Starting and running a small business is hard, time-consuming work, and often one of the roadblocks to success is lack of knowledge about all the aspects of running a business.
Addressing that knowledge gap is one of the chief goals of Power Up Spartanburg’s mentoring program. After more than a year in action, the program is paying significant dividends for the county’s small-business owners who have participated.
Knowledge and perspective
The mentoring program is part of a range of services provided by Power Up Spartanburg, a OneSpartanburg initiative aimed at supporting and growing the county’s small and minority-owned businesses.
For Jasmine Herbert, a business owner selected to be a mentee in the pilot phase of the mentoring program, the biggest immediate benefit of working with her two mentors was getting an outside perspective.
With a decade of corporate human resources experience, Herbert had started a consulting firm, The Employee Handbook: Career & Workforce Solutions, to help job seekers with career coaching and development.
But because of that same human resources experience, she began consulting with small companies on HR issues and was in a quandary over how to balance the two sides of business.
“What I found through the mentor program is being able to bounce ideas off of people who are not in it every day,” Herbert said. “(It) really helped to uncover some new ideas and things that I could potentially do.”
One of those ideas was splitting the two sides of her work, which led to the start of a new business, HR Compliance Partners.
In working with her mentors, Herbert came to realize the name of her career-development company was a bit confusing to companies she was trying to pitch for her HR consulting. She said that insight was invaluable and helped her decide to launch a second business aimed solely at HR clients.
She said running a business day-to-day can be overwhelming and lead to tunnel vision but working with mentors can break that cycle and give a business owner the necessary time and space to ask themselves important questions.
“When you have an opportunity to connect with people who can drop in and help you and support you through conversation, that’s really where I find value in the program for sure,” Herbert said.
Paying it forward
Herbert found such value in the program that she has since become a mentor herself and is on a team with two other mentors supporting a mentee.
“It’s really fulfilling to be able to give that back the same way that I’ve been able to take it in,” she said. “It’s just exciting to see the growth week over week with our mentee.”
All of this is part of the mentoring program’s goal of creating a support network for Spartanburg County’s small businesses, according to Sheila Snoddy, Power Up Spartanburg’s mentoring programs director.
She said part of that support is helping small business owners move beyond the “mom-and-pop” stage, where it can be a struggle to keep the business afloat, to a more sophisticated level of business acumen where the mechanics of success are understood and applied.
Snoddy said feedback from both mentors and mentees revealed a widespread lack of financial knowledge among small business owners.
With that in mind, the program now offers a curriculum on business financial operations which has been highly successful, Snoddy said.
The program, which is coming up on its second anniversary in May, has 66 mentors working with a current class of 27 mentees.
For more information, visit powerupspartanburg.com/mentoring.
Power Up Spartanburg mentor program fast facts
- Started in May 2023 and patterned after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Venture Mentoring Service program
- Both mentors and mentees are vetted to ensure suitability for the program
- Mentees work with a team of two or three mentors
