When I need cheering up there are a couple things that never fail me: New Girl, Halo Top, and Best of Craigslist.
You can find just about anything on Craigslist. Apparently, you can also post just about anything. Not until recently have I considered turning to Craigslist for something other than a bookshelf.
You see I'm looking for a mentor, and I'm baffled that I'm not quite sure where to start.
I began as the first marketing employee at my company, JBKnowledge, and have had the incredible opportunity to grow our marketing efforts. I now get to manage what I would consider the best team on the planet. They're young, capable and hungry. Steve Jobs would approve.
The only problem is - I'm also pretty young. And I surprise my team daily when they say, "Sounds good, how do we do it?" and I say, "I'm not sure. Let's figure it out."
As a manager and leader, your team often expects you to have 99% of the answers. And 100% of the tools. It's a well kept secret that every manager on the planet has to Google how to do parts of their job at least once a week.
The internet is the world's best, worst library. It can give you the answers and the tools - but it often lacks the experience. Seeing as it wasn't even around in the time of Mad Men and Donald Draper did not have a Twitter account.
At 29 years old, being responsible for a team of 13 full-time employees and 4 interns is exciting, motivating, and beyond entertaining. It's also terrifying. I often feel like a parent, afraid to screw them up or fail in equipping them with whatever they encounter next in their professional lives. I'd argue "manager issues" can be just as detrimental to an individual's psyche as "daddy issues."
I've had and have incredible mentors at my company. Whether I work with them or for them, or just watch them work, I've learned a great deal about entrepreneurism, product management, software development, sales, public speaking, operations and financial management. Not to say I could do it all, but I've been exposed to some ridiculously smart people doing it well. I'll never stop learning from them.
But being the head of a department in a young, quickly growing tech company means we've done a lot of self-teaching and as critical as that has been for my development as a professional, it can also be a little lonely.
So I've realized how badly I want a mentor. Someone who had a role like mine, leading a marketing department, who's had more successes and more failures than me, who's in my industry but not my company. Someone who can share in what I do, but from the outside, so I can learn from and apply their experience to help me grow mine.
So before I resort to Craigslist - here's what I would swipe right for in a mentor:
Preferred Experience in:
- B2B marketing, preferably at a tech company (but will be happy with just one of the two)
- International product marketing
- SaaS product launch successes and failures
- Lead generation
- Event management
- Public speaking
- Creative team management
- Hiring/recruiting for in-house marketing staff
- Grassroots PR (i.e. getting in the news without having to pay a PR company to call in favors)
- Guerilla marketing (because it's awesome)
- Building viral advertising campaigns
- Competitor analysis
Must Love:
- Numbers (making decisions based on analytics and 'facts not feelings')
- Nerding out on search engine marketing
- Sharing brilliant memes
- Building a brand that says more than the company name
Responsibilities will include:
- Giving Google a break to answer my occasional "why do marketers do this" questions
- Sharing nuggets of knowledge whenever/wherever they come to mind
- Helping me broaden my network and share my own limited experience
- The occasional coffee + breakfast tacos + brainstorming session (all expenses covered)
Any takers? Know of anyone considering posting a "Looking for Mentee" ad to Craigslist? Forbes says if you want a mentor, don't be a wallflower. I'm hoping a blog isn't the "wall" of the internet, but there's only one way to find out.