Dan Martell - October 05, 2015


Finding a Mentor Is Easier Than You Think

Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Steve Ballmer Jerry Pond Ken Nickerson Frank McKenzie
How To Manage An Assistant Lean Learning： Just in Time vs. Just in Case

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

241.23

Word count

1,203

Sentence count

46


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about how to find a mentor and how to keep them. I share my personal story of how I found my first mentor, and how I kept them as mentors for the last 10 years. I also talk about the 4 things you can do to find and keep great mentors.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.320 How to find a mentor.
00:00:01.360 It's probably the most important topic as an entrepreneur
00:00:04.040 you gotta figure out.
00:00:05.080 And it's why I've been holding off for all these months
00:00:07.320 before I shared it, because I wanted to make sure
00:00:09.120 that I had the absolutely best framework
00:00:11.400 for you guys to follow to find a kick-ass mentor.
00:00:14.200 You know, I've got four ideas that I wanna share with you,
00:00:16.160 but before I get into that, I wanna share with you guys
00:00:17.880 a story, my personal story of finding my first mentor.
00:00:20.880 You know, I was really struggling in my business,
00:00:22.760 Spheric Technologies, I was probably 26 years old,
00:00:25.320 and I just figured a cold email to the former premier
00:00:28.440 or the province where I lived, I'm Canadian,
00:00:30.580 would help me find people like me.
00:00:32.840 I just figured there's gotta be other people
00:00:34.400 that have built this kind of business in the past
00:00:36.760 that might be able to give me guidance and ideas
00:00:38.800 and kind of a direction for me.
00:00:40.840 And I cold emailed this guy named Frank McKenna
00:00:43.360 and within 30 minutes he wrote back
00:00:45.100 and I emailed him probably at midnight
00:00:46.980 and he introduced me to three guys.
00:00:48.580 Those three names were Jerry Pond, Steve Palmer,
00:00:51.280 and Ken Nickerson.
00:00:52.820 And if you guys know who those people are,
00:00:54.280 I mean Jerry Pond is now kind of the Ron Conway
00:00:57.020 the godfather of tech in the province.
00:00:59.180 Ken Nickerson's one of the top angel investors,
00:01:01.320 and Steve Palmer at the time was the CEO
00:01:03.120 of one of the largest technology companies in our region,
00:01:05.260 and is now the co-CEO of another technology company.
00:01:07.900 Really great operator, and those three people,
00:01:10.200 even though I didn't get introductions,
00:01:11.640 I reached out to them, and all three responded.
00:01:14.200 But I wanna share with you guys how I got them engaged,
00:01:16.940 and then also how I kept them as mentors
00:01:19.400 over the last, you know, almost a decade.
00:01:21.820 You know, so the first one I wanna share with you guys
00:01:23.840 is when you reach out to them,
00:01:25.420 You wanna make sure that you have a big problem.
00:01:28.160 You know, many times when people reach out to me
00:01:30.420 and they want me as an advisor or mentor,
00:01:32.500 they don't have something to dive into.
00:01:35.440 They're just like, hey, I saw you online
00:01:37.160 or I follow you on Twitter, I watch your videos on YouTube
00:01:39.440 and I'd love to sit down and pick your brain.
00:01:41.400 Big no-no, don't do that.
00:01:42.840 Have a problem, have a specific problem
00:01:45.400 that you can dive into or you can connect that mentor,
00:01:48.480 that potential mentor to the challenge that you're facing
00:01:50.880 so that they can say, oh, that's something I've been through
00:01:53.420 and I can give you some quick thoughts.
00:01:54.980 Now, the second thing I want to share with you guys is make sure that you start small.
00:02:00.220 You know, the biggest mistake you can make is reaching out to one of these potential mentors and saying,
00:02:04.260 hey, I'd love to come and visit your office and get a tour.
00:02:08.060 I mean, I've heard people say that.
00:02:09.420 They're like, oh, I'm in town.
00:02:10.340 I'd love to come to your office, meet your staff, get a tour of your business.
00:02:13.440 And I'm like, why?
00:02:15.280 I don't have time to do that.
00:02:16.840 I'm busy.
00:02:17.340 I have a company to grow.
00:02:19.520 And what I want to suggest to you guys is start small and build from there.
00:02:22.920 So what's start small mean?
00:02:23.940 it might mean just getting a response via email.
00:02:26.580 Maybe it's a very specific question like,
00:02:28.380 hey, Dan, I've seen you've gone through this in the past,
00:02:31.140 I'm going through this scenario,
00:02:32.460 very short, one sentence each,
00:02:34.460 what do you suggest I do, A or B?
00:02:36.320 And just have them respond, start small,
00:02:38.180 get an interaction going.
00:02:39.720 Then the key, and this is the third aspect
00:02:41.800 that you need to get really great at
00:02:43.060 to find and keep great mentors, is circle back.
00:02:46.700 You know, if I respond to an email and I say,
00:02:48.700 you know, I don't really understand
00:02:50.020 the whole context of your situation,
00:02:51.420 but based on what you've told me,
00:02:52.680 I would suggest going with option B.
00:02:55.060 In six months, maybe after you've already played out
00:02:57.360 the scenario, maybe even sooner, in six weeks,
00:02:59.520 you can circle back and say, hey,
00:03:01.420 this is what you suggested I do, I did it,
00:03:03.640 that's the key, is take action, and here are the results.
00:03:06.900 And to me, that is probably the most valuable thing
00:03:09.600 you can give a mentor, is not only be an active listener
00:03:13.300 and ask really great questions, but on the other side is,
00:03:16.980 circle back and let them know how their advice
00:03:18.960 or their guidance helped you.
00:03:21.120 I mean, to me, as a mentor, and I've been fortunate enough
00:03:23.880 to mentor dozens of entrepreneurs over the years,
00:03:27.040 it's just the way, it's kind of the circle of value,
00:03:30.160 is they ask you questions, you give them answers,
00:03:33.100 and then they go and either do or don't do them,
00:03:34.760 and I would suggest circling back,
00:03:35.980 even if you don't follow up with them,
00:03:37.620 but that'll give them some value,
00:03:39.160 and the other thing I want to share with you guys,
00:03:40.880 it's a big idea, is really to give praise back
00:03:43.860 to your mentors, you know, any chance I get
00:03:45.440 to do a video like this, or if I'm on stage,
00:03:47.600 I love telling the story about, you know,
00:03:49.500 Jerry, Ken, and Steve, and just how invaluable
00:03:52.780 their advice was at that specific moment in time.
00:03:54.840 I was 26, I was really, really struggling.
00:03:56.960 I seriously, I was about on the verge of going bankrupt,
00:03:59.540 and I just needed some guidance.
00:04:00.920 I needed somebody to kind of say, you know what,
00:04:02.480 the biggest thing that I heard from all three of them,
00:04:04.760 check this out, the biggest advice I got was,
00:04:07.060 you know what, you're doing really well.
00:04:09.120 And at the time, I thought I was a complete failure.
00:04:11.420 Even though the company had grown millions of revenue,
00:04:13.680 dozens of employees, I really thought that
00:04:16.600 I wasn't doing something right,
00:04:17.780 because obviously I wouldn't be in this position.
00:04:19.340 And I thought, just having somebody tell me
00:04:21.520 that not only it's normal, but you're doing well,
00:04:24.720 congratulations for having these kind of problems,
00:04:27.380 that to me unlocks so much potential
00:04:28.900 and really why I've been able to go on
00:04:30.820 and build the other companies that I have.
00:04:32.140 So I want to share that with you guys
00:04:33.220 because I think that the most important thing
00:04:35.500 you can get from mentors is to make you feel
00:04:37.280 like you're not alone.
00:04:38.400 And that'll really help you grow your business
00:04:40.300 and really achieve in life.
00:04:42.080 So I want to ask you guys to like this video,
00:04:43.980 leave a comment below, and let me know
00:04:45.480 if you have a mentor, how did you find them?
00:04:47.720 You know, help everybody else watching this video.
00:04:49.220 Leave a comment below.
00:04:50.060 Tell the story of how you found your mentor.
00:04:52.260 I think that's a big question everybody asks.
00:04:54.160 Then I also wanna challenge you guys
00:04:55.420 to live a bigger life and a bigger business
00:04:57.400 and I'll see you guys next Monday.