MentorCruise has enabled access to high-quality mentoring that simply wasn’t available to many founders before. It has created a space where people can get direct input from experienced operators at moments when that guidance can genuinely change the direction of a business or career.
Over the past few years, I’ve been fortunate to work with hundreds of founders, freelancers, and senior digital professionals, supporting them through a wide range of growth challenges. In most cases, the value of the work quickly outweighs the cost.
I’m very aware that I’m not the only mentor on the platform delivering strong results. There are some excellent mentors on MentorCruise, particularly if you are looking to deepen specific technical skills such as coding, data, SEO, or paid media. In fact, I’ve been hired by several of these mentors to help them grow their own businesses, particularly around client acquisition, pricing, positioning, and commercial strategy. Time and time again, mentoring proves valuable for founders at every stage.
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, has spoken openly about this. Reflecting on his own experience, he said:
The best business advice I ever received was to hire a coach.- Eric Schmidt
Even at the highest levels, having an experienced external perspective matters.
I’ve seen the same pattern repeatedly in my own career. The biggest leaps forward rarely came from doing more alone, but from adding the right experience around me at the right time. Mentoring remains one of the highest-ROI investments a founder can make, because the improvements compound long after the engagement ends.
Early in my career, I hired a mentor to help me scale my first agency. At the time, paying around $700 a month felt like a serious commitment. Looking back, that decision generated well over $100k per year in additional revenue. It’s now been around ten years since we first worked together, which means that single decision has contributed well over $1m in additional revenue over time and continues to do so, even though we stopped working together years ago.
Mentoring is a proven way to grow. As founders scale, the form that support takes often needs to change.
Many founders reach a point where the challenge is no longer finding information or tactics, but making the right calls consistently. Pricing, hiring, positioning, and growth decisions begin to interact, and the cost of getting them wrong increases quickly.
In those situations, I’m often brought in to help connect the dots. The role is to help founders prioritise, make trade-offs, and turn advice into clear, confident decisions that move the business forward.
As businesses grow, decisions carry more weight. Pricing changes affect cash flow. Hiring mistakes are expensive. Opportunities look attractive but come with risk. Founders often carry all of this in their head, with no one to sense-check thinking or challenge assumptions in a constructive way. This is where a Non-Executive Director (NED) adds real value.
Growth means heavier decisions, made with real consequences. Too often, founders carry them alone.
An NED typically suits businesses with five or more staff, generating over $10k per month, and with ambitions to grow beyond that. Earlier-stage founders are usually better served by a standard mentoring package.
When I work as a NED, I act as a right-hand partner to the founder or leadership team. Someone who understands the commercial reality, asks the uncomfortable questions, and helps you think clearly when the pressure is on. It’s about judgement, perspective, and having someone who has your back when decisions are high-impact and time-sensitive.
My background is in building and running digital agencies for over 25 years and founding six businesses. I’ve lived through growth phases, plateaus, restructures, pricing mistakes, team challenges, and the day-to-day realities of running a business. That lived experience is what I bring into NED work.
A recent example includes working closely with the founder of AI Heroes, a leading AI agency based in Amsterdam. Over a two-year period, I worked alongside him as he navigated major business decisions, successfully exited an AI startup, and then continued to advise him as he scaled his agency to more than 25 people. The work covered commercial strategy, positioning, pricing, team structure, and decision-making at pace.
Alongside this, I’ve worked with founders and leadership teams at board level, helping them make clearer decisions around sustainable scaling, marketing strategy, pricing psychology, sales processes, and business development. The focus is not growth at any cost, but building something profitable, resilient, and manageable.
Formalising a deeper level of support
Reaching 100 five-star reviews on MentorCruise felt like the right milestone to introduce this deeper level of engagement. Alongside my existing mentoring work, I now offer a Non-Executive Director role for founders who need more ongoing, board-level support.
By selecting my Pro Package, you are effectively adding very senior, real-world experience to your business on a fractional basis. While it’s priced above most standard mentoring packages on MentorCruise, it typically costs less than a junior hire and gives you access to decades of experience and judgement that would otherwise be out of reach.
Depending on location and availability, this can also include occasional in-person meetings, with travel costs covered by you, alongside regular calls and ad-hoc input when needed. I’m happy to sign an NDA, work inside your existing tools such as Slack, and be listed on your website or pitch material as a Non-Executive Director where appropriate.
This offering is best suited to founders, agency leaders, and senior digital professionals who already value mentoring and want to add board-level thinking to their support system.
If this resonates, I recommend visiting my MentorCruise profile, reading the feedback from people I’ve worked with, and booking an introductory call. If I’m at capacity, you can save the slot and you’ll be notified when space opens.
In many cases, progress doesn’t come from more advice, but from clearer decisions. That’s where this role tends to make the biggest difference.
