How to Be a Mentor, Part III
- Jun 25, 2014
- 3 min read
By Jamie Damato Migdal, CEO and Pet Industry Entrepreneur
Last week in How to Be a Mentor (Part II), I covered my recent experience with a “global” mentorship, where various international organizations came together with the goal of fostering human progress and business relationships across the world. This week, I want to cover a more “local” mentorship, like the one I have developed with Katie Hench.
Katie Hench is the Founder and CEO of Infiniteach, which focuses on changing the approach to autism education. I met Katie this May, when we were featured in a Sun-Times article about women in the tech industry. We spent a day together at 1871, talking to the reporter and to each other. That kind of situation always produces an accelerated courtship (so to speak), where it’s possible to learn a lot about another person in only a few hours.
What I learned from Katie is this – one person with passionate beliefs can change the world. The caveat to that observation is that no amount of passion can change the world if you don’t have a solid strategy and good business plan (which Katie has). So many people have great ideas that never come to fruition simply because they don’t know where to start. Getting a business off the ground is hard, hard work – the paperwork is complex, the emotional cost is high, and the money just seems to evaporate, leaving very little in its place.
In the early stages of any startup, especially the first, you feel like all you are doing is floundering in very deep water (the phrase that always springs to mind is “I’m not waving, I’m drowning.”) When I think back on my first business (Out-U-Go), I have to shake my head at all of the mistakes I made. If I had had a mentor to help me navigate what I know now are common, avoidable pitfalls, it would have saved months of time, and tens of thousands of very hard-earned dollars.
If you can find even one simpatico person who will always answer your emails with sound, thoughtful advice, your business (as well as your mental health) is more likely to survive those early and ongoing days. Does your mentee need legal advice? Introduce her to the lawyer who put together the contracts and incorporation documents for your last two businesses. Is your mentee pulling her hair out because she can’t get WordPress up and running? Put her in touch with the guy who can produce a clean, beautiful site that she can actually edit herself. Do you know a good pet-sitter so that your mentee doesn’t need to feel wracked with guilt over 18-hour days? Give her the phone number.
The running theme here is this – you don’t need to spend endless hours being a mentor. Katie and I plan to spend about 30 minutes per month together on a couch in a corner at 1871 where I hope to answer questions, make introductions, or just provide a sympathetic ear. That’s not a lot of time, no matter how busy you are.
What’s in it for me? EVERYTHING. Believe it or not, as a mentor I get just as much out of the interaction as the mentee. Knowledge is not a finite resource, and it’s never a one-way street – if you have it, share it. Don’t be afraid to make the world a better place, one relationship at a time.
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