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Small Enterprise Mentoring

Use Your Experience to Mentor

You have accumulated a wealth of experience while building your career.  You can use all that experience as a volunteer small business mentor for the next generation of business owners

How Does Mentoring Work?

Who are Mentors

Our Mentors are all volunteers. They have had successful careers themselves and now want to help the next generation of business owners.

About Meetings

You meet when you like; and up to twice a month. You mutually agree the time and place. To cover Qld, many meetings will use Zoom.

What Workload

We expect mentors to have at least 3 mentees. Meet a maximum of twice monthly and generally less frequently once the mentee settles in.

Four Easy Steps to Get Started

Register Your Interest

Click to provide your contact information to get started. Note that we are a volunteer organization so you are not paid as a mentor and can't charge mentees a fee; now or in the future.

Initial Interview

We have a phone interview to get to know you better and for you to ask any questions about how the mentoring process works.

Start Mentoring Experience

If both parties decide to progress, you will be paired up with experienced mentors initially so you can get a feel for the process.

Continue as Experienced Mentor

Once your training period is completed, you continue as an experienced Mentor.

Do you need more information?
No problem! Ask us anything

No you don’t.  Mentors must only give general assistance and feedback.  This is a requirement of all our mentors.  For specific advice always have the mentee contact the appropriate specialist advisor.

To some extent.  We let mentors know when we have new mentees.  You can express interest at that point.  We then allocate mentees firstly on the mentor’s existing workload (minimums apply).  There may be 1 or two mentors per mentee.

Many of our mentors travel for extended periods or may have personal leave.  To permit this without disrupting the mentee, we generally have two mentors / mentee.  If you are not available for an extended period, we might suggest replacing you with another mentor.

We do have insurance cover providing you follow our policies.  Mentees sign a Liability Waiver form when joining.  

Mentees can be Mentored as long as they like providing the process is working well.  We have a minimum of 4 months to get the process started.  Most stay for 1-2 years or until the business is operating smoothly.

You are not paid as a mentor.  You are not permitted to offer professional services to a mentee outside of the mentoring process in case of unintentional bias.  

Yes.  Our process is a little like “blind dating”; sometimes it works and other times the parties are not the best fit.  Either party can request a change in the arrangements.  We will always offer a change in mentors at the end of a year so the mentee can get the benefit of new insights.  

If you would like to discuss small business mentoring further, please register for a no-obligation meeting or email your questions to reception@mentorsme.org

OUR ORIGINS

Join small business mentoring with MentorSME and support our small business owners

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