An important question that remains impressively unanswered is ‘How Do You Find A Mentor?’ Some believe that the relationship and guidance that a mentor provides is paramount to one’s success in all activities. Therefore, the first place to look for a Mentor is your area, So, what happens if all the mentors in one’s area are not worthy to be tagged mentor, hence this leads to the question.

Question: How Do You Go About Finding A Mentor In Your Area When They Are not Any Available In Your Area?

Karthic Gurnani

Answer: I find it hard to believe that mentors aren’t available in your area — they are everywhere. There may not be a specific organization for mentor matching in your area, so you may need to do a little poking around.

Finding Good Mentors While Starting A BusinessTake a look at friends and family. My father ran a successful small business after a career in corporate America. When I decided to leave my job at Dell to be an entrepreneur, I started having a lot of business conversations with my dad. I also turned to friends and bounced ideas off of them on a regular basis. It was great to get their feedback, as they are successful in their own right, know me well and give great advice.

Good mentors are not paid. If you have to compensate mentors then they are not mentors, they are consultants.

Mentors do it for one of the following reasons
1) They know you and want to help.
2) They like helping startups because they have gone through this before.
3) They like the problem you are trying to solve

If you can find such a mentor, you are well on your way to find a good mentor.

When the startup is doing well, you as founder may choose to compensate the mentor in some form. However the mentor never expects nor demands any compensation.

Do you agree with Gurnani?

Absolutely right. We all need mentors.
Reminds me of the book: Richest Man in Babylon.

scubed: An important question that remains impressively unanswered is ‘How Do You Find A Mentor?’ Some believe that the relationship and guidance that a mentor provides is paramount to one’s success in all activities. Therefore, the first place to look for a Mentor is your area, So, what happens if all the mentors in one’s area are not worthy to be tagged mentor, hence this leads to the question.

Question: How Do You Go About Finding A Mentor In Your Area When They Are not Any Available In Your Area?

Karthic Gurnani

Answer: I find it hard to believe that mentors aren’t available in your area — they are everywhere. There may not be a specific organization for mentor matching in your area, so you may need to do a little poking around.

Finding Good Mentors While Starting A BusinessTake a look at friends and family. My father ran a successful small business after a career in corporate America. When I decided to leave my job at Dell to be an entrepreneur, I started having a lot of business conversations with my dad. I also turned to friends and bounced ideas off of them on a regular basis. It was great to get their feedback, as they are successful in their own right, know me well and give great advice.

Good mentors are not paid. If you have to compensate mentors then they are not mentors, they are consultants.

Mentors do it for one of the following reasons
1) They know you and want to help.
2) They like helping startups because they have gone through this before.
3) They like the problem you are trying to solve

If you can find such a mentor, you are well on your way to find a good mentor.

When the startup is doing well, you as founder may choose to compensate the mentor in some form. However the mentor never expects nor demands any compensation.

Do you agree with Gurnani?

I agree, except the the sentence I ruled out. Your mentor may have a lot of mentees and in this case, if you pay him, you may actually gain more of his attention. It's not that he relies or needs your money per se, it's for your gain more of his time and attention amidst lots of contact he has to keep up with.

If we can't find live mentors, we can still make use of literary mentors by reading books written by people who achieved our dreams before.

Seun: If we can't find live mentors, we can still make use of literary mentors by reading books written by people who achieved our dreams before.

Sure! It actually works for me.

This is one aspect of business I ignored and I paid dearly for it. Will look into this asap!

Seun: If we can't find live mentors, we can still make use of literary mentors by reading books written by people who achieved our dreams before.

what if you find that live and happens to be close sortof but just wants your own dream of being like him shattered?

Seun: If we can't find live mentors, we can still make use of literary mentors by reading books written by people who achieved our dreams before.

And just to add to this one,when starting up new businesses,look for people around you who does similar businesses & have been successful in doing it and make them your mentors.But when you can't find one,then take a further step to locate as many that have failed in that line,learn from them why they failed and then avoid their pitfalls.