Who's Guiding You?

We look to mentors - parents, teachers, friends - for guidance and support in our personal lives all the time. But, taking this practice into your business life is a great way to develop yourself professionally as well. A business mentor can:

• Act as a sounding board. Have an idea or a frustration, but not sure where to go with it? A mentor is an excellent confidante with whom you can share your thoughts.
• Provide guidance. As a more experienced businessperson, your mentor can provide wisdom and advice from previous experiences - both successes and failures.
• Network, network, network. As someone who has been in business for an extended period of time, your mentor can expose you to business circles (and opportunities) that would have taken you years to develop on your own.

North Star just completed a one-year mentorship program with UPS, offered by the Center for Women & Enterprise. UPS selected us based on our need for a mentor to help us with our approach to monitoring profitability by project, employee, and as a company. We began in April 2008 with very aggressive growth plans and as the economy shifted in 2008 we strategically shifted our approach. UPS helped us develop reporting systems to analyze overhead and profit margins within our projects. We also identified our most billable employees and ways to increase the billable hours of the entire team. It was a fascinating year with UPS and we are very grateful for the time they spent with us. It was amazing to take a big corporate philosophy and apply some of their key learnings to our small company.