We often hear about mentorship as a key to building a successful entrepreneurial venture. Many of us have experienced the power of mentorship by being a mentor, a mentee, or both. You may ask what makes for a good mentoring relationship.
A good starting point is to understand where the word mentor comes from. It is said that our present-day understanding of mentor was influenced thousands of years ago by the character Mentor in Homer’s, “The Odyssey.” In that story, as Odysseus prepared to fight in the Trojan War, he asked his friend Mentor to watch over Telemachus, Odysseus’s son. Mentor encouraged Telemachus, offering guidance and sharing his experience. Thus, “mentor” became a word identifying an individual who conveys wisdom to and shares experience and knowledge with someone less experienced.
Value of mentorship
History lesson aside, mentors do several key things for you as a founder of a startup or small business:
- Share experience you cannot gain from books or podcasts: As we know from data, many entrepreneurial ventures fail and often come with quite the price tag. When we engage mentors, we can effectively gain their insights without “paying the price to admission.” We can read books, listen to podcasts, and scour the internet to gain perspectives and experience, but there are limits to this learning, as authors can only go so far in sharing their stories. Connecting with a mentor creates space that allows a more intimate relationship to develop, where the mentor can share a deeper level of the experiences and how they were dealt with practically and emotionally.
- Expand your network to increase opportunities and social capital: It has been said repeatedly that investors tend to trust startups that were personally recommended to them by someone close in their network. A mentor can be a trusted bridge to these opportunities and serve as a connected resource to get you from where you are today to where you want to be. At each stage of the entrepreneurial journey, social capital is critical to discovering access to resources and connections you need. Mentors provide the social capital required to navigate and reduce friction on this journey.
- Develop a greater level of emotional intelligence (EQ): A founder needs a high degree of EQ to lead a team, garner customers, bring on investors, and much more. A mentor can help deepen your EQ, especially as a younger entrepreneur. As a mentee, you can learn not just about challenges your mentor faced, but also emotions they experienced and how they navigated them. This is key to preparing yourself for the unforeseen.
- Enhance clarity and confidence: A sense of clarity has a profound impact on self-confidence, which is vital to entrepreneurial success. A great mentor will instill confidence in a mentee by asking the right questions that lead them closer to their desired goal/destination. To do this, a mentor should use the Socratic method of questioning. This approach enables the mentee to reach a decision, idea, or connection on their own, thus promoting a sense of clarity that will provide the confidence necessary to move forward.
- Increase the probability of success: In an article from Forbes with research from Kabbage, it was demonstrated that 92% of startups and small businesses believe that mentorship was vital to their success. Of those, 84% were profitable in the first four years, with 68% reaching profitability in just the first year.
Mentorship and the ecosystem
Mentorship is vital to growing successful founders and startups, which in turn will support a thriving ecosystem. Mentorship not only increases entrepreneurs’ confidence in themselves but also connects the broader community to one another, driving confidence in the overall ecosystem (investors, support organizations, workforce, and others).
Startups are innately risky, but having a deep pool of mentors for startups and founders increases their likelihood for success. This is largely due to a greater number of founders receiving and implementing advice at the right time, limiting their mistakes as they scale. Mentorship also increases a founder’s efficiency in using capital, as mentors tend to connect them to potential partners and customers allowing them to generate revenue more quickly.
It is clear that mentorship leads to more successful startups. It is imperative that, as an ecosystem, we invest in mentorship to drive economic impact.
Sign-up for the Carlsen Center Mentor Network powered by the California Bank of Commerce on Mentor Sacramento today. Mentor Sacramento is an online business mentoring platform connecting diverse startup founders to mentors.
The Carlsen Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Sacramento State serves as a regional hub and platform for providing approachable and accessible entrepreneurial education, community, and support to enable startup founders of all backgrounds to explore and launch their ventures.
Cameron Law is the executive director of the Carlsen Center, a passionate ecosystem builder, and a proud Sacramento native.
