MENTORING

Garavagno Laura

Having a mentor and being subsequently a mentee is really important in Business. In term of relations but also and above all in both learning and improving yourself in an especially area.

Indeed, having a mentor permits you to know from the beggining what will be the main difficulties and the goals of your work. A mentor will give you advices on what to do or not at the begining to be efficient and meet success without making mistakes. It can avoid you a lot of trouble and doubts that you may have. To meet a mentor you have to widen your relationships, be interesting in what the others do and not be focused only on your own. In USA people are happy to help you, they know that everybody need a little bit of help at the begining and that with mentoring they have good feedbacks and maybe new partners.

As an example, we can talk about Michelle and Nina, who are the women behind the amazing pastries of Sugar Path. We can say that their first mentors was their parents as their father teach them the importance of fresh food and healthy ingredients in life. Their mother teach them the love in cooking and the pleasure of sharing it. Thanks to them they find the concept that they wanted to create. A pastry which propose a wide range of products but always made with fresh ingredients and with their heart. On the first hand,this way to work made them different from other in term of concept, quality and taste. On the other hand, by choosing fresh products they are also helping small productors and encourage the healthy food that people are more and more looking for. Thus, they also answer better to the consumers expectations and meet more success.

Moreover, we can underline that they started their business in farm markets before to open their own store. They shouldn't have could open it so quickly and so easily without the help of a mentor. Indeed, to cook their pastries, they meet a girl who was the owner of a restaurant and asked her if they could use her restaurant kitchen during the nights when the restaurant was empty, to cook their cakes.The answer was yes. This woman not only lend her place, but also give them a lot of advices to win time, customers, to have a good communication.... Moreover, she proposed them to sell their pastries in her restaurant. It was an excellent promotion for them to get their firsts customers and have a first approach on how customers were reacting face to their work ( what they expected, what they were feeling). Today these 3 women are friends and always discussing, sharing ideas.

With that example, we clearly understand that being persevering and looking for contacts is more than helpful. You can't be afraid of asking people's help, especially if they are working in the same area that you want to. Mentoring permit as much for the mentor as the mentee to learn and improve himself. 

Mentoring is the key to avoid the first failures to make your firsts contacts and meet your first customers. The next logical step of mentoring is Networking.