MentorcliQ Helps Make Mentoring Work
The impetus for MentorcliQ goes back to founder Phil George’s time in the Peace Corps. As a volunteer in Armenia, he helped establish a not-for-profit that provided business education for women.
“These women represented a generation of young people who were eager to embrace the changing times, but lacked a lot of mentors to look up to,” George said.
So George and his associates created a nine-month long curriculum, the capstone of which was a mentoring program that connected the women with leaders in the capital. These women went on to develop amazing international careers.
MentorcliQ helps companies create mentoring programs that match their needs and goals.
George gained further experience working on mentoring initiatives in a much different environment, a Fortune 1000 business with 5000 employees.
Organizations tend to have multiple initiatives around employee training and retention.
“These are relative to the company’s goals and missions. We find that one of the things that ties them together is mentoring,” said George.
“But companies, no matter how well-intended, face challenges when they are implementing a mentoring program. For example, how do you get people connected with other individuals they would be interested in connecting with? How do you keep the mentoring progressing forward, handle follow-up, and share success stories when they occur?”
George started looking in the marketplace for a solution.
“When we didn’t find one,” he said, “my brother, Andy George, and I founded MentorcliQ; and a friend from the Peace Corps days, Miles Ulrich, joined the team to help us build our own.”
MentorcliQ provides a cloud-based software platform that allows an organization to create a mentoring program that gets results.
Using MentorcliQ, companies can easily create a program, match people quickly (MentorcliQ has a fancy algorithm underneath), and then manage, measure, and analyze mentoring results.
Connecting with organizations that already make mentoring a priority.
Surprisingly, many of MentorcliQ’s customer relationships begin in the profit centers of organizations, rather than in human resource departments.
“When companies bring us in, it’s either because they are looking for an enterprise-wide solution across divisions and business segments, or because a particular division executive has specific ideas about how he or she wants to develop people or specific problems that they are trying to tackle with mentoring,” said George.
MentorcliQ uses Internet tools and resources to identify companies that have existing mentoring programs, where mentoring is already a priority.
Companies that recognize the value of mentoring are interested in ways to make administration of their programs easier and learn how to expand their mentoring program so that it has a larger impact on the organization overall.
“We have multiple Fortune 500 customers,” George said. “They and we are incredibly excited about the value proposition that our platform offers them.”
“Nothing prepares you for being an entrepreneur like actually being an entrepreneur,” George said, “and there are some outstanding mentors and advisors at TechColumbus who stand ready to give entrepreneurs a hand.
MentorcliQ team takes its own advice.
It took MentorcliQ a few tries to meet TechColumbus’ engagement criteria.
“One of the many happy results of the process included a new website (www.mentorcliq.com), which was designed by Zoco Design, through the Expert Network,” George said.“They have a filtering process. We had to go through a few hurdles,” he said. “But the result is that we learned how to express our value proposition and understand our target markets in a way that we didn’t before.”
