New in Town - Mentor Strategies?
February 23, 2023
by a searcher from The Ohio State University - Max M. Fisher College of Business in Grand Rapids, MI, USA
Hi Searchfunders -
Just wanted to say hello as a new member. I’m currently doing a self-funded search and have found my local SBA community to be both resourceful and welcoming. While I’m grateful for a growing network, I wonder if you have tips for finding one key mentor. The formal mentor-pairing programs I have found are for operators, not searchers. I’m curious if successful self-funded searchers had one key mentor (outside of the deal) that guided them through search and if they formally sought out those relationships or let them unfold organically.
from The University of Texas at Austin in Austin, TX, USA
Throughout my career I've always believed having a wide range of mentors is important because people have different perspectives.
And the idea of having a single mentor, I think it's too much responsibility on a single person.
What is really helpful is having multiple people with multiple perspectives and one of them may be the one you're closest to but 1. they may not always be available and 2. you might need a different perspective whether you need someone from a legal background, to finance background, or a different work life is perspective or gender, or ethnicity, or whatever you need.
I do some thing where I just ask people to introduce me to other people and that turns into some really good relationships.
I bounce ideas off of other people on here and we you know you could say we mentor to each other in that way, which basically means you ask them a question and that person knows more about the answer than you do.
I also do something called a Prospecting for relationships that I learned from Jay who was the author of the New York Times bestseller the one thing.
if I have a new area that I'm interested in, I use LinkedIn automation to introduce me to new people in that area and then I see which ones are a fit.
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And then of course all those people can introduce me to new people.
there's lots of different ways to find mentors as long as we just think of mentors as someone who knows more about something specific than you do .
The Twitter idea above is also great by just posting not even asking for help just posting what I'm doing on Twitter, people responded and some have been quite helpful - which I can mentoring.
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from The Ohio State University in Chicago Metropolitan Area, USA
This may sound strange but I would consider getting on Twitter and posting some of your experience (within comfort around confidentiality, and you can stay semi-anon if you'd like) and contributing to threads that others start. There are thriving "SMB Twitter" and "EtA Twitter" communities where people are super open and helpful. I have connected with people offline after meeting them on Twitter. Searchfunder is great for this too.
SMBash conference is coming up in a couple of months - that might be worth the investment. I went last year and while I am not actively searching I still found it useful for when I get going on a search for myself. Last year was a good mix of operators, searchers who just closed on a deal, active searchers still looking, intermediaries/service providers, and posers like myself who are hanging around the ecosystem but haven't launched yet!
Best of luck - feel free to reach out if you think I could be helpful.