From Mentoring To Match Making

From Mentoring To Match Making

In a novel twist Christchurch business mentors Terry Fullerton and Mike Button have come up with a plan to take a very different approach to mentoring by setting up the company My Business Mentor Limited with a range of mentors with specialist skills to match the different needs of each client.

As Terry says “Having a portfolio of mentors to select from gives another whole dimension to our mentoring business – there is not much point matching up an IT specialist with a farmer – with us the farmer gets a mentor with a farming background who talks their language. Similarly an online business manager wants to talk to a mentor who is an IT marketing specialist rather than an accountant.”

The business www.mybusinessmentor.co.nz has now been offering mentoring services for over 2 years and in that time they have had a wide range of clients. As well as the normal business management and financial advice the company also has mentors available in the areas of IT and online marketing, tourism and travel, agriculture, forestry, manufacturing and viticulture.

“It can be everything from a tradesman wanting help with costing out jobs properly to a family owned company wanting guidance with putting a value on the equity in the company and matching this to the input of the various shareholders.

More often than not the person asking for a mentor has a successful business and is looking for advice on how best to take it to the next level. Sometimes the issue isn’t about growing the company but rather managing the stresses and strains that come with a company growing very fast.”

Terry has spent most of his career commercialising new technologies. Since leaving Canterprise at UC he has started up 6 new businesses in the IT sector and taken each of these through to a trade sale. These included a website business, a company importing training technology from Israel, a company marketing share trading software, a social media marketing website and an online toy website. His latest venture is the friend funding website www.onegreatgift.co.nz .

“In many ways the My Business Mentor approach is a lot like what I was doing when I was CEO of Canterprise at UC where it was my role to match up the specialist skills of the academic staff with the needs of the business clients.”

Mike’s business career has been in the commercial, finance and banking industries where he held a number of senior management roles in London, Wellington and Christchurch.

For the past 4 years he has operated a successful management consultancy business which has acted for a number of commercial clients. He has mentored, business owners, company shareholders, senior management in change management, succession planning, governance/management splits, exit strategies, debt and equity restructures, management buyouts and business advice and staff training.

His background as a JP and a Trustee of two charitable Trusts (Chair of one) and a Rotarian make him ideally suited as a mentor.

Mentoring is all about being a sounding board to bring out the best in an individual and the MBM team of Terry, Mike and their business mentors are well placed to advise and focus their clients attention on how to successfully move forward with their business issues.

ENDS

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