Meet a Mentor events are a great place for business mentors to pair up with mentees looking for guidance and inspiration. However, for some, simply attending an event can be a reminder of how far they’ve come.

This was the case for Victoria Hall (pictured, left), a former picture editor who turned her artistic flair into a business four years ago.

Victoria runs Cluck Cluck!, a retail business selling homewares, gifts and art featuring her illustrations of chickens and other birds.

When Victoria came along to a Meet a Mentor event in New Market looking for a Mentor, she found something different, as she explains:

“It probably worked out the other way to be honest. Some people were still coming up with their business ideas and I realised that actually I’ve been doing this for four years. As always with mentoring events, I found it gave me much more confidence, and made me realise I knew more than I thought I knew.”

Victoria established her business in 2010 when she moved from London to Suffolk. During the first year she sold prints at local fairs as a way to get to know people, as well as to build a business base in the area:

“Everything is produced locally in Suffolk, primarily because I wanted the business to have a UK production ethos. But it also meant I could be there when things were made. Doing the fairs was a good way of just meeting people and getting out and about in a new area. People had expressed interest, wanting tea towels and cards and that kind of thing, so the business gradually grew from there. I grew it slowly because I wanted to see if it was going to work.”

Asked whether she’d recommend mentoring to other SMEs and start-ups, Victoria is emphatically positive, urging business owners to seek mentoring whether it’s formal or casual:

“Yes, definitely do it. It’s a lonely occupation having your own business, especially when it’s just you doing everything. Although it’s not formalised mentoring, I regularly brainstorm with friends who worked in the textiles industry and building brands. When I’m doing a new range I’ll ask everyone to look at the designs, across a wide range of age groups. When I get new product lines I show samples to people whose opinions I value and say ‘OK, what do you think?’”

Victoria heard about the Meet a Mentor event through local mentoring organisation Menta (www.menta.org.uk). Menta is a not-for-profit organisation that provided the artist with some of the support and advice a more traditional one-to-one mentoring relationship might deliver:

“Menta runs courses on finance, bookkeeping, facebook, twitter, googleplus, sales, marketing, as well as giving one-to-one business advice. And they do a monthly networking coffee morning.”

Wherever she goes, Victoria is making contacts and picking up bits of mentoring and support. Whether she’s at Menta, attending an IOEE event or simply quizzing the people around her, she’s someone who is open to the input and advice of others:

“I did the Home & Gift Harrogate trade fair for two years running and the same four stands were placed next to each other. You get to know people if you’re standing opposite them for four days and we’ve all stayed in touch. We often speak about certain shops and we warn each other – ‘Did a big order for them and their payment was really late.’”

By embracing networking enthusiastically and recognising opportunities for mini-mentoring sessions, Victoria has really invested Cluck Cluck! with a wide range of experience and knowledge. This is a wise move, and one that will give the business strong foundations on which to build future successes.