Category: entrepreneurship

After I did this talk, last week at the Hive, I was approached by someone to ask if I could be his mentor. Which is on the face of it a nice compliment. Rather than say yes or no, I thought I’d tell him the truth about mentoring. And it went something like this:

“Thanks for asking, I’m honoured you think I have something worth sharing, but here is what I’ve learned about mentoring…

A mentor isn’t something we recruit. I can’t just be your mentor. Mentoring isn’t as one way as people think it is. In fact it’s a two way relationship, much like any teacher student relationship should be. Where both parties learn from and teach each other. It’s also less formal than we’d believe, rarely is someone asked to be a mentor, or does someone recruit someone they’d like mentor. It tends to evolve organically. Where for example two people meet or know one another, and enjoy each others company. They genuinely share the same interests in life and or business. When these factors exist, mentoring might evolve.

I then proceeded to say, you know who I am, and here’s my details, call me up for a coffee sometime and we’ll take it from there.”

The point is, we all have multiple mentors, and should be mentoring all the people we care about and respect. It’s not based on age or experience, and it’s not unidirectional. In fact, it should be a life value where we aim to help whoever we can, whenever it’s possible. And most people are human enough to share some time with anyone who puts a hand out for a chat. Personally the people I like learning from aren’t those who are not the richest or smartest, but the happiest.

We always hear about return on investment (ROI) and yield. The problem with this type of talk is that it assumes money is the only thing we can get a return on.

Turns out there are two things we can invest. Time or money. And when we haven’t got a lot of money to invest, we must invest our time. Which is what our education is about.

For bootstrapping startups our key investment is time.

The hope is that our time invested will give us a financial return. Which we can then invest in addition to our time. So the question we should ask ourselves as we track our new startup is this:

What is my return on effort?

Here’s a really nice piece of brand engagement by South West airlines. Watch it, then we’ll chat some more.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKnsyYbfC60]

This is such a simple idea, not just for Airline & time lapse photography nerds, but pretty much anyone. An entertaining audience connection. It brings the audience into the organization, a little bit of industrial tourism, which pretty much any company can do if they stretch their imaginations a little bit.

I think this could work showing chocolate bars being made, rock bands setting up, graphic design work, furniture being carved, clothes being stitched..l almost anything. And the awesome thing is that it’s very cheap to do these days. iMac movie comes with a speed up footage feature, and very good time lapse software apps can be bought for the iphone for a few dollars. It’s a good way to create a conversation, fill the blog, or even tweet about.

Startup blog says: Share the process, not just the results.

Advertising polymath David Ogilvy once said:

‘You are not advertising to a standing army, you are advertising to a moving parade.’

Translation. We get bored of our output long before our audience does. Our audience is changing constantly. When our promotions strategy is working, our own boredom is no reason to change it.

What does this mean for entrepreneurs? It means that change for changes sake is pointless. It means that we need to be sure our communications strategy (or any tactic for that matter) has run its course before we take on the expense of changing it.