How to Find a Perfect Mentor?

This article is contributed by multiple Startup founders from different fields.

Most of the time having a mentor really is a benefit for many entrepreneurs. the main job of a mentor is to guide, motivate and inspire you and will you out to find a way from any kind of challenging situation. Amongst millions of people, it can be a challenge to find the perfect mentor for yourself.

In this article, we will find out how to find a perfect mentor. Some of the successful entrepreneurs shared their views on this topic.

Kunal Ahirwar | CEO & Co-Founder, Earnvestt Technologies

We needed someone with experience and expertise and hence we decided to go through an incubation program. We found great mentors like Tanul, Kruti, and others along our journey through Afthonia.

Utkarsh Gupta | Managing Director, Ramagya Mart

This was a challenging task indeed! My office was given the task to identify a mentor for me who could assist me in taking the right decisions.
After engaging with professional mentors, management gurus, and consulting organizations that were either recommended by references or identified by research, I finally found a perfect mentor that followed his organization's philosophy to the tee- "I know that I don't know"!  I loved the philosophy the second I heard it!

The trait I liked the best about this mentor was that in our initial engagements, there was no mention about his 25 years of cross-industry experience, never failing to achieve a target ever, 100% success as a brand strategy consultant and in fact, I never got a feeling that he was a know-it-all guy!  His confidence, his energy, and the way he emulates his consulting practice were just unconventional and incomparable to the rest, like a doctor that never prescribes a treatment unless the symptoms are thoroughly analyzed.

Neha Indoria | Co-Founder, Boingg!

A perfect mentor doesn't exist. Just like a perfect business doesn't. We essentially earmarked the areas where we needed help and identified 2-3 people we could trust to get advice from. Slowly this network of individuals helped us create a veritable sounding board for our areas of concern.

Manav Shah  | Founder, Eduvacancy

I am an avid networker and I love meeting new people. The sole idea behind meeting new people is to learn about their life stories, habits, and personality. I found my perfect mentor by continuously networking and meeting different people from various walks of life. I would go into detail and understand the life learnings of the people I met. This helped me in understanding the characteristics and leadership styles of people with who I interacted. I would also chalk down my future plans and try to understand from different people’s experiences if anyone would add substantial value in my growth journey. However, it was a continuous process of networking at events, conferences, social media platforms that led me to find the right mentor for myself.

I wanted a mentor who was extremely disciplined and focused in their life journey. Besides that, I wanted someone who has experience in building/scaling and investing in different startup ventures. When one invests in different ventures, they start evaluating companies extremely critically. For me, it was necessary to focus on every small problem in the business and do anything to fix it. I wanted a mentor who personally had faced a lot of challenges in their phase of building up. This would really help me in evaluating and overcoming the challenges and mistakes that would come my way. More importantly, I wanted a mentor who would also sharpen my leadership skills and make me more efficient to scale my startup.

Pallavi Utagi | Founder & Mom-in Chief, SuperBottoms

There was no wishlist, as such. But some of the most inspiring mentors have been the ones who have helped me see the bigger picture, have faith in myself, and call a spade, a spade. Professionally, most founders also seek out the investor community, including myself. I don’t come from a business family, I just had a vision for SuperBottoms. It was Kunal (Bahl) who was the north star in terms of bringing the vision alive and breathing life into SuperBottoms.

Ritesh Ujjwal | CEO & Co-Founder, Kofluence

Mentor mentee relationship is extremely important and it needs to be nurtured over time to understand each other’s and corresponding personality traits and thought processes. While nurturing this relationship is mostly conscious and the way is largely defined wherein you understand the strengths and weaknesses, one can also find a mentor in a serendipitous manner. In my case, it has been a mix of academic as well as professional life.

Conclusion

Mentors are the guide that will give you a clear picture of your situation and will be beside you when you need them. One needs to be careful while looking for a perfect mentor because in the long they are going to be your trusted confidante.