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Mentor program in San Francisco helps out startups

Business veterans help budding entrepreneurs find their feet

For publisher Maritza Gueler, it took two years to learn that "mock- up" and "monkey" were one and the same.

Vanessa Hua, Chronicle Staff Writer

Though Gueler had years of experience writing arts reviews and editing in her native Argentina, she had difficulty picking up the U.S. jargon she needed to develop Danza en Espanol http://www.danzarevista.co , a Spanish-language Web magazine devoted to dance in San Francisco.

She found the answer through MicroMentor, http://www.micromentor.org/ a new program that pairs business experts with budding entrepreneurs — online. What was mono (monkey) in her homeland was also the term for a magazine design prototype in English.

Along with her partner and co-publisher Rodolfo Lo Bianco, Gueler e-mails their mentor, Richard Christison, at least three times a week — sometimes three times in a day. Since January, the retired advertising executive has helped them with finding sponsors, business etiquette and using the right parlance.

"We spent two years trying to get this word," Gueler, 45, said with a chuckle.

Lo Bianco, 52, and Gueler unveiled the online magazine at the end of 2001. They sank more than $20,000 into the project so far, not including their unpaid labor. Lo Bianco works as a photographer and Gueler as a Spanish teacher and translator to support the site. A paid Webmaster in Buenos Aires and 15 unpaid contributors reporting from Russia, Mexico, Cuba and around the world round out the staff.

Started in 2001 as a two-year pilot program in California, MicroMentor began to match mentors and business owners from the same industry last fall.

The program’s target is so-called micro-entrepreneurs, defined as those who started their business with less than $35,000 and with fewer than five employees. There are an estimated 13 million micro-entrepreneurs in the United States, said director David Rand.

California is the epicenter of micro-entrepreneurs, driven in part by the state’s many immigrants and startup spirit, he added.

Unlike traditional mentoring programs, MicroMentors’ experts can be located anywhere in the United States and can respond at any time, at their convenience, rather than having to set up face-to-face meetings or phone calls.

Mentors based elsewhere also do not have to worry about giving a hand to local competitors.

The project grew out of research at the Aspen Institute, a Washington, D.C.,

think tank, which has studied low-income micro-enterprise.

The Technology Opportunities Program at the U.S. Department of Commerce, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and the Friedman Family Foundation provided $847,000 to the project, which is looking for additional funding to automate the matching process.

Nonprofits that provide small business support and training, such as Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center in San Francisco, help refer clients to MicroMentor. These organizations help ensure that the business owners have at least a minimum level of tech literacy, Rand said.

Going online can help remove barriers, according to preliminary research by a professor at the New School University in New York. Using e-mail, some entrepreneurs may feel less intimidated by a mentor.

Currently, a panel matches mentors with entrepreneurs, but MicroMentor plans to speed up the process and create a searchable database by year’s end. The program has made 42 matches so far, and has plans to expand the program nationally this year. There is a waiting list, but the program is trying to recruit more mentors.

Gueler has worked with mentors before, with mixed results. Though her mentor last year through a different program was charming and kind, she did not have the industry expertise the magazine needed at the time, Gueler said. They stopped calling each other four months into the six-month program.

The dance magazine’s new mentor, Christison, learned of the program from a posting on Craigslist, the San Francisco online community site. Christison said that he was helped by mentors in his career, when he ran his own businesses, and he has mentored many of his former employees, he said. The tech format of MicroMentor appealed to him.

"I liked the idea that the mentee would have to think about their question as they composed it in an e-mail," he wrote in an e-mail. The act of writing forces them to collect their thoughts and focus on what’s important. "It’s a sensible idea that genuinely helps everyone."

Though mentoring is often lauded as necessary for success, such relationships can be difficult to maintain.

A clash in personality, values or working style can also spoil the experience, said Bette Price, a management consultant who has worked with small and large businesses.

Clients are often focused on the immediate problems, while mentors try to direct their attention to long-term planning, said Jim Ellis, an entrepreneurial marketing professor at the University of Southern California.

"The mentor is frustrated by the mentee’s inability to look beyond his nose, " Ellis said. "The mentee is frustrated by the mentor’s lack of desire to worry about today’s latest fires."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/05/26/BU226991.DTL&type=business

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