Opening Letter
Building the Right Team through Mentoring
“Talent is about getting the right expertise working for the benefit of a company.”
Many people ask me what I believe to be the greatest challenge we face as a community when it comes to maximizing the economic benefits from investing and supporting entrepreneurs. My answer to this question might surprise you: I think it is by far and away getting the right talent into these companies at the right time.
You’ll be reading a lot about the opportunities related to talent in this issue of InSight. Conversations around talent can tend to focus on finding, recruiting and retaining employees, but talent doesn’t necessarily have to mean hiring someone. Talent is about getting the right expertise working for the benefit of a company. Because many early stage companies don’t have the resources to hire a marketing, strategy or industry expert, we often help our portfolio companies build their first board of advisors or directors. The resulting infusion of knowledge, experience and connections has proven to be very cost-effective and efficient.
There are also scenarios where we find ourselves advising an entrepreneur who is even earlier in their business development. While having a formal board may not yet be appropriate, connecting these individuals with experienced business mentors can make a lot of sense. In fact, studies show that startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth. In the recent past, providing each of these very-early stage entrepreneurs access to an entrepreneur-in-residence from JumpStart or one of our collaborators' staff wasn’t possible or cost efficient. That’s why almost one year ago JumpStart started to look at mentoring programs across the country that could help to fill this need. Eventually we settled on a team mentoring model developed at my alma mater, the MIT Venture Mentoring Service, which has had a lot of success over the past 13 years--working with thousand entrepreneurs and helping their companies achieve 17 significant liquidity events.
In an effort to make Northeast Ohio’s entrepreneurial support ecosystem more sustainable, this program capitalizes on the knowledge of interested and qualified individuals, many of whom have been asking us to find an outlet for their abilities. All mentor volunteers participating in this program are respected leaders: company founders, marketing gurus, lawyers, scientists, investors and others. These high-achieving individuals are asked to donate eight to ten hours a month of their time to contribute to and directly impact an up-and-coming entrepreneur. This expanded engagement of the community promises to channel previously untapped expertise and experience to accelerate the progress of entrepreneurs across our region to increase their ability to realize investment and revenues which will lead to jobs over time.
The volunteer team mentoring approach recognizes that, at any given time, a company will have different needs. The program allows us to alter the composition of an advisory-mentor team engaged with a company depending on the particular challenges that company is facing. While we are still at an alpha or early-stage with this program and it has not been officially unveiled to the general public, we have recruited 22 charter mentors to begin working with a modest-sized group of eight companies to start. By the end of 2012, we hope to have as many as 30 companies from across the JumpStart Entrepreneurial Network working with 40 or more mentors.
One company taking part in the mentoring program is RKN, a very early stage med device company that gives patients a tool to play a more active role in preventing the spread of healthcare-associated infections. Started by Robert and Nina Knighton, the young founders are already being educated and inspired by their official and unofficial mentors. “Connections and advice are helping us continue on,” says Robert. “Now we have even more people in our corner, vying for us, and helping us make this product a reality.”
Appreciatively,
Ray Leach
Chief Executive Officer, JumpStart