Find a mentor for your startup. Don’t act like a know-it-all: those of us who start a new project or company from scratch don’t know everything.
First-time entrepreneurs make lots of mistakes, and I am sick of seeing them, having lived the day-to-day of many startups ever since my time at AJE Madrid, or even before.
The figure of the mentor has always been there; it is nothing new, nothing that came to us from Silicon Valley. Mentors are professionals with more than 10 years of business experience, in other words plenty of know-how, who are willing to help, selflessly, those crazy people who take the plunge with a new project.
I caught the mentoring bug when I was director of AJE Madrid, and I have tried to be consistent and help only with what I know: designing a marketing and sales strategy. That is what I help all the startups I mentor with.
Where do I find my mentor?
Easy. It was in 2011 that AJE Madrid, the Cámara de Comercio de Madrid (Madrid Chamber of Commerce) and the Fundación para el conocimiento Madri+d created the Red de Mentores de la Comunidad de Madrid (Madrid Region Mentor Network). We created a network of 25 mentors and 25 startups, and after the success of the first edition we kept it going; now there are hundreds of mentors: Click here.
Why is a mentor so important?
It’s not just me saying it: it has been proven after analysing hundreds of startups that mentors are one of the keys to success. But why?
- They guide entrepreneurs
- They make them think their goals through better; they challenge them
- They pass on knowledge, their know-how based on their experience
- They open doors to top-level contacts, such as potential clients
- They even connect them with investors
- They empathise with entrepreneurs and help them overcome mental barriers
- They guide them (without recommending or influencing) when taking critical decisions
For which companies is a mentor advisable?
For practically all of them; it isn’t exclusive to tech startups. When you start a business for the first time, or even the second, you have doubts, you haven’t mastered every area, and you don’t have the experience needed to get it right first time.
Mentors can give you general help when you are launching your company, but also in specific areas where they are experts: finance, marketing, sales, communication, legal matters, international expansion… so look for more than one.
What will a mentor ask of me in return for their help?
Some mentors do it altruistically, because they like to help and contribute to your success, so don’t take up too much of their time; keep in touch with them, invite them for a coffee or lunch now and then, and share your successes with them.
Others are pro bono mentors: they don’t charge you at first because you are just starting out and short of cash, but once you have it, it would be good to pay them for part of their work, or even give them a small percentage of equity in your company when you incorporate it, between 0.5% and 5%.
Is being a mentor cool?
Yes, it’s cool and it’s addictive. In my case I must have lent a hand to a dozen startups. With a couple of them I barely got a thank you from the founders, but what can you do; others, though, have given me great joy by doing well and sharing their success with me.
If you want to get on board, get in touch with the person who, to my mind, knows most about this: Don Julio Rodríguez, with whom we set up the mentor network and who now runs Mentoring Spain, which has more than 250 mentors and is crossing the Atlantic.
Julio Rodríguez Diaz
Thanks to him, one of the key pieces of the startup accelerator I run, SEK Lab, has a good network of mentors, and we do proper mentoring thanks to his methodology.
Categories