Brainstorming: The CompleMentor Service

When we mentor entrepreneurs, we do many things instinctively – brainstorming, educating them on certain business issues, helping make connections for business validation, working on specific challenges to help the entrepreneur synthesize specific solutions, etc….

However, when we were trying to package these varied activities for the MentorSquare platform into neat bundles for specific segments of entrepreneurs, we ran into a big challenge. Because the entrepreneur’s requirements are hard to compartmentalize into specific areas, geographies, industries and such like, and therefore required customization.

As we grappled with this challenge, we decided to do a very entrepreneurial thing – come up with the best possible solution given the constraints and our understanding of entrepreneurs’ needs. We have, however, left the door open for course correction as we go along. We decided to compartmentalize our services into three broad families:

- CompleMentor: Advice and ideas to help you make better decisions

- AugMentor: In-depth advice to take your business to the next level

- ImpleMentor: Helping you execute on your plan

In this post, I would like to share with you my rationale and thinking behind CompleMentor service, which is the service that most members have subscribed to.

CompleMentor: Advice & Ideas

Often an entrepreneur is faced with several choices, all of which appear to be equally attractive. Sometimes entrepreneurs need help in areas that they don’t know much about, and other times need help in areas that they don’t know that they didn’t know (!). Other times they just want to bounce their ideas off of somebody who has been down the path before and, therefore, in a position to provide advice that could help the entrepreneur validate available options. And there are times that the entrepreneur simply looks for guidance on what to consider or whom to talk to next before taking a decision.

We have structured the CompleMentor package to cater to these situations. This service provides to the MentorSquare member access to the complete set of Mentors and their vast experience, in-depth expertise and extensive geographical reach. We at MentorSquare believe that a single Mentor cannot provide guidance and assistance for all problems and all situations. The Member thus needs to select multiple mentors, thereby ensuring good and relevant responses. This also implies that the member needs to make informed decisions about how many and which mentors they should invite to participate in their conversation.

To help with this and to establish a personal relationship with the Member the network of Mentors is front-ended by an Executive Mentor (EM), and every Member is assigned an EM. Executive Mentors are the link between the member and the MentorSquare platform, and help facilitate the Member’s experience on the platform. They help on-board new Members, they help them start conversations on the platform, indentify the right set of Mentors, bring conversations to convergence and they monitor the Member’s progress on a regular basis. Member interaction with Executive Mentors could be on the platform as well as offline, whereas interaction with the Mentor network is almost always on the platform.

The CompleMentor product is not designed to be an in-depth, detailed solution service but is intended to provide comments, suggestions, advice, pointers, guidelines and feedback that will help Members develop their entrepreneurial muscles, find their bearings and refine their thinking, and use these as decision support inputs to take their businesses forward.

I would love to hear your thoughts on how this service meets the requirement of Members and how it can be evolved to serve them even better.

ravi.narayan@mentorsquare.com.