Dorset Business Mentors

Dorset Business Mentors is a majority funded program offering high quality, affordable business mentoring to support and promote resilience and growth in small and medium size businesses, charities and social enterprises in Dorset. The service is an acknowledged centre of excellence in the UK, fielding an incomparable number of talented professionals (around 130) across all sectors, who are senior executive business leaders and successful entrepreneurs, who give their time and enable business owners to benefit from their experience and expertise to support them in raising and realising their growth ambitions. The program is majority funded by Dorset Council and BCP Council and sponsored by INVESTEC Wealth & Investment. The program expertly matches the requirement of individual businesses to the expertise offered among its mentors. The service serves business in any sector and at any stage of development from fledgling, through growth and scale-up to supporting owners with developing their exit or handover strategy. With 82% of Dorset businesses qualifying as micro in size, a core mission of the program is to ensure continued affordability and in return for up to 12 months 1:1 mentoring requires a nominal contribution to administrative costs of £200. The programme offer includes: role mentoring for management staff (and multiple mentors mentoring a number of staff in one business at any one time), skills development courses (such as decision making and leadership), and peer-2-peer networking events - thus enabling clients to share insights and solutions to challenges.