I have recently been feeling like a big hypocrite every time I tell a startup they need to get their product out of their heads and into a customer’s hands.
Because I have my own secret venture that I’ve been hiding away like Gollum.
I have built enough businesses to know that you’re never ready to share your new idea with anyone – so you just have to get on with it.
So here it is: More to Give.
It’s meandered a bit over the last year – thanks especially to Sarra who is the only person I’ve properly shared it with – but at its heart its mission is:
To help under-utilised corporate people recognise their value and feel good about themselves again. By helping others.
Through mentoring.
I love helping the startups on the accelerator programme I run. But my proudest moments have been when mentors, super-smart, incredibly capable people, have told me how mentoring has built their confidence, proved to themselves how valuable they are (outside their company), given them new skills, expanded their networks…
How’s it’s helped them feel differently about themselves.
Because that was me.
I left BP, to be perfectly honest, feeling quite average and within weeks had accelerator programmes asking me to help, then founders selecting me to be their mentor over other brilliant options, and now I’m paid to mentor.
It’s changed my life. And I want that change for others.
With More to Give.
It’s an assignment-based mentoring platform, which means mentors and founders connect for a finite period with a specific goal – a job to get done. Not the kind of ongoing mentoring which can drag and make everyone feel awkward and guilty. But sub-10 hour assignments conducted over a few weeks or months.
Mentoring for startups, social enterprises and charities – i.e. businesses without access to the incredible (and often under-utilised) talent residing in corporates; businesses doing good…startups working to deliver the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
There’s no underpinning business yet and I am resisting all my urges for perfectionism to keep it deliberately hacky and manual, so I can learn what works and doesn’t before investing in building the platform.
I am really trying to practise what I preach.
So if you click on the link you won’t see a beautifully polished website, fully functional, with hundreds of assignments and other mentors. Not yet.
But you will see an opportunity to join a waitlist.
You’ll also see a price. It will almost certainly be wrong, but it’s far better to have one than not – and real customers can tell me if it’s too high or too low rather than me sabotage everything.
I would dearly love your feedback. I would love even more for you to sign up if you think you might be interested in building your skills, network and confidence – and give back to businesses that really need your experience and expertise. Or share it with someone who looks like they need the opportunity to get out of the day job and back to doing what they do best.
Oh and I’m doing a webinar on Mentoring for Startupbootcamp next Thursday if you’re interested! Sign up here.
On another note, I applied for the British Airways Pilot Training Programme this week. It closes today (Friday 21st) so get your application in fast if you’re interested. For the avoidance of doubt I would be a terrible pilot, but I saw an ad and thought why not?
It made my kids’ jaws drop over dinner! Well worth it.
And it made everyone laugh at this week’s Escapology Live as I demonstrated a commitment to experimentation.
I have passed the first couple of stages but now it’s a maths test, never my forte. I expect it will weed me out – and rightly so.
But the point is I could – and would – never have done this when I was working at BP.
My mind and my life are open to new experiences these days because I have cut the chains, broken down the invisible walls that kept me imprisoned.
And although, as with More to Give, I feel more vulnerable, I also feel like I am really LIVING now.
It’s something I’d never expected.
And I want it for you too!
Cohort 6 of Escapology Live is now full, but Cohort 7 is filling up. Someone from Cohort 4 gave me this terrific feedback:
“I feel like an old corporate lumber getting shaped into something- lol, and you’re like Michelangelo, taking away extra things to find out what’s hiding inside.”
I’ll take Michelangelo! And here’s another:
“I enjoyed the program and the structured approach to it and found the book so easy to read! I also echo everyone’s feedback from our last session. There have been many helpful parts, but one thing that I took great comfort in is knowing that I’m not on my own.”
If you know anyone who wants to feel like this – especially this point about not being on your own, please do share it – and this email, so they hear about More to Give!