(S4) E045 Kerrie Dorman on Entrepreneurship and Supporting Businesses through Mentoring

Bio Kerrie, a serial entrepreneur, was introduced to mentoring after her last successful business sale. Realising she had no support or guidance in what she was doing, Kerrie founded the Association of Business Mentors in 2011 to provide mentoring skills and training for those seeking to mentor business owners professionally. Kerrie’s vision for the ABM was to provide reassurance to business owners that they are in the safe hands of a trusted and experienced ABM professional business mentor. Kerrie mentors businesses of all shapes and sizes. She also mentors within the workplace, working closely with HR departments to run mentoring programmes to support the growth and development of their employees. Interview Highlights 01:30 Give it a go or you’ll never know 03:30 Starting out in mentorship 06:30 The vision or the team? 10:30 Boundaries in business 12:30 The onion exercise 16:30 Mentoring v coaching 21:00 The mentoring door 22:00 Quietening the mind 23:30 Embedding an organisational mentoring culture Contact Information · ABM website (Association of Business Mentors) · Association of Business Mentors on LinkedIn · Kerrie Dorman on LinkedIn Books & Resources · The Mentoring Manual - Julie Starr · A Complete Guide to Effective Mentoring (The FT Guides), Dr. Ruth Gotian, Andy Lopata · Henley Business School webinars · Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice, Matthew Syed · The Choice: Embrace the Possible, Edith Eger Episode Transcript Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I’m Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. Ula Ojiaku I am very honoured to have the Founder of the Association of Business Mentors, Kerrie Dorman, as our guest on the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. Kerrie, thank you so much for making the time for this conversation. I've been looking forward to it for ages. Kerrie Dorman You're very welcome. Thank you for having me. Ula Ojiaku My pleasure. So what's led you to the place where you are today and being the Kerrie Dorman that we've gotten to know and admire? Kerrie Dorman Okay, so actually part of my upbringing was being very much around entrepreneurship. My father was a key project manager on business ideas, primarily in Africa, and my stepfather also ran a very large family business. So I had business sort of around me from quite a young age, and I would talk to both my father and my stepfather about why things would happen and et cetera, et cetera. And so I became a serial entrepreneur from quite a young age. I think what gave me the impetus was the fact that I wasn't afraid to give something a go, and actually my motto now is give it a go or you'll never know, and if it works out, amazing, if not, then you learn and you move on. So my first business was in optics, because what I did do was get a profession behind me first, and that was a qualified dispensing optician. And so my first business was in recruitment for people within the optical industry, and I somehow managed to sell that by the skin of my teeth. And I just felt that it was incredibly satisfying, and a great sense of achievement to have been able to build something, even though it was very small, that was attractive to somebody else to want to pay for it. And so hence my entrepreneurialism streak started. So I started all sorts of businesses in all sorts of industries, I saw niches and just as I said, gave it a go. Some work just failed, and some I managed to sell, so I sort of came out vaguely on top at the end of it all, and then of course, there was the Association of Business Mentors, which is still going, and that came about because when I sold my last business, which was probably the most successful of them all, there was a new government funded mentorship program happening. It was an incubation centre, so there were young and bullish business owners wanting to be in this incubation centre to make sure that they had the best start, and so I was asked to come and share all my experiences, the successes, the failures, what I learnt, and I felt that I had a lot to share with these people, and that was my first stab at being a mentor. However, I didn't really know what I was doing, I'd never had my own mentor before, and I felt that I was getting quite frustrated with these young, inspiring people because they weren't running a business the way I had run a business. And I thought that that's what mentoring was about. There was no guidance on this scheme, and I just felt that it wasn't quite right in terms of what I was supposed to be doing. So I looked around for somewhere to hang my...