Mentorship

Overview

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Mentorship is a repeated relationship in which someone who has already run a company lends judgement to someone running one now. The instrument varies on four axes: how long it runs, who pays, whether it is one-to-one or a cohort, and whether capital travels with the advice. In Flanders, Voka sells access through Bryo, where the fee tracks company stage, from 290 euro for pre-starters to 1,150 euro for startups past 100,000 euro of revenue, and the delivery unit is a cohort of 10 to 15 founders meeting 10 to 15 times a year. Eleven people on the wiki are tied to this concept and ten of them run or have run operating companies, among them Herman Van de Velde as former CEO of Van de Velde, Toon Bossuyt at Boss Paints, Inge Geerdens who founded CVWarehouse and Nicolas Van Hoorde who co-founded delta app before its sale to eToro in 2019, with Katleen De Stobbeleir of Vlerick Business School the one academic.

Stated facts & numbers

• Videos discussing mentorship in the wiki corpus: 34
• People tied to the concept on the wiki: 11 (10 founders or current/former CEOs, 1 academic)
• Companies tied to the concept on the wiki: 0
• Flemish paid programme: Voka Bryo: StandUp 290 euro, StartUp 575 euro, StartUp Advanced 1,150 euro; cohorts of 10 to 15 entrepreneurs, 10 to 15 sessions a year
• Walloon free programme: Réseau Entreprendre Wallonie: two years of free peer accompaniment; 604 enterprises supported since 2004, 420 participating business leaders, 4,416 jobs created or preserved
• Brussels programme: Réseau Entreprendre Bruxelles: board sessions, monthly one-to-one mentoring, peer clubs and flash mentoring, plus an honour loan up to 50,000 euro at 0% interest with no personal guarantee; 400+ member entrepreneurs, 500+ accompanied
• Main video source for the quotes: Ben's Mentors, a Belgian long-form entrepreneur interview channel