With 50 percent of all businesses failing before their fourth birthday, start-ups need mentors like bees need honey
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It’s a startling statistic: Fifty percent of all businesses fail before their fourth birthday. Unless that is they undergo incubation and mentoring before opening their doors. In those cases 87 percent of businesses make it past the five-year mark.
Entrepreneur Zevy Wolman decided last year he wanted to bring the same kind of mentorship to the Jewish world. So he founded The Jewish Entrepreneur (also known as TJE) matching budding entrepreneurs with business owners and experts to act as mentors. Founded with 25 mentors 18 months later TJE counts more than 100 mentors and has helped more than 250 businesses.
More than just acting as cheerleaders these mentors offer expert advice and wisdom to their mentees often helping them to avoid the very same pitfalls they experienced themselves. These strategies range from making a problematic business plan viable to ensuring that a stable business is maximizing its profits.
Mishpacha spoke with three different mentor-mentee teams to get their take on how these relationships breed success.
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