If you’re tracking the numbers but still feel like decisions are harder than they should be, you don’t have an information problem. You have an interpretation problem.

That’s where mentorship earns its keep. Not by telling you what to do, but by pressure testing your assumptions, challenging the story you’re telling yourself and forcing you to look at what’s really driving results, especially how and where money is being spent.

The myth about mentorship

When entrepreneurs talk about mentorship, many often picture a more experienced person stepping in with directives. That someone else gets a vote in their decisions, and their leadership starts to look less decisive.

That’s not what happens in effective mentorship. Authority isn’t a scarce resource that shrinks when you invite perspective. It shrinks when decisions are made in a closed loop. The larger the business gets, the easier it is to confuse confidence with clarity, especially when you’re the one closest to the problem.

Mentorship is not a transfer of power. It’s a better decision environment. You keep the final call, but remain aware that your interpretation is not the only interpretation. The right mentorship doesn’t hand you answers. It widens your field of vision, surfaces what you’re missing and forces you to articulate the reasoning behind your choices. That means you still make the call, you just make it with fewer blind spots.

Why I had to redefine what mentorship actually meant

Early on in my career, I thought I needed to figure everything out on my own. I carried a quiet belief that asking for input signaled weakness. If I wanted to lead, I told myself I had to be the only person with the answers.

That definition of mentorship was flawed, and it came from pride more than principle. I associated mentorship with instruction, which made me resistant before the conversation even started. I did not want a voice in my business that felt louder than mine.

Over time, experience forced a shift. I realized that being open to other ideas was not the same as handing over the wheel. Having the privilege to bounce ideas off someone who has ‘been there’ changed my entire approach to leadership. It replaced my reactive habits with intentional ones. Through mentorship, I learned to bring my decisions into the open and examine them from multiple perspectives. I moved forward with more confidence because my thinking had been tested.

And in the process, I discovered that independence doesn’t have to mean isolation. Independence is you own the final call. Isolation means pretending to welcome perspectives when you really don’t.

When you’re in the middle of execution, you don’t see the business the way an outsider does. You see urgency, not patterns. You solve symptoms, not root causes. The bottleneck becomes “busy season.” The overspend becomes “investment.” The churn becomes “market reality.” Over time, that story hardens into the operating truth.

Exposure to other entrepreneurs changed that for me. Hearing people talk about their businesses, their mistakes, and the decisions they regret can force you to look harder at your own. Sometimes a founder describes a situation and you realize you are living the same dynamic.

Other entrepreneurs do not need to know your company to be useful. They just need enough distance to see what you cannot. That distance turns into honesty. Not harshness, honesty. The kind that helps you admit where things could improve before the problem becomes even more expensive.

How mentors expose the gaps in your data

Founders love metrics for good reason. Data gives a sense of control in a world that constantly shifts. The risk is that numbers can also become a hiding place.

Being challenged by people who are further along pushed me to go beyond surface-level data. The numbers might tell you one thing, but that is rarely the full story. A strong month in revenue, for example, can cover up weak retention. A growing pipeline can easily be a distraction from low-quality leads. A profitable quarter can also mask inefficient spending that will catch up when conditions change.

Mentors and peers who ask the right questions force you to investigate the story behind the metric. What changed and why. What is sustainable, and what is a temporary spike. Where the business is actually healthy, and where it only looks healthy on paper.

That shift matters because leadership does not mean reading dashboards. Leadership is interpreting reality well enough to make decisions that hold up later.

How to pick a mentor that works

The point of mentorship is not accumulating more advice. It is converting insight into decisions that move the business forward with fewer missteps.

We have always tracked numbers well, but an outside perspective helped me use that data differently. The biggest shift in my leadership came from learning to make quantitative, strategic decisions. With the help of my peers, I learned to pay closer attention to the ‘how’ and ‘where’ of our spending. I identified where money was flowing and connected those expenditures to specific outcomes.

When you have the right people around you, you start making decisions with cleaner assumptions. You catch weak logic earlier. You stop defaulting to what feels urgent and start prioritizing what is actually important. You also get comfortable saying, “I don’t have an answer yet, but I know what I need to test.”

If you want mentorship that works, choose people who make you think harder instead of people who make you feel better. Bring them decisions early enough that their questions can change your approach. Then take what serves you, leave what does not, and own the final call.