You do not need convincing that mentoring works. You have watched a capable person stall because the only development on offer was their manager's spare half hour, and you know what one honest conversation with the right mentor would do for them.

The people whose approval you need are starting from different questions. What does it cost. How much of the team's week does it take. What does the business get back. How will we know if it worked. Those are fair questions, and most development proposals stall on them for the same reason: the answers come back without proof. A cost that turns out to be an estimate. A time commitment nobody has counted. A benefit lifted from someone else's case study. A review promised for some point next year.

All four can be answered here with figures you can show. This is how to put them together.

Start with the cost, because it is the easy part

A cohort with PeopleTopics costs €290 for your first three mentoring pairs, and €50 for each pair after that. Four pairs comes to €340.

We priced it that way deliberately. Most companies smaller than 300 people have no standing L&D budget line, so every request becomes a special case, and special cases need process. €290 sits below the level where that process switches on. For most HR leads this is a decision they can make themselves, or settle in a single conversation.

Keep the cost part of your case short. It needs the least defending of anything you will present.

The number people will want: time

The question you will get is how much of people's week this takes. The good news is that you can answer it precisely.

A cohort runs three sessions per mentoring pair. Add around twenty minutes of preparation or notes either side of each session, twenty minutes of onboarding at the start, and a couple of minutes of feedback after each call. That is under five hours per person, across the whole 3-month cohort.

Scale it to your group. A company enrolling four mentees and providing four mentors has eight people taking part, which comes to roughly 35 to 40 hours in total, spread over about three months. Per person, per week, it is under half an hour.

Your own coordination time stays small too. Matching, scheduling, reminders and feedback collection run in the platform, so what is left for you is briefing your participants, one internal announcement, and reading the results as they come in. Half a day across the cohort is a fair estimate.

Adjust the assumptions to your own setup. The value is in walking into the room with a specific figure rather than a range, because a specific figure is something a manager can plan around.

Give your managers something concrete

A manager who hears "a mentoring program" pictures something open ended. A manager who hears "three one hour sessions between October and December, booked in advance, and you will have the dates in your calendar" has something they can work with.

Bring them the dates and the names early. Most of the friction in internal development programs comes from managers finding out late, and it disappears when they are part of the plan from the start.

The mentor seat is a development seat

This is the strongest argument in your case.

When you ask a department head for mentors, you are offering their senior people something they are unlikely to get anywhere else. A senior person who has to explain, out loud, to a capable stranger, how they handle a situation they normally handle on instinct is doing real work on their own judgment. It is the kind of development that usually only arrives through a promotion or a crisis. Here it costs five hours and no budget.

Reciprocity is how the model works: your people are mentored by people at other companies because your company puts mentors into the same pool. Say that plainly. It reframes the ask from a favour into an exchange, and it gives your department heads a stake in it rather than a cost.

Answer the confidentiality question before it is asked

Someone will ask what people can safely discuss with a mentor from another company. It is a fair question and it has a clear answer.

Sessions are structured around the mentee's own development, and both people get session guides that set the boundaries before the first call. On your side, you see aggregated feedback and participation from your own company, rather than the content of individual conversations. People speak more freely because of that, which is a large part of why an outside mentor is useful in the first place.

Promise what you can deliver

You will be asked what this changes. The strongest position is a specific promise you can keep.

You can commit to this: every participant is matched with someone outside your company who has done the thing they are trying to learn, and every session is rated by the people in it, so you will know within weeks whether it is working rather than guessing at the end of the year. You will see it per pair and across your company.

That is a firmer commitment than most development spend comes with. A number you can produce in November is worth more in the room than a percentage borrowed from a study of a company ten times your size.

When you are ready

Cohort 1 starts in October. If you would like to walk through the numbers for your own team, or see what the feedback looks like from the inside, book an intro call and we will put the case together with you.

Illustrations by Storyset