Giving Back as a Mentor (Alice Hall)
Our Mentoring Manager Michael Dixon recently arranged a drop-in afternoon for Entrepreneurs’ Forum members to meet a mentor. Our mentees had a private one-to-one meeting to talk through whatever business challenge they’re currently facing. This month we talked to one of those mentors, Alice Hall from Rowen Homes.
“I have been wanting to mentor for a very long time, but always felt that things were way too busy in my business journey. So, I made it an objective for 2023, that I would get involved in some mentoring and help give back to the business community in the North East.
“To be a good mentor, you need to be able to listen and take in facts about a business rather than just rushing in and giving advice without understanding their situation. It's super important to have the life experience that will benefit that person in the relevant fields. Broad experience is good because you can advise on a range of different things holistically. I also think it's important to be positive. I've found through mentoring experiences that energy can be infectious. Quite often people are coming to you when they're having quite a challenging time.
“My expertise is mainly in marketing and creative. I have broad experience of running businesses. I'm able to consider how, for instance, a marketing activity or new channel would affect the rest of the business, but what I really love and what makes my heart sing is in marketing and creative. I'm also very focused on business culture.
“I gain so much personally from being a mentor. At the core, I want to give back and help but the beautiful and brilliant thing about mentoring is that as you're talking, you're evaluating your own business at the same time. I always come out of a session with lots of ideas of where I want to put focus into my own business so that's just a lovely by-product of mentoring.
“The Entrepreneurs’ Forum has been a really, really big part of my business journey, and I feel really, really privileged to have it in the North East and be able to access it. It was a really, easy decision for me to get involved because I feel like I've taken a lot from what the Entrepreneurs’ Forum has done, so I want it to give back as well.
“It's super easy to become a mentor with the Forum, and you don't have to commit to a huge amount, you can literally do just one of the drop-in sessions if you want. Just email Michael, he will schedule you in for a date that's convenient to you and then match you up with other people within Entrepreneurs’ Forum network, who may benefit from your expertise.”
This month Alice met with three mentees, inlcuding Nigel Marston from Jane Prior Funeral Directors.
