- Have you worked with a mentor who has led you far? Take a moment to recognize their contribution(s) and we’ll all applaud with you!
Being a young manager in a medium sized company that is part of an international manufacturing company, I was given a mentor to help me through issues that might come up. It was part of the company’s strategy for being world class. That turned out to be a real disaster. I was teamed up with another manager who worked in a plant that was fairly close (in a neighbouring community). We were both so busy that we only talked on the phone when we were trying to co-ordinate our busy schedules and only met once in person for a coffee. I really like the idea of mentors, but my only exposure to a formal mentor was less than impressive.
Informally, I have a great network of friends that are successful in a wide range of business ventures from owning and operating their own business ventures or franchises to managing large companies. I would have to say that this group would include the great majority of my mentors. In particular would be Chris Miles who owns and operates Milestone Casting Studios and has also started up a production company called Lucky Friday Productions. Chris has an entrepreneur’s mind and he would definitely be a mentor. I helped him with the startup of Milestone Casting and that experience taught me a lot about entrepreneurship and inspired me to want to have my own business. Greg Ionson is another friend that comes to mind. He lives in now, but I was lucky enough to have him living with me while he and his wife Chie were here in
- Without spilling the beans, what is in the works for your business or product line for 2006? Where are you headed, and where do you hope to be by the end of they year? What about the coming years? Share your goals with us and tell us how you plan to achieve them.
I don’t mind spilling the beans. I am looking forward to having a time when Blog of the Day no longer requires development time and can just have the updates and follow up. That won’t happen for a little while, but I’m looking forward to that day. I am a bit of a perfectionist and am always looking for continuous improvement on a project, so I know that the development aspect will always be something that I will work on to improve the site.
Following the stabilization of Blog of the Day, I am looking to start up a new site. I have a couple of different ideas that I believe could be successful. All of them are unrelated to Blog of the Day. Having worked in the acting community and still having ties to that community, one site idea that I have is to create an online community for actors to share photos, video and just generally interact with other actors and industry professionals. There are many services similar to this for other groups, but I don’t think that actors really have an online community such as this. The development of that project is pretty intense, but I am hoping to have it up and running by the end of the year.
After I get that site up and running… Who knows? Running two sites will be a lot of work but if they are successful, then it may be time to move on to the next project for development. Staffing may be required at that point. By delegating some of the duties that I currently do on my own, that will give me the time to either decide to take a project to a new level or start another project. Only time will tell.
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