Ed and I have been running our own businesses for years now, and in that time we've lost count of the advice we've been given. A lot of it was generous. A lot of it conflicted. And when you haven't got much money coming in yet, working out who to trust with the money you do have is genuinely frightening. 

If that's where you are, this page is for you. It's the process Ed uses when people ask him how to find the right person and if you follow it too, you’re much more likely to end up with the right partner.

Why this is harder than it should be?

Three things make it difficult.

The first is that good advice isn't transferable. What worked brilliantly for one business can be exactly the wrong move for another, which means someone can be completely sincere, completely experienced and still be wrong for you. You can't tell the difference by looking at their website.

The second is that most people offering opinions on your business have nothing riding on whether they're right. That doesn't make them dishonest. It does mean the cost of bad advice lands entirely on you.

The third is less obvious. When you're the person carrying the whole thing, you're often not looking for an answer so much as someone who understands the weight of the question. Getting a technically correct answer from someone who's never had to make that kind of decision themselves can leave you feeling just as alone as you were before you asked.

Ed's approach: date the person first

Ed's advice to founders is to treat this like an investment rather than a purchase. You wouldn't put money into something after one conversation. Don't put your business into someone's hands after one either.

Here's how he suggests going about it.

1. Don't rush. The pressure you're feeling is real, but the cost of choosing badly is higher than the cost of taking another month to be sure.

2. Make a list of ten people you admire. People who've built the thing you're trying to build. Some a year or two ahead of you, some much further on, some who've exited, some who've built something that means something. If you're building a technology company, find people who've built technology companies. 

3. Ask each of them for a conversation. Not a meeting. A coffee. Nothing more formal than that. 

4. Talk, and then listen properly. Share what you're actually going through, not the tidy version. Then pay attention to what comes back and how it lands.

 5. Notice whether they're selling. If someone quikcly turns that first conversation into a costly proposal, that tells you something. The people worth working with are usually happy to be useful before there's anything in it for them.

6. Use recommendations to speed this up. If someone you already trust knows and rates them, that does a lot of the work for you.

7. Only then work out how to work together. And that doesn't have to start with a fee. If you can't pay someone yet, you may still have a business future they'd want to be part of. There are more ways to shape these relationships than most people assume.

Mentors, coaches and advisers

These words get used interchangeably and they shouldn't be, because they do different jobs and knowing which one you need saves you a lot of time.

A coaching relationship tends to be structured. There's a method, usually a qualification behind it, and the value comes from someone helping you find your own answers through a process that's been tested on a lot of people. When you've got the experience but can't see clearly, that structure is exactly what you need.

 Mentoring tends to be looser. Someone who's been where you are, who listens, and who occasionally tells you what they'd do. There's no framework and often no session plan. The value is in the fact that they recognise the situation you're describing because they've stood in it.

Both are useful. They're just useful for different problems, and the mentoring end of the spectrum is undervalued because it's harder to package. Work out which one you're short of before you start looking, or you'll spend money solving a problem you didn't have.

Signs worth paying attention to

• Someone who won't tell you what they charge until they've worked out what you can afford is telling you how they price.

• Someone who can't name a single client, or point to anything that happened as a result of their work, may have good reasons. Ask what they are.

• Someone who talks more about their process than about your problem is selling you the process.

• And someone who agrees with everything you say isn't going to be much use to you. You want a person who'll tell you an idea isn't your best one and explain why. That's uncomfortable, and it's the whole point.

If you'd like a conversation

We do this too. That's the obvious thing to say at the end of a page like this, so here it is, said once.

If you'd like to use one of your ten conversations on us, we offer a free 30-minute discovery call. No proposal, no deck and no follow-up sequence. You tell us what you're wrestling with, we tell you what we think, and if we're not the right people we'll say so and point you towards someone who is.

If we're useful, brilliant. If you go through this whole process and end up working with somebody else entirely, that's a good outcome too.