I’m sure you’ve heard before that there’s “No Shortcut To Success” but this couldn’t be further from the truth.

The REALITY is if you learn how to find a mentor in business, you’ll be well on your way to making MASSIVE progress in a very short period of time that would have otherwise taken you a MASSIVE amount of time on your own.

The entrepreneurship game is not an easy one, no matter how many flash-in-the-pan “Gurus” tell you it might be.

It can often be a long and difficult road and having someone guide you down that road is CRITICAL if you want to succeed.

This post will show you how to find a mentor, how to make sure you find the RIGHT mentor and what kinds of questions you should be asking your mentor so you can get the most from the relationship you have with them.

More importantly, it’s going to show you how to avoid the WRONG mentor, which can result in you losing all kinds of money (and your sanity) if you go about this the wrong way.

A good mentor can help you whether you’re brand new to the game and want to know how to start a business with no money or whether you’re just ready to kick the results up a notch.

Kick back, grab some chips and guacamole, and we’ll get into exactly what YOU need to know to hit your goals 100X faster by welcoming a rockstar mentor in your life that can help you get there.

How To Find A Mentor

The first thing I did on the path to finding my own mentor was keeping my eyes open for who was doing well in my industry.

I run several different businesses but my main one is selling digital courses that teach entrepreneurs how to market their businesses more effectively, so my first goal was to find someone who was already selling products like that but at a MUCH higher level.

While I was doing just shy of 6-figures a year selling digital products through what seemed like the biggest grind of my life, I met someone who was doing 8-figures (over $10,000,000+) every year selling digital products and seeming to do it easier than I was.

That person became my mentor.

I had first connected with them over Facebook, a popular social networking site most people use WRONG that a lot of entrepreneurs use RIGHT.

Most people go onto Facebook and get totally distracted and just like their friend’s vacation photos all day but entrepreneurs go there to connect with each other and work deals with each other.

You might think LinkedIn is a better place for that, but right now the message folders in LinkedIn are always stuffed with spam from the next Joe Schmo who wants you to sell you his social media marketing services, so Facebook can actually be a great place to find a mentor.

My Facebook Rolodex consisted of DOZENS of millionaires and countless people breaking the 6-figure mark by the time I was finished putting it together and the coolest part was that most of them would respond to you same-day, if not same-hour.

When you start building up your Rolodex of entrepreneurs on Facebook, you’ll meet the entrepreneurs THEY are connected to and the ones THEY learn from.

If you keep your eyes open, it won’t be too hard to spot the big fish from the little ones, and the big fish are the ones that mentor you.

But not ALL of them will be a good fit for becoming your mentor. We’ll talk in a little bit about how to find the RIGHT mentor for you because you can’t just pick anybody.

I just wanted to let you know Facebook will be a good place to start.

What Mentors Look For In Mentees

Now obviously, if someone is making millions of dollars a year and I’m a little small fish and want to learn from them…I can’t just waltz into their life and siphon off a chunk of their valuable time for nothing in return.

There are two ways to get in with a good mentor and that’s giving them TIME or giving them MONEY.

Personally, I’ve gotten in with several good mentors in the past by giving them my TIME and now that I have some money I’m reinvesting a piece of it into good mentors to expand my results even further.

For example, I have my eye on a $6,000 course & coaching program I’m about to join after I wrap up a few open loops in my business and that’s CHEAP compared to some of the $25,000+ per year masterminds people join to get the very best mentorship out there.

NOTE: Just because a mastermind circle has a high price tag on it does NOT mean it’s a good one. I’ve had people tell me a $997 course I sell was better than a $10,000 mastermind they’ve attended. You need to be careful when spending that amount of money on a mentor and be VERY sold on them if you’re making an investment like that.

So let’s say you don’t have bags of money and want to get in with a mentor…

That’s where you get in with TIME.

Remember how I said you can find a mentor on Facebook?

The first part of the TIME equation is that you start to hone in your skills on your own and provide value on your Facebook feed to your audience that you’re slowly but surely building.

This does a few things…

For one, when you start providing value and people start following, you can easily tie that back into you making money with it if you read other posts on our blog that show you how.

Second, it makes you STAND OUT from the other entrepreneurs on Facebook that mentor is connected with and they start to see you as a person of VALUE.

If they see you as a person of VALUE and recognize that you have SKILLS and WORK ETHIC…that’s the magical combination for you being able to get into their sphere of influence without you having to hand over your life savings to them.

Not that there’s anything wrong with investing in a mentor, but if you don’t have the money to invest you’re going to go with the TIME investment route.

And with THAT route…you’re going to be working for them.

Possibly for free. It’s as simple as that.

I’ve often given potential mentors I wanted to work with free gifts that would help them out in their businesses.

Liking, commenting and sharing their posts so they make more sales from the post is the easiest little gift you can give them and gets you on their radar.

I just had one mentor I’m getting in a circle with and I wrote a whole review post for the main product he sells AND ranked a YouTube video for the product saying nice things about it.

I’ve made free 2-minute viral-style Instagram videos for mentors and written up Google docs with some advice on how they could implement a strategy I knew about but knew THEY weren’t implementing, to make it easier for them to start.

I had another person I’m working to get “In” with who I just sent some free graphics to for his YouTube channel and also sent over a Google doc about some mistakes his team made on the channel he could fix to make more money from it.

I’m never opposed to the GIVE first in order to GET in the circle of a good mentor.

Think about it: They make MILLIONS of dollars and 99% of people that reach out to them are asking them for a handout or to mentor them for free or some other crap like that.

They see a message from me and it’s some free gifts that are actually useful and can help boost their bottom line TOMORROW.

Which person are they more likely to pay attention to?

It gets me ON their radar as they’re swatting endless amounts of other people OFF their radar each and every day.

And the best part is…it’s not even that hard to do.

Remember, if they see you as someone who is VALUABLE and has SKILLS and WORK ETHIC, they’ll want to be around you because that’s what they look for in ANYONE at ANY level.

If they see you applied some of that work ethic and skill to give THEM a free gift that will help them when you didn’t have to…it’s game on.

Can’t I Just Be My Own Mentor?

Lots of people ask if they can just mentor themselves and the truth is that yes you can, but it’s going to be way harder and take you WAY longer.

You’ll also end up doing a TON of stupid stuff along the way and you might think it’s good to do that stupid stuff because you learned from it…but wouldn’t it be better to just SKIP the hurdles and get right to the RESULTS part?

A mentor can tell you LITTLE things that will save you BIG pain in the future if you listen to them.

For example, I have 7 different info-products right now at the time of me writing this.

I remember one day I was at my mentor’s house and he wanted to help me get to $100,000+ per month so he grabbed a marker and took me to his whiteboard and asked me what my CURRENT plan was for how to get there.

“I’m about to build a full-blown sales page AND an evergreen webinar funnel for each of the 7 products.” I started to tell him.

He smiled and turned to one of the members of his team.

“How many funnels do we use to make over ten million dollars a year?” he asked the team member.

“One.” the team member responded.

He then drew out a funnel where I’d have an evergreen webinar selling ONE of my products on the front-end and then getting on the phone with people and selling them the REST of my products on the back end.

And I would just need to build one phone script instead of building SIX more sales pages and SIX more webinars since I already had the front-end stuff built.

Talk about saving me a lot of time and effort!

It was a better system too, and that’s why mentors are so valuable to you and your success.

I was about to spend MONTHS executing a system that was not nearly as powerful as the one he drew out for me over the course of a 15-minute period of time.

Had I just been “Mentoring Myself” sure I would have made money with building all those systems, but at what cost?

I wouldn’t have the BIG system build (the one that had made HIM tens of millions of dollars) and I would have spent MONTHS on something I could have spent a few weeks on to get a WORSE result with MORE work invested.

Mentors can save you from yourself, and that’s an important thing to know.

We can be 100% sold on a plan being EXACTLY the right thing to do, only to have someone with more experience come in and show us in .02 seconds why that’s the wrong plan entirely.

Better yet, they correct you and hand you the right plan and then you’re off to the races.

What Qualifies Someone To Be A Mentor?

Now here’s the thing: There are lots of people out there offering mentorship who absolutely SUCK as mentors.

(Trust me, I’ve run into a few of these that I’ve personally worked with and it doesn’t turn out pretty.)

Just because someone makes a lot of money does NOT mean they’re automatically going to be an amazing mentor for you, even if they openly offer mentoring services.

Lots of entrepreneurs make the fateful mistake of handing over their hard-earned money to whoever they see that’s making good money, and they assume that because that person has made a few bucks that they’ll be an amazing mentor to them and take them to the promised land.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Out of ALL the people who make a lot of money, only a small amount will be good fits to be YOUR mentor, and we’ll talk about why in just a second.

But know this: Just because someone is GOOD at making money does NOT mean they are good at teaching OTHER people how to make that money.

This is critical and something you MUST understand.

We assume that because someone is rich that it would be easy for them to teach us how to get rich, but there are lots of rich people who can’t communicate what they do in a way you can replicate it.

This is especially important to look out for, so keep your eyes WIDE because you need to find someone who’s making money AND someone who can teach YOU how to make it too, and without both, you’re hosed.

3 Things To Look Out For

I’ve identified 3 big things you need to look out for while you’re wondering how to find a mentor and these 3 will serve you big time.

Find the RIGHT mentor and you can be getting results crazier than you’ve ever expected in a time period shorter than you ever thought possible.

Find the WRONG mentor and you can waste YEARS of your life and come out of the situation more financially broken than you were when you got in.

It’s THAT important.

So, what are the big 3 you need to look for when finding a mentor?

Here they are:

1 – Make Sure You Resonate With Their Technique

Lots of people make lots of money but they make their money in DIFFERENT WAYS.

You need to find a way YOU actually like that you could see yourself jumping out of bed to do every morning.

Some people make millions of dollars trading stocks.

Would looking at all the lines and charts and numbers on the screen EXCITE you or did your inner artist just shudder at the thought of so much analysis?

Some people hit the phones and make millions of dollars a year with sales calls.

Are you the “HAND ME THE LEADS AND I’LL CLOSE EM’ DOWN!” type of person or do you resonate more with the “Underground Introvert” tactics like running profitable websites that pull in money without you having to personally talk to a soul?

You don’t have to pick just ONE way to make money for the rest of your life but you should definitely have your MAIN ways in place and know what you like vs. what you don’t like.

For example, I love making products. I love shooting videos. I love writing. I love SEO. And I’m just now diving into the world of paid ads and I love that too.

My main mentor loves making info-products and he loves ads so I learn a lot about both of those from him.

He doesn’t necessarily love writing and SEO, so I have a different mentor for THAT part.

My main mentor knows how to CRUSH sales calls and has made lots of money doing sales calls in the past…but now he has people on his team doing his sales calls for him trained on his strategy since he doesn’t want to do them himself anymore.

For my business, I still do them myself but as soon as I get maxed, guess what I’ll be doing?

I’ll be getting people on a sales team to do the calls for me, following the EXACT same method my mentor is using to still get results with sales calls without actually doing them.

You MUST find someone who runs a technique you can resonate with or your heart won’t be in it and you won’t stick in it long enough to get good at it.

That part is absolutely critical.

2 – Make Sure They Have Case Studies

I know of people who are on Facebook right now lying about how they made $200,000 in a week while in reality, they didn’t make a dime and actually just lost their house.

Lots of people say LOTS of things about results they get…but few people can back them up.

It’s a big red flag when someone is bragging about the results THEY are getting without posting proof that those results are coming in.

It’s an even BIGGER red flag when they don’t have any testimonials from anyone who’s actually implementing their strategies and actually producing real-time results with them.

They might have fluffy testimonials in the category of “Their training made me FEEL good” nature but if it’s not testimonials about money-in-the-bank results…it doesn’t matter.

You want to find someone who has case-study after case-study of people actually getting specific business-growth results and making specific amounts of money.

For example, my mentor has a TON of testimonials and one is from someone saying they were able to replace their multiple six-figure per year job with online advertising following his strategies, and another person said they made over a million dollars with his strategies.

For me, I have one student who was able to achieve 8/10 rankings on Page 1 of Google in a single day and I have another student who implemented my advice and made $15,000 and put some of it towards buying his dream car.

Obviously, my mentor has produced better testimonial stories than I have but I’m working my way up and my testimonials are no longer about people who “Feel Good” when they go through my products, but people getting actual results.

I’m not saying this to try to become your mentor, but I’m saying this because you need to look for the SPECIFIC results a mentor has helped LOTS of different people get instead of just vague generalities that anyone can produce whether they’re credible or not.

And that brings us to Point 3:

3 – Verify They’re CURRENTLY Getting Results

The internet marketing industry can be a vicious one…and there are a lot of “Has-Beens” out there who made a few bucks YEARS ago that still leverage that fact to trick people into getting “Mentored” by them today.

The problem is…they have no clue how to make money in TODAY’S market.

Well…minus exploiting loopholes in the human psyche and promising to mentor them to riches, which will ALWAYS be “In”.

You need to find a mentor who’s getting results NOW.

Like “New Leads “New Sales” types of results, this MONTH, this WEEK.

Just because someone has “Made Millions” doesn’t mean they’ve made their millions in the past 10 years.

And if you hire someone on as a mentor who USED to make some money but doesn’t anymore…you’re going to spin your wheels and end up just as worthless as they are at the end of the day.

Even worse, some only made their money back in the day by exploiting loopholes in different algorithms that aren’t active anymore or using BlackHat tactics that were WAY on the illegal side that they ended up getting shut down on.

But guess what? That thing made them a few bucks while they were doing it and they’ve been bragging about it ever since, throwing their “I’ve made millions” hooks out there in the water for the next vulnerable newbie entrepreneur to bite on when they swim too close.

It happens more often than you’d think and it’s a BIG issue in the internet marketing space.

So please, verify that they’re making money CURRENTLY and follow the other two steps as well so you can wind up with mentors that are actually WORTH IT and not waste your time with any of the washed-up has-beens.

What Qualities Do You Look For In A Mentor?

Those 3 things are the FIRST 3 things I look for in a mentor, but there are other characteristics I like to look for as well.

For one, I want someone who’s humble about their results.

You find some people in the industry who think they’re God’s gift to the earth because they’ve made a few bucks and they aren’t afraid to tell EVERYONE about it.

You find others who are more low-key about their results and are happy they’re getting results at that level but are always chasing the NEXT level too and working on improving themselves.

These are the ones that will actually help you level up.

If they’re working on getting to the next level instead of just bragging about how great they are for being at the level they’re at, that also means they’re going to be INVESTING their money wisely.

That means they can teach YOU how to invest money too…not just make it and then end up blowing it later.

I’ve seen people make a few bucks and go get the Lambo only to have it repossessed a short while later because they didn’t invest that money into an ASSET that would then PAY for the Lambo.

And I’ve also seen the opposite, where someone launched something and made a bunch of money and threw 80% of that money into paying for an incredible team that helped them take their business to an all-new level.

Some “Mentors” say THEY don’t have mentors because they already know it all.

Some are spending $100,000+ a year to attend business-training and personal development events and getting into high-level masterminds so they can ALWAYS be improving.

Which one would YOU want to learn from?

How To Ask Someone To Be Your Mentor

You already worked up the courage to ask that special someone to Prom in high school so don’t trip up when it comes to asking someone to become your mentor.

First of all, if you’re buying mentorship from someone you’re literally just filling out some kind of form and then handing them money after you get on the phone with them or their teammate and then you’re IN.

If you’re going with the TIME route…you simply start off the relationship by not asking them to be your mentor at all.

You share their posts. You like and comment on their posts. You send them free gifts that can help them out. Maybe you connect them with someone else you know that can help them with a problem they just posted about needing to solve.

At this point, the law of reciprocity kicks in and they feel like they owe you and maybe you ask them a question or two OCCASIONALLY without overdoing it.

The CRITICAL part is that after you get an answer from them…you need to go implement it IMMEDIATELY and show them PROOF that you implemented it so they don’t see you as just a black hole that’s always going to be asking them for advice but never executing on it.

Trust me, entrepreneurs HATE that (it’s a total waste of their time after all) so if you can show that you’re different and will actually take action…they’ll be more receptive to you.

Next, you find a project they post publicly about working on and ask them if there’s anything you can do to contribute to it and remind them of the skills you have and bring some ideas to the table about how you can make things better.

Usually, it flows from there and now you don’t just have a mentor…but potentially are even PARTNERED UP on a project and getting a cut of the revenue it produces.

It sure works better than just asking them to mentor you right out of the blue.

What Are Good Questions To Ask A Mentor?

When you finally learn how to find a mentor…use the relationship you have with them WISELY.

Keep up a flow of continuously providing them with VALUE and you’ll be able to continuously ask them QUESTIONS that bring YOU value.

One of the first things you want to do as far as asking them questions is to layout your GOALS to them and the PLAN you have to get there.

Most of the time you’ll find your goals were centered around other people’s values and a good mentor will help you center them around your OWN.

And pretty much 100% of the time they’ll be able to poke enough holes in your plan to the point where you have to make a completely new one…but they can HAND YOU the new one in just a few minutes.

It was only recently that I asked my mentor if he thought I was on the right track with everything as far as executing my plan goes and he told me I was.

Before that, we were readjusting the path I was on like crazy to make sure I was following the right steps.

Another question you want to openly ask your mentor is asking them what you’re doing WRONG and how you can IMPROVE yourself.

That is…if you have the balls (or lady balls as my friend Jody would say) to ask.

Most people are TERRIFIED to take critique so if you can learn to not just take it but ENCOURAGE it…you’ll beat everyone at everything because you’ll be improving rapidly while they’re slowly withering away into oblivion.

My mentor used to talk about me behind my back a bit to my friends and they’d report back to me that he would say things like “Ben is the type that’s going to be making 7-figures a MONTH but only when he learns how to actually FOCUS!”

They’d report it back to me because they knew it would help.

As our relationship developed, he’d say that kind of stuff right to me because he knew I wasn’t emotional about it at all and I’d see it as a gift, not some kind of insult my ego would otherwise make it out to be.

If you’re willing to ask yourself the hard questions and look at the REALITY of your situation through the lens of your mentor’s guidance…you will get great results.

So don’t just use mentors to get plans for what you need to do to hit your goals.

Ask them to point out your personal flaws that have hurt you from achieving your goals so far.

Those kinds of questions are just as potent…if not more.