasingly interested in: not telling leaders what to do, but helping them make better decisions and act on them with confidence.
Looking back, I think I've learned as much about mentoring from the times I got it wrong as the times I got it right. I've learned that experience is valuable, but only when it's applied at the right moment. I've learned that sometimes the most useful thing you can do for someone is give them an answer, and sometimes that's the worst thing you can do. And I've learned that good mentoring isn't about making someone's decisions for them. It's about helping them become more confident in making their own. That's something I'm increasingly bringing into my work with leaders and leadership teams, helping them navigate complexity, challenge assumptions and turn uncertainty into confident decisions.
If you're facing a leadership or transformation challenge where an independent perspective would be useful, I'm always happy to have a conversation.
