A few weeks back I remember watching a panel discussion at the Startup Safari Budapest online conference, debating about what is the role of a mentor, and when and how should a startup work with them, or with a consultant, or when & why to hire an expert?

It seems to me that neither parties of this discussion were truly aware of what these roles stand for and what you can expect from them. As someone who has relevant experience in this field from working as such a person and also to co-manage an incubator where you work with them, I thought that I will share with you my opinion about this specific topic.

Let’s talk about the mentor first.
A mentor can be a person with a strong willingness to share his/her knowledge/experience, with a selected Mentee, within a defined time window. He/She shall never directly tell the Mentee what to do, or how to think, rather being a pretty good listener and guide to the Mentee by highlighting crucial elements in its business flow. So mainly listening, asking questions, and through thorough conversations let the Mentee realize either the solution or the next steps towards the solution.
In this form of cooperation, Mentors are spending on average 4–6 hours per month with the Mentee, and their drive is rather a pay-it-forward / pro bono approach.
There are various example of who can become a mentor, but most usually a critical amount of experience — even within one specific field — is a requirement, and then you need to be a great listener, thoughtfully communicative person and embrace the mindset, that you are there to show & walk together the road ahead of the Mentee, but not walk it instead of him.
Organizations, such as incubators and accelerators are highly embracing this form of knowledge sharing method, and usually do not compensate fiscally the mentor, but rather offer him/her a quite visible media presence, opening their professional network for them /with them and covering activity related cost (f.ex: travel, accommodation, F&B, etc.)

Now, let’s see the consultant.
A consultant is a person, or a group of people, highly trained, with a higher education degree and a rather large expertise in a certain field. Someone who can be hired to consult or advise you in a specific task of domains which you would like to execute yourself. The cooperation between the consultant and its client or the principal, always includes a defined goal with an usually precise time-frame, also a specially preset work method, mostly compensated with an hourly rate and sometimes with a pre-defined incentive(s) (bonus, success fee some time convertible to company shares). Depending on the scope of your cooperation consultants might provide you with relevant information in a certain field even with a set of data to use in your business’s favor, commonly in the form of a report when concluding their contractual tasks.

And finally let’s talk about the expert.
It’s definitely a — or a group of — professional(s) with a deep understanding of his/her field(s), and generally, they are offering their services in delivering well-defined services or documents (market research, business plan, pitch deck, etc.) You can order from them any agreed service or product and they take care of its delivery to you, with a high-quality standard. Even more sometimes, you might use these elements as part of your company work element.

So as you see, although there might be some overlapping elements, these three roles have their truly unique characteristic, which clearly separates them.
In special cases it might happen that a person or a group of persons are able to provide you with more than of the above services, however, you need to choose wisely which roles would you like to solve the challenge ahead of you.