Tag Archives: mentoring

My Father, My Mentor : The Entrepreneur Seed

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Whenever I hear or read about mentors I think of my father.

I come from a *very* entrepreneurial family.  My father was always a risk taker, from the time he was a boy and he and his brothers ran away from home and joined the circus.  Really.  Then they started their own circus. ( It traveled backwoods towns in another era, and some of the animals were not really that exotic. The brothers were the acrobats and tight rope walkers.)  But it was a start that ultimately took him on to success in business.

Once as an 18 or 20 year old he got down to his last quarter.  His reaction to that was to be so disgusted with himself he pitched the quarter over a fence, borrowed some money and had some circus tickets printed. He took a train to the next town and sold the tickets, then went back and pulled together a circus to go back and perform before all the very delighted ticket holders.  He was on the road again!  Ultimately, in true entrepreneurial fashion, after a number of businesses,  he became a pioneer in the oil business and a huge success.

When I was 5 years old he used to take me out and point to a building.  “How much is that building worth?” he would ask. “As much as you can get for it” was the correct answer.

I have to admit I’m not as much of a buccaneer as my father and I didn’t care so much for the oil business… or at least how business was done in the oil business… so I got out of it.  Yes, yes I know.  You can make a lot of money in the oil business. And I did that for awhile.  But I also think it matters how you make money and it’s good for your soul to really love what you do.

None-the-less many of my business life lessons came from my father.  As I’ve mentioned, he taught me to play poker so I would  understand risk, how to size up my competition and how much money to bet on the hand I held.  I have since been a serial entrepreneur, putting (almost) all my chips in many times.  I started the first commercial Vinifera ( fine European and California wine grape) vineyard in Texas, wrote, found sponsors for and passed the legislation which enabled and launched the now billion dollar wine industry in Texas. I have launched a number of businesses in diverse industries but all were, in one way or another, grounded in advice my father had given me.

That’s why I could really identify with Norm Brodsky who talks about lessons learned from his father, who was his first mentor although he didn’t realize it at the time. In The Knack… and How to Get It –Norm Brodsky discusses lessons from his father like the importance of maintaining high gross margin;  “Always make a good sale with a big markup,” he’d say. “Make sure your customer is someone you can collect from.” “Don’t take advantage of people.” “Be fair.” Those are fabulous business lessons embedded in my mind,” he says “and they came straight from my father.”

Norm makes the case that most successful people have developed certain habits and ways of looking at things and that is what accounts for their success. He points out there are no “silver bullets” but one can pick up a way of breaking down problems and analyzing them, a bent towards action and taking advantage of opportunities.  Having a certain mind-set “doesn’t guarantee that you’ll succeed at everything you do, but it does improve your chances significantly. You win more than you lose, and the longer you stay in the game, the more often you come out on top.”

You can’t hit a home run if you don’t step up to the plate and take a swing at the ball. The famous baseball players who hit the most home runs also probably had the most strikes, but they kept on swinging.  And, eventually, they would connect with the ball and sometimes it would fly out of the park.  In business, you don’t have to hit a home run that often.  You just have to get in the game, stay in the game and keep swinging.  As Norm says, “the longer you stay in the game, the more often you come out on top.”

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Match Your Entrepreneur Story

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AdvancingWomen’com‘s Gretchen Glasscock

Share your story!  That’s how we learn from each other.  I’ll start.  As I was looking over these personal and pivotal entrepreneur tales from Startup Stories #1 from Scott Allen’s Entrepreneur Blog I had sudden flashes from my own entrepreneurial past and I suspect you will, too.

If you are a woman in business, take a look at ” Inside the Green Room - Internet marketer extraordinaire Donna Fox shares her experience as the only woman (not counting staff and spouses) at a conference of 100 top internet marketers.”

I can easily equal that.  In 1995, I was at an Internet conference in Tampa Florida, when the newly Netscape browser enabled Internet was in its infancy.  There were presentations on how to name your web page: beginning with a letter near the first of the alphabet was recommended so you’d come up first in lists of what was then pre-Google search.  There were dramatic videos featuring the metaphor du jour for the Internet, intergalactical spinning of planets, full throttle Star Wars type background music and strobe lights, indicating an out of this world, reaching for the stars future for all of us.

The conference, mostly patting the Internet’s creators on the back and imagining what the Net future might hold, boasted 5,000 attendees with a prospecting for gold mindset, about 5 of whom were women.  Tampa was sporting a brand new 600,000 square foot convention center, views of sparkling Tampa Bay, and huge, airy bath rooms of perhaps 50 stalls. For the very first time I could remember, you could enter the woman’s room and laugh in astonishment if you encountered another woman ( as the guys no doubt scrambled for space down the hall.)

And here were are today, with reports of women on the Net outnumbered 100 to 1.  Ladies, don’t wait to be invited to join the game.  Kick the doors in and come on in.  The Internet and particularly business on the Net is a very friendly place for women to be.  See:

Don’t Cry for Us, Silicon Valley
Yes, Some Blogs Are *Very* Profitable – And Some Of Them Are Women’s Blogs

The other story that struck me was Are We Products of Our Entrepreneurial Environments? – John Jantsch shares the story of his entrepreneurial upbringing.  This is really an excellent post and I highly recommend it. John notes:

“Many of the traits that make up the entrepreneur are ingrained as habits, I suspect, knowingly or unknowingly, by our well intentioned parents and caregivers.

Fear of failure is learned, fear of success is learned, fear over money and lack are learned, shame in tooting one’s own horn is taught, fear of being called different is acquired. Likewise, innovation can be an observed trait..”

My father, a fearless entrepreneur in a family of entrepreneurs taught us early on to take risks.  He taught us to play poker to learn the connection between the hand you held and the risk you were willing to take on it.  Since scientifically, if 1000 hands are dealt out to 4 people, they will all wind up with the same number of winning hands, the key was in the betting.  And knowing your competition.

If neither your father or your mother or any of your early mentors have been entrepreneurs, AdvancingWomen.com was created as a support system, an electronic mentor to help women succeed and prosper, to kick down those doors and put more cracks in that glass ceiling.

What have your experiences been as an entrepreneur?  Have you started a business?  Tell us about it.  Or tell us what you’d like to hear more about:  solopreneurs?  blogging?  You name it and we’ll discuss it or get one of you to come on as guest bloggers and tell us more.

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Who Needs A Mentor? Just About Everyone.

Francoise, our lovely mentor

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AdvancingWomen.com

Absolutely you need a mentor.  Most successful women have had one.  Sometimes it is their boss, father, mother, more experienced colleague or someone respected in their field who they sought ought and convinced to mentor them.  But without a doubt, the time between where you are and when you become a success is dramatically compressed when a mentor shows you the ropes.

In fact, research indicates mentoring is one of the crucial and important factors in business and career advancement. Having a mentor or going through some type of mentoring program dramatically increases one’s chances for success. Although it is not fatal to lack a mentor, it certainly helps one a great deal to have one, both in technical and conceptual knowledge, learning from a broad base of experience and rapidly gaining a wealth of contacts.

Mentoring can be a shortcut to career success because it provides a safe, protected environment in which one can learn. One benefits from the mentor’s experience without having to go through the trial and error of learning those same lessons over the years; time is compressed, mistakes don’t have to be repeated. Valuable lessons, knowledge, attitudes and recognition of opportunities are passed on.

The mentor guides his or her protege or partner in developing skills, methods and work habits which the mentor developed painstakingly over her entire career.

An equally important aspect of mentoring is teaching one’s less experienced partner how to network and who to network with. The mentor becomes, in effect , the gateway to the business experts and resources his partner will need. Frequently the mentor provides the introduction, and by taking his partner under his tutelage and introducing her in this manner, his endorsement provides an entree and an acceptance by other experienced business people that the younger person might take years to achieve on her own. In fact, she might never achieve that acceptance on her own because business cliques can be quite closed and intolerant of newcomers, particularly women.

When major decisions or choices arise, the mentor can be an effective source of advice and encouragement, sizing up not only the business situation, but evaluating your skills , attributes and natural talents and bringing to bear seasoned judgment on where you would best fit and what are the right choices for you, not just as a business person, but as an individual.

Finding A Mentor – The First Challenge

No doubt about it, finding a mentor can be a challenge. Mentoring demands a broad base of experience, a high level of skills, and an ability to teach and nourish. Generousity and openness are required of a mentor. A second obstacle is the fact that there are many women who want and need to be mentored and few mentors to help them. Those in a position to mentioned have reached a position where they have great demands on their time.

Each of the following approaches can add a piece to the mentoring puzzle which you are trying to solve:

The Direct Approach. Search out the person you admire most in your field, and one with whom you feel comfortable. Ask to speak to her at a convenient time. Then you can explain you know how busy she is, but you genuinely want to improve your skills and knowledge and ask her if she would be willing to spend a small amount of time…..even 30 minutes a month, reviewing your situation and mapping out a path for your progress. You can even ask her to give you homework in the form of books to read or presentations to attend. Most people, however busy and important, are flattered by this approach and probably will be willing to help you. Some may not have time to see you in person but will gladly mentor you by email.

An Electronic Support System. Although not as warm and fuzzy and personal as a real, live mentor, sites on the Net like  AdvancingWomen.com, and its Advancing Women in Leadership Journal, were designed as an electronic support system for women, to help them meet their many, multifaceted challenges. If you read and follow the advice given, you will be reaping the benefit of successful women with deep experience who are , in effect, mentoring you electronically. If you want specific advise, don’t be shy, ask for it. You can do this by writing to the editor and asking if the website will address a particular issue. Preferably you should frame your questions in a way that the answers will apply to more than just one person, but to an entire group facing a particular work situation. You can also put your questions on one of the bulletin boards and get a lively, hopefully informative discussion going.

Mentor Yourself. At a meeting AdvancingWomen.com‘s Gretchen Glasscock attended in Austin with some of the national leaders of the Women’s Department in the Department of Labor, a regional director said she had met the mentoring challenge this way: “Everything you really need to know is inside yourself.. You just have to focus on the areas you need to develop and then do whatever it takes to make yourself into the person you aspire to be.” Although this approach may not give you everything you need, it certainly will increase your self reliance and take you a long way down the road to career success.

For more on this subject see:
Get A Mentor To Help You Learn The Ropes

85 Broads

85 Broads is a network of trailblazing, visionary women who aspire to use their talent and leadership savvy to effect professional, educational, economic, and cultural change for all women globally.

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Community on the Net – The Platform To Network, The Power to Mentor

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AdvancingWomen.com

Community on the Net has a transcendent role as , simultaneously, the beginning, means and end product of networking and the development of community, specifically women’s communities.

Back in 1996 when AdvancingWomen.com was one of the first women’s sites on the Net, joining the scientists, engineers, government workers, and a few bold pioneers, we were just entering a whole new world and a new era, and much like the dinosaurs crawling out of the swamps, when we saw the light, we must have blinked.
I remember writing articles to explain to women what “Cyberspace” was, what emails and chat rooms were, and how to use them. But, since then, in our new networked world, we have all gotten up to speed and gone on to become prolific users of YouTube,  Facebook, Tweet and the entire blogosphere and  social networking panorama.
I look back and see how remarkably prescient some of those early  articles were.  Somehow we knew “As consumers grow familiar with the Net, their appetite for real time information, delivered in the most convenient and accessible way will continue to increase voraciously. People will want news, weather, the ability to order books or cars, to get a map, access a how-to site, or ring up a sale on an antique listed on eBay, all from their cell phone, Palm Pilot, Blackberry or even their watch.”
Probably it was Bill Gates or possibly Steve Jobs who foresaw that future, even then.
But, even then, AdvancingWomen.com knew two important things:


1. There are unique characteristics of the Net which make it an ideal vehicle for community formation and networking


2. Women’s communities on Net in could play a pivotal role in establishing a electronic networking structure to support other women.


The quintessential experience on the Web is the formation of communities of common interests. This capability of the Net to break down masses of people into communities of interest is a critical factor. AdvancingWomen.com believes it is important that a meaningful part of content on the Net be shaped and produced by women and offer new paradigms to support women in their attempt to advance. The Internet has empowered us to become a nation of citizen journalists,  sending in our videos of hurricanes to CNN, and writing on our blogs about what matters most to our communities of interest. The Net today, particularly with its new, free communication platforms such as Workpress, and the many automated blogging and social networking tools available, opens up the potential for an historic landmark in serious communication. It advances women’s hope that women around the world will accept this challenge and choose to use the advantages they have been blessed with — their education, talent, abilities and determination — to advance women everywhere.
Our first task is to foster a sense of inclusive community among women’s groups with many different agendas and ideologies because that is the catalyst which will drive open communication among them and form the foundation for both networking, and its further evolution into a support system. Ideally, a support system requires cohesiveness. A group with common goals can build on a shared history, shared experiences.  We do not have to share all our beliefs and ideologies.  We just have to share the belief that there is still work to be done for women to advance, and share our binding common commitment to that goal.
To achieve women’s advancement in many areas – business, law, politics, academia –  we need a critical mass of women and women’s organizations to share their knowledge and strategies. We need ” to use more of what (women already ) know, to create opportunities for private knowledge to be made public and tacit knowledge to be made explicit” . Communities of interest foster teamwork, nourish social forms of learning and provide a means to capture, synthesize and formalize knowledge, to marshal its use into action plans.  All of this can be captured and put forth on the Net.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the Net are the new communities being forged with new perceptions, new alliances, new agendas and a focus on communication as a means to achieve their goals. Site by site these women’s communities are forming a nucleus of a women’s support structure on the Net, not just to address a single issue, but to support women in all their multi-faceted challenges, from careers and education to seeking family friendly legislation and more women legislators.
AdvancingWomen.com is one such community, which fuses the power of the Net, as a communication, networking and information tool, with the compelling agenda of women seeking the most effective means to advance their careers or business.
The New Agenda , a non-partisan women’s group, seeks to bring about a systemic change in the way women are treated in the media, by the government, at the workplace, and at home, working towards parity in the government and in the workplace.
There are  many such women’s groups working on the Net to advance women.
But there is much which remains to be done. The Net is not a passive experience in which you are fed news or entertainment; the Net is an interactive medium which encourages participation and response and features two way communication, forums, group discussions, debate, voting. You can get on the Net and , by participating, help shape it into what you want it to be.  You can choose to harness the power of the Net to make progress for women so their voices will be heard and they will have equal access to pay and power and benefits. The Internet is very much like democracy in that ,even if you are entitled to vote, you must still get out and do it yourself. You can’t assign it and you can’t delegate it . You must do it yourself.
As an old proverb says, you make the path by walking on it. And you put the Web to Work for women by networking on it. Who better to shape the future of the Net, than you?

AdvancingWomen.com

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15 Worthy Books for Business-Minded Women | Business Pundit

15 Worthy Books for Business-Minded Women | Business Pundit.

Some of the books covered are extraordinarily helpful for women.  Some of our favorites are as follows:

8. Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide

by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever

Babcock and Laschever explore why women hesitate when it comes to asking for what they want. Using a number of academic studies, the authors illustrate how women’s hesitation to negotiate comes from a fear of destroying the personal relationship involved, while men see it as a routine part of
business. Women will forsake an opportunity to negotiate if it means avoiding conflict. This hurts individual women in the long run, as they forsake additional money, prestige, or other benefits. The book empowers in the sense that it underlines what women can do to improve their own lot. In a word: Ask.

6. Be Your Own Mentor: Strategies from Top Women on the Secrets of Success

by Sheila Wellington and Betty Spence

Mentors are crucial to anyone’s
business success. But how do you find one, especially as a woman? Wellington shares how to locate good mentors, but, crucially, also shows women how to mentor themselves. Using surveys, statistics, and interviews with famous and successful women, Wellington gives women the keys to advancing their careers and overall standing in society. Her specific tips, which include managing work/family guilt and gracefully getting out of a dead-end position, are career basics for women of all experience levels.

AdvancingWomen definitely believe both these books will help you get on the right path to success and come in handy as you continue your journey.

Get A Mentor To Help You Learn The Ropes

Get A Mentor To Help You Learn The Ropes – AdvancingWomen.com

Gretchen Glasscock

Being mentored by the right person is an important and viable bridge to achieving your career goals. Mentors can serve as role models and gateways, introducing you to the right people. Having savvy mentors is one of the key levers that can lift you from obscurity and fruitless toil to success. Because top leadership posts are occupied primarily by men, women must build the skills to enlist men as allies and mentors. As Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, said “Before you become a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.”

Therefore, the leaders you work with (or network with) should welcome the opportunity to mentor you, if you ask them directly and make it easy on them, not taking up too much of their time. When you network (an extension of mentoring), it’s a good idea to reach out to men’s established, powerful networks as well as the newer women’s networks.

  • Get a mentor. For many daughters of prominent men, their father is their first mentor. From the age of about five, the author, along with her brother and sister, was in “entrepreneur training” with her father.  He would take us on business drives to oversee his properties, then point out a building and ask us what we thought it was worth.  The correct answer was, “Whatever you can get for it.” He also taught all of us to play poker, as a way of learning business and betting strategy.  But this isn’t just the author’s story; Governor Kathleen Sebelious of Kansas, the first daughter of a Governor in U.S. history to be elected to the same office, learned her lessons at her father’s knee. And Cheryl Miller, the first female analyst to call a nationally televised NBA game on Turner Broadcasting Team, was mentored by her dad.
  • If your dad’s not the mentoring type, look to your mom or a teacher. Mothers can be mentors, too. Sharon Avent, president and CEO of Smead Manufacturing Company (a privately held, women-owned company founded in 1906 that manufactures and distributes home and office filing systems, supplies, and software, with $315 million in annual sales and approximately 2500 employees) took over as president from her mother.  Another woman leader told a story about her sixth-grade civics teacher, who after a class debate told her, “You know, if you were my daughter, I’d send you to law school.” She took it to heart, determined not to be a tobacco farmer all her life, overcame her mother’s admonition that she should aspire to be a school teacher, and went on to law school and a successful career.
  • Get an incredibly successful woman to be your mentor. Ask for 15 minutes a month, and be willing to do it by e-mail. Gayle Crowell, who was a six-figure executive at a software company (but also a former school teacher) says she’s always willing to mentor, as long as she can do it by e-mail, while she’s waiting in airports or on planes.
  • Turn to your supervisor. Your supervisor might be willing to mentor you if you ask for just 15 minutes, once a month, to tell you the expectations for your position; how well you are meeting them; and a plan to move you along a career path that will take you to the next level (as long as it doesn’t threaten his job, even if it’s a lateral move to another track.)
  • Tap into powerful networks. Join the National Association of Women Business Owners, the National Association of Female Executives, your city’s Women’s Chamber of Commerce, and your Alumni Club. Janet Hanson, the founder & CEO of Milestone Capital Management, founded 85 Broads—a groundbreaking global mentoring network now with 4,200 18,000 members worldwide. It offers ‘Broad2Broad,’ a model for numerous other corporate/alumnae networks.
  • Hire a coach. When the author was on the board of directors of NAWBO, she was enlisted to ask a friend of hers, an enormously successful millionaire entrepreneur, to be the keynote speaker at our awards event.  Linda had never spoken in public or gone beyond high school. She asked me to connect her with an executive coach, another NAWBO member, who helped her give a successful speech to a rousing response.
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