Who runs this
John Morrow founded Managers & Directors in 1998. The firm began in governance and mentoring, working with owners and directors of mid-sized private companies on the structural questions that come with running and growing them: how decisions get made, who sits alongside the owner, how the business prepares for the next stage of ownership. The executive search practice developed from that work naturally. Owners who had been working with John on governance and structural questions started asking him to find the people who would run the next phase of the business. Mentor matching is where those two threads meet: thirty years of finding the right people for the right roles, now applied to finding the right mentor for the right brief.
What a South-East Queensland business owner gets when they engage this service is access to John's judgement on who would actually help their business. Not an algorithm, not a researcher working from a database, not a panel review. John takes the brief, runs the search, builds the shortlist, and presents it. He stays available through the interview process and up to the placement, then steps back and lets the mentor and client run the engagement.
The search work is done remotely by nature. Most of the pre-engagement conversation happens by phone or video, with email handling the written detail. John meets clients in person by exception rather than by routine, and the method has been built around that reality for three decades. What stays close is the judgement and the network. The geography that matters in this engagement is where the mentor is, and for a South-East Queensland brief that means a mentor in Brisbane, on the Gold Coast, or on the Sunshine Coast, matched as close to the client as the brief allows.
The firm
Managers & Directors Pty Ltd is the entity that contracts with you for any engagement. Established in 1998. ABN 43 082 518 778. Registered for GST. The engagement letter, the brief, the search, the shortlist, and the post-placement check-in are all delivered by the firm, with John as the principal who does each of them personally.
Business Mentors Brisbane is the trading name under which Managers & Directors runs mentor matching for South-East Queensland business owners. The firm has operated continuously in governance, mentoring, and executive search since 1998. It runs Business Mentors Perth and Business Mentors Sydney, and Business Mentors Melbourne, the same matching method applied city by city. The Brisbane service draws on what those decades have built in practice: a working network of senior people John knows from years of executive search and placement, maintained through the ongoing relationships that come from doing that work well over a long period.
The network is the asset. Finding the name of a senior executive or a former CEO is not difficult. LinkedIn has made that part of the task trivial. What isn't trivial is having a relationship with that person that means they'll take the call seriously, read the brief, and consider the engagement on its merits rather than politely declining. John has spent thirty years building, maintaining, and renewing the relationships that make those approaches land. That's what the search engagement is buying.
The search itself is solving a four-way matching problem. The brief has to connect to the mentor's operating background. The mentor has to be willing to take the engagement at this point in their career. The mentor's working style has to suit the client. And the client has to want to spend time with this particular person. All four have to line up. The mentors in the network aren't running mentoring practices; they're senior operators who take an engagement when the brief matches what they've spent their career learning and the client is someone they want to invest time in. The search is finding the three or four people most likely to produce that outcome for this specific client, and the shortlist is presenting those people in enough depth that the client can make a good choice.
The firm is small by headcount and deep by network. There is no team of consultants behind John, no offshore research function, no back office. What you're engaging is a thirty-year search practice run by one experienced principal whose primary asset is the quality of who picks up when he calls.
Why mentor matching
Mentoring is the right kind of help when what you need is someone who has personally been where you are. Not skills training, not a project delivered, not governance oversight, not capacity added to the team. Mentoring is for the owner who is facing a stage of the business that is new to them, who would benefit from talking it through regularly with someone who has navigated something similar, and whose situation calls for ongoing dialogue rather than a one-off output. The value builds across sessions over a year or more. It doesn't come from any single conversation.
South-East Queensland's business community has particular patterns that make mentoring valuable in specific ways. Construction, trades, and development businesses that have grown fast on the back of the region's expansion and now need a management structure that can carry the size they've reached. Owners who built a business on their own direct oversight and personal relationships and have hit the point where that model can't stretch any further. Health and allied health practices and tourism and hospitality operators scaling past the point where the founder can hold the whole thing personally. These are situations where real operating experience is more useful than method, and where the mentor's value comes from having personally navigated something structurally similar.
The matching is where the value gets created or lost. Two senior people who respect each other but whose operating backgrounds don't connect to the client's situation will produce a relationship that feels professional and delivers little. Two people whose backgrounds connect properly and who click personally will produce conversations that change how the owner thinks and decides. The difference between those two outcomes is the quality of the brief and the quality of the search run against it. That's the work the engagement fee is paying for, and it's the part of the process John has been doing in various forms for thirty years.
Who the service is for, and who it isn't
The service is built for owner-managed South-East Queensland businesses with annual turnover between $1 million and $20 million as a typical range, though businesses above that band are workable and the conversation is worth having. Below $1 million the engagement fee and the mentor's session rates sit above what most businesses at that scale can comfortably absorb, and the complexity that makes senior mentoring valuable usually develops later.
The buyer is the owner or the founder, running a business they built or bought, usually with a small leadership group sitting beneath them. Most are somewhere in their late thirties to early fifties. The typical situation is that the business has grown to a size or a stage the owner hasn't managed before, and the tools and instincts that worked at the last stage aren't quite sufficient for this one. Private sector across any industry. We take engagements with not-for-profits where there's genuine budget for it. We don't take public sector or government engagements.
South-East Queensland's market adds some specific buyer patterns. Construction, civil, and development businesses scaling with the growth corridors and the infrastructure pipeline, including the long run of work attached to the 2032 Games. Trades businesses that have grown from a handful of people to a sizable operation and never built the management layer to match. Health and allied health practices expanding with the population. Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast tourism and hospitality operators running at a scale their original setup was never designed for. These are the situations the regional mentor pool is particularly well placed to address.
The service isn't right for every situation. If you need a project delivered, hire a consultant. If you want structured skills training, hire a coach. If the business is in genuine distress, insolvency risk, serious legal exposure, or a partnership dispute heading toward litigation, what you need is a turnaround specialist, an insolvency practitioner, or a lawyer. Senior mentors won't take engagements where distress is the underlying situation, and the model isn't built for it. If your sector is so specialised that very few suitable mentors exist in South-East Queensland, the search may take longer and sit at the Specialist Match end of the fee range. John will tell you that on the first call.
If the situation fits and the cost makes sense, the first call is where you find out whether the model works for your specific circumstances. Some calls end with John pointing the owner toward a consultant, a coach, or something else entirely. That's the honest outcome when the model isn't right, and it's better for everyone than taking an engagement that won't deliver what the client actually needs.