For our parents, it was more than common to work at the same company for several years – or even decades. Nowadays, professionals jump from opportunity to opportunity, gathering an immense amount of transferable skills and knowledge in different fields. You might not realize it just yet, but your expertise could be extremely useful to aspiring entrepreneurs throughout the world.
Now, why should you give up your valuable time to volunteer and mentor entrepreneurs? There are many reasons why being a mentor can make a difference in your life, both professionally and personally. Here are 4 of them!
You Get To Help Entrepreneurs – For Real
Oftentimes, mentors join our online ecosystem Bridge for Billions because of their desire to help others. To them, being a mentor is a direct and efficient way to make a difference. Most of our mentors have had their own struggles as entrepreneurs or in business, and they wish to help others to avoid the same mistakes.
Through our incubation programs, you’re given the opportunity to help others accomplish their dreams, which is a very rewarding experience in itself. As our mentor Christian Korwan put it:
“I’ve spent my entire life having to get ahead on my own merits. I’ve had a few, but very good people by my side to help and motivate me [through my failures]. Now it’s time for me to give back by providing that same help that was given to me.”
You Dig Into Your Passion For Start-Ups And Social Entrepreneurship
Have you heard about social entrepreneurship? It’s an approach by start-up companies and entrepreneurs in which they develop, fund and implement solutions to social, cultural, or environmental issues. Popularized in the mid-2000s by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunuscan with his book “Creating a World Without Poverty”, social entrepreneurship helps you leverage your skills in a meaningful way.
“Social entrepreneurs trying to make a better world in a sustainable way deserve support.”
While it’s in no way a requirement, many of those who join Bridge as a mentor share a passion for the world of social entrepreneurship. No matter their field of expertise, all of them believe in the power of social businesses to solve some of the world’s most dire social issues.
Often, it’s this same passion that has led them to mentor entrepreneurs. Mentors strive to assist those who need help in building the businesses that tackle key issues such as education, food scarcity, and global warming.
Many of our mentors share an enthusiasm for the start-up world and find it really rewarding to be part of the ecosystem available to aspiring entrepreneurs. When you become a mentor, you’re able to provide them with support no matter their location, while getting the chance to become an active member of a growing and rich ecosystem.
You believe that talent is everywhere, but opportunities are not
At Bridge we’re driven by a mission: to democratize entrepreneurship by guiding and impulsing those who want to improve the world. And our mentors believe in this just as much. They see the potential nestled in our entrepreneurs, and how to unlock it with the help of our innovative methodology.
This urge to make a difference, combined with our online platform, makes it possible for them to overcome the obstacles that generally get in the way of wanting to make a difference, such as time, location or the area of expertise.
You wish to keep on learning
Another noteworthy reason people choose to mentor is that it’s a learning experience for them as well. We believe that pairing up individuals who possess complementary skills produces the optimal outcome: mutual learning, or “reverse mentoring.”
Apart from discovering a new business industry, mentors at Bridge for Billions develop skills that are highly valuable in today’s world like empathy, radical collaboration and problem-solving, while amplifying their network of contacts. When joining Bridge as a mentor, you become part of a Community of experienced professionals around the world with whom to connect. The Community also gives you access to exclusive masterclasses and resources on a range of topics, from Marketing to Human Resources.
Finally, through mentoring, you can discover a top-notch methodology for business development that you can bring to other mentoring relationships or even your own personal and professional life.
