How Mentorship Helped My Black-Owned Business

Ten years ago, I left my full-time job to start the women+ insight and brand studio, Tote + Pears. I was the first person in my immediate family to start a business, and there were so many things that I didn’t know – what bookkeeping was, how intertwined your personal and business finances are as an entrepreneur, what you need to do (years in advance) to buy a house as an entrepreneur, and how to bounce back from failure.

Having mentors with more experience than you can help you navigate blind spots.

Behind every successful business owner, you’ll find several mentors who helped guide them along the way. These mentors could be informal, like a parent they turn to for advice, someone who trained them in the family business, or someone they met through a business venture, accelerator, or mentorship program. Mentors come from different backgrounds and provide value in many ways. And as a Black business owner, finding a team of mentors can be the difference between your business surviving and thriving. 

A mentor can help you start and grow your business in a number of ways. Here are a few: 

1. Avoid Mistakes

Hindsight truly is 20/20 in the business world. The more experience you have, the better you are at spotting challenges before they become big problems. As a first-time business owner, I often found myself navigating new territory, and to avoid big mistakes, I turned to mentors for guidance. 

One of those mentors is my previous manager, Kirsten Kuhlmann, a former corporate executive and business owner who’s led operations for large, global brands. When I considered shifting our business model, I reached out to Kirsten for advice. Her operations and strategy experience provides me with insights I may not have.

Kirsten helped me determine which positions I should hire for and what the hiring model should be (full-time, part-time, or contractors) and gave me ideas on the budget. Had I not spoken with Kirsten first, I wouldn’t have known that there are more expenses than just salaries involved in hiring employees and that I needed twice as much cash to cover our initial plan. After working through the numbers, Kirsten helped me rework our hiring plan, so I could identify exactly who we needed to hire based on our budget. 

Having mentors with more experience than you can help you navigate blind spots.

2. Find New Opportunities

One way to scale your business is to find opportunities to reach new markets or reduce costs. Having a mentor who understands your market can help you take advantage of these opportunities. And you can find these mentors anywhere. I found one of my mentors, who is now a good friend of mine, Kimberly Strong, a few years ago at a presentation in Atlanta, Georgia. 

Kimberly is an advisor at The Mentor Method (mentorship software for hybrid teams) and former head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) at a Fortune 50 company. After listening to my talk, she shared some ideas on how employer branding was a needed service in the corporate world and how our expertise at Tote + Pears in designing brands for women and other marginalized communities could be a new business opportunity. It was a concept I never thought of, but one that proved to be incredibly valuable. Within a few months, we landed our first corporate employer branding client, a move that would lead to a 23% increase in revenue that year. 

As a Black woman and business owner, Kimberly knew the importance of mentorship and the value of sharing insights. 

3. Bounce Back From Setbacks

I met Seema Phull, chief operating officer at Kore Power (an energy storage and battery cell technology company) and the founder and senior advisor at ForeOptics (a full-service management company), on a plane when I was pregnant. We started a conversation about motherhood. She had a consulting agency, and I wanted to know about her experience running a business with children (three!). That was more than eight years ago, and over the years, I’ve turned to Seema for mentoring on many things related to the intersection of business, family, and life. 

It was Seema whom I called after delivering my son prematurely before I decided not to return to my full-time job. And it was Seema whom I reached out to when I had to close one of my businesses. I was having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that the business was not working out. I needed to notify my customers of the closure, and Seema helped me determine a strategy for the announcement. During that time, she also reminded me that closing a business was not the defining factor in my life – it was just a chapter in my story. She encouraged me to keep moving forward, and I did. Closing that business allowed me to focus on Tote + Pears and grow it into a company that serves clients worldwide and supports over 4,000 freelance creatives. 

Businesses have ups and downs, and being able to bounce back during difficult times is necessary. Having a mentor offer you a new perspective can make those transitions easier. Running a business is hard, and it can be isolating, but you don’t have to go through it alone. Mentors care about you and your business and are willing to share their expertise. Having their guidance can make all the difference on this journey called entrepreneurship.

Photo: Courtesy of Amber Anderson