Tips For Finding A Good Community Mentors — Startup 101
…. In everything that anyone chose to do in this life, the only way that they can be assured of success is by finding a community mentors. A mentor is someone that can give advice in every situation and most especially when things aren’t going according to plan. For many people and especially entrepreneurs they tend to try and look for someone that has been there and done it before and ended up being successful in the trade. But in most cases, finding and keeping mentor can really be hard and one has to search long and hard especially if the person they are looking for, for the mentorship isn’t someone they know or have a relationship with teaching and mentoring communities.
Don’t Be Afraid To Ask
Once a good and perfect mentor is identified, the entrepreneur should worry less about how busy the person’s schedule is. There is a need to recognize that the business has to grow and it will need the guidance of the mentor that one has identified. The entrepreneur should shoot to the mentor who is successful. The entrepreneur should have the confidence that the person they are approaching will say “yes” after all the entrepreneur has nothing to lose after all. The entrepreneur should get their pitch right and present it confidently.
Be Mentee-Worthy
Anyone who is looking for a mentor should make sure that they are worth the mentor’s time. No one is willing to give up their time to someone whose business doesn’t have the confidence that the business will succeed. The mentor has to be assured that their time in the venture is being spent wisely. First of all, the entrepreneur should tell the teaching and mentoring communities why exactly they chose a mentor in the first place and what the entrepreneur intends to gains with having the person as a mentor.
Choose Someone With A Different Perspective
No entrepreneur will grow much unless they face up to their flaws and ignorance that they have to the world around. The mentor that any entrepreneur should be looking for is one that will challenge their thinking and reasoning. Try finding someone that can arrive to a solution using a very different method from the one that the entrepreneur would use. Also, it is only good to find a mentor who can see the additional potential that the entrepreneur may never have known existed.
Seek Out For More Than One Mentor
When looking out for a mentor, the entrepreneur should not only focus their energy on one source alone. The entrepreneur should draft a list of the best candidates that they want as mentors and follow it. Sometimes things will not work out when one has only one person they are looking at to mentor the entrepreneur. If things go well with all the community mentors then it is good especially if the person looks for development community mentors with different backgrounds and experiences.
Try To Reciprocate
The relationship should never be one-way-traffic as the entrepreneur needs to and be useful to the mentor. Try and ask the mentor what can be done if not for anything but as a way of saying thank you for the person to help. Some community mentors may insist that by giving their time to mentor someone else is a way of giving back to the teaching and mentoring communities, but the mentee who in this case is the new entrepreneur should never assume and insist on doing something for them.
Having a mentor early on in any entrepreneur’s career can really be valuable as most have confessed that it was the difference between success and failure in their respective businesses. A good mentor will lead the mentee to define what direction the business should take even if in a different perspective and that will be valuable on having more ways to deal with competitors in the field they are in.
