Why did you decide to become a mentor?
Mentorship is a rewarding process for the mentor, at least as it is for the mentee. I have decided to take this direction in order to diversify and expand globally, helping talented entrepreneurs across the globe.
From my experience, talented mentees tend to be diligent and open-minded (the very fact that they turned to mentorship shows they are willing to push further themselves).
I trust their challenges would not end within a personal mentorship, as their needs will certainly grow with them, and I’ll be there to support them in a continuing relationship.
My diverse background means exposure to a wide range of managerial, product, marketing, and cultural challenges. I draw on this experience to generate insightful advice for my mentees.
I pride myself on my agility and ability to integrate disparate experiences, while quickly learning new contexts, and coming up with innovative solutions, comparable to proven best practices.
Most importantly, I find the ever-changing nature of consulting, mentorship included, is what draws me most to this line of work. I do not view myself as a "specialist" in the narrow meaning of the word, but more as a generalist specializing in the analysis of uncharted waters.
How did you get your career start?
That’s a good one, as I went the long path:
I started as an industrial designer and built my consultancy to focus on manufacturing industries. This is where I designed durable goods and industrial equipment, communication hardware, and access control systems.
Following my MBA studies, I joined the industry as an R&D manager, specializing in medical devices and electronic monitoring. In that capacity, I developed new product concepts, as well as maintained a large product portfolio.
Entrepreneurship followed suit, again in medical devices, where I co-founded and led a company developing a fall-prevention exercising system.
Closing the cycle, I find myself in consulting again, now more and more in software companies (b2b SaaS seems to be all the rage in my corner of the world, but hardware and consumer startup companies are welcome anyway).
What do mentees usually come to you for?
The first kind of mentees come to me to expand their understanding of business growth challenges, especially in technology startups.
I help them understand their market, for its size, trend, and structure.
They then articulate their solution for an unmet need.
We craft a positioning statement that would guide them in their journey ahead of the competition. Financial planning follows suit as we budget for goals and activities. Now is the time to assemble a compelling investor media kit. This is where I take my leave, and they continue their journey.
The second kind of mentees are C-suite executives in the technology domain, facing product, strategy, marketing, and growth challenges in their roles. To these I offer what I call management extension services, coming up with a point solution to each type of problem: It can be a Go-To-Market plan across geographies, it can be a marketing and sales operation plan, it can be a product validation program.
The third kind of mentees reaching out to me are young professionals trying to cut their path to personal growth and professional success, usually trying to secure their first employment or move up the organizational ladder. I help them understand where they stand in the grand scheme of their industry, and what are career paths they could follow, and how should they go about it.
What’s been your favorite mentorship success story so far?
I had the privilege to help a few startups and Venture Capital firms:
- An electric bicycle startup got a seed investment with my help. I was able to identify a strategic investor, who later took on the company's management and built the first version of this complicated consumer hardware.
- A Shopify retention add-on got seed investment based on the investor kit we have created together. Noteworthy is the work we did with a growth model, looping back revenue to fuel the lead-generation process.
- A text-to-speech startup developed a new product, converting news articles to video, automatically. This innovative product was built on cutting-edge natural language processing concepts, bringing in context-sensitive automatic prosody generation.
- In an assignment spanning several years, I provided a CEO and founder of an enterprise software platform company management extension services, helping his firm to grow as it searched for focus and product-market fit. From competitive analysis to positioning, to strategy formation and expansion plan, I was able to push this SME to new products, markets, and funding.
- I have conducted Product due diligence on a local service provider for an acquirer, wishing to take that service globally. In this process, I mapped the strengths and weaknesses of the target company's technology, evaluating if it was ripe to compete against incumbent competitors. I then defined how such expansion could be done, and finally, I pointed to the geographies and segments in which this move could succeed. A multi-million M&A deal followed through.
- In one of my product assignment, I redesigned a hardware product, changing its architecture so that the total cost of ownership is cut by half.
- In another product assignment, I led a lexical database provider to develop a digital online service, which they could offer to OEMs as a software component as a service. This changed the fortunes of that company, whose business was declining for years.
What are you getting out of being a mentor?
What do I get out of the mentorship experience? To begin with, the challenge in taking on new assignments lies in ‘breaking the code’ of a new business.
Analyzing the market, the competitive forces, and the solution first, then synthesizing the value proposition, the business model, and the go-to-market strategy all these are engaging, challenging intellectual endeavors, which drive my whole career as a consultant.
Now, as a mentor, I hope to help the professional challenges of my mentees, help them grow, and gain new insights in the process.
I constantly seek intellectual stimuli in the challenges presented to me, for solving these challenges is like solving a puzzle: Very frustrating until very satisfying upon a breakthrough is made.
I believe this is the time for me to grow my international clientele, and this may be a good way to start and build connections, a portfolio of success stories, and a professional reputation.