“High performers in any field typically have a coach or mentor. A great coach provides you with the benefit of their experience and asks more questions than they answer. They force you to think about your business, career, decisions and choices in ways that you wouldn’t do on your own”, says John Warrillow, founder of The Value Builder System.
And he’s so right!
National Mentoring Day, taking place on the 27th Oct each year was founded by Chelsey Baker, an award-winning business mentor to help recognise and celebrate mentoring in all its forms. It is a great reminder for us at iProtégé about how we founded the idea for our company a little over a year ago.
Katarina and I have wanted to go into business together for as long as we have known each other…that’s almost 10 years. I remember us coming up with all sorts of ideas at Uni, from Student Radio, to Backstreet documentaries and Women’s Talkshows, wanting to change the world.
We have done so many things together and along the way we’ve sought after Mentors. We’ve been to networking events and meetups in search for others who have accomplished goals in the same arenas we want to venture in but for some reason we just haven’t seem to get the right people, yet.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some really amazing people out there who have done some extraordinary things. We have had the great privilege to meet some and they have spent a little time with us, but not enough to dig in and grasp all that we need to get substantial guidance for our next steps in business.
That’s when the light bulb turned on for us. Imagine if there was an app that could walk you through the steps of where you wanted to get to from start to finish. Imagine if it could navigate you from whatever starting point you identify with and guide you to the destination of your goal in your professional career. BOOM! iProtégé was born.
The word Protégé, refers to the one in receipt of mentorship. The ‘i’ in it refers to self. Yes you guessed it, self-mentorship with the guidance of our app that puts you in touch with top people / experienced mentors in various fields to collaborate with and learn from. This partnership can really help give valuable insight into alternative options and strategies at crucial crossroads in your career.
A few months ago we met up with Anthony David King, specialist in social venture innovation, which was a good eye opener. He literally took our mentorship business idea through palm sweating questioning and challenged our knowledge of our market audience to the absolute microscopic detail.
We also applied for a fantastic competition via Virgin Media Business Voom 2016 earlier this year, which gave us more exposure and confidence to show what our business idea was all about. Even though we only made it top three hundred entries but it was definitely worth it and we shall keep on moving forward.
Currently, Crowdfunder are working with Virgin Media Business to give start-up and growth business projects a £10,000 leg up over 10 weeks, details can be found here.
No one got to where they are without learning from someone else be it in personal life or career. We’ve all had influence from somewhere and the more successful the person you emulate the higher the probability you will have similar success.
Plato, Aristotle and Socrates are the great names in the field of philosophy. We only just found out that Plato was a student of Socrates and it is from Plato’s writings we came to know about Socrates. And Plato was the mentor of Aristotle.
So, today is your chance to say thank you to your mentors or if you’d like to get more involved visit http://nationalmentoringday.org/get-involved/
Happy Mentoring Day J
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