How Do You Scale Mentoring?

By guest author Irina Patterson

To date, on this blog, we have interviewed more than 30 incubator managers and more than 40 angel investors, and all of them are looking for solutions to scalable and effective mentoring resources.

Most mentors are active or retired entrepreneurs, senior executives, and incubator managers themselves. Most seek not only emotional satisfaction from mentoring but also a return on their time (and often money) investment.

If you are a senior executive, your time is worth anywhere from $500 an hour and up. Mentors spend anywhere from two to 100 hours a year with each entrepreneur. So, they invest anywhere from $1,000 to $50,000 in each entrepreneur in terms of time.

Now, consider an alternative. The 1M/1M Premium Curriculum covers all the core groundwork on bootstrapping, positioning, market sizing, customer validation, financing, customer acquisition, team building, and so on. In addition, we have electives that are specific to industry segments like Web 3.0 and e-commerce, cloud computing, healthcare IT, online education, mobile and social apps, gaming, outsourcing, and more.

At 1M/1M, we ask each entrepreneur to spend at least 50 to 60 hours digesting the curriculum so that by the time they engage with a local, live mentor, they have already mastered the basics.

Once entrepreneurs know the basics, local mentors could do higher caliber coaching. This way, everyone stands to get greater return on their time (and money).

By everyone, we mean the entrepreneurs and their local mentors, the incubators and regional economic development organizations and, of course, the local and global communities at large.

Note: The 1M/1M team has invested significant resources to engage with and understand the challenges of the Incubator industry around the globe. You can sign up for our opt-in mailing list to get this information via email on an ongoing basis.