Pam Calvert established Communications Management, a reputation and communications strategy company serving the education and skills sector, in 1987. However, in recent years she’s begun to mentor small business owners. We caught up with both Pam and Joe Cripps, one of the people who has benefited from her mentoring.

Pam Calvert originally trained to be a mentor on SFEDI’s government-funded Get Mentoring scheme around three years ago. She was preparing herself to dedicate time in the future to mentoring:

“I hoped I’d be able to help other people grow their businesses and deal with some of the challenges I’d dealt with as a business owner. That’s why I set out to gain that framework of knowledge about the mentoring process.”

Having fine-tuned her mentoring skills, Pam then set out to identify suitable mentees, initially using Twitter to reach out to small businesses, but also attending a number of Meet a Mentor events in her quest. Pam now has two mentees as a result of the events, as well as a third who she connected with elsewhere, as she explains:

“I met both of my two current Meet a Mentor mentees last year at London events. One of them is a lady called Vivian Grant who runs a company called Integrity Coaching providing coaching to headteachers, so there is a connection to my own business area. She asked specifically to be introduced to me because I have an education specialism.”

The second person Pam is currently mentoring however, operates in a completely different sector. He is Joe Cripps, who runs Cardiff-based technology company Trail, and he explains that upon meeting Pam, he knew they would be able to work together:

“Pam and I clicked on an intellectual level, although we were in different sectors doing different things. I felt she was going to be objective and challenge what I was doing as a business person.”

The fact of their different backgrounds doesn’t worry Pam, in fact it’s something the mentor finds quite exciting as it offers her the chance to learn and develop alongside her mentee.

There are plenty of areas Joe and Pam have worked on together where the mentor’s direct experience has proven relevant:

“I have called upon my human resources experience when working with Joe. Just the knowledge of running a business, and being in a business that is concerned with reputation and influencing has given me a lot of skills that are transferable to many different settings, including influencing venture capitalists, or talking to Angel Investors.”

Having mentored individuals both directly connected to and completely separate from her own work, for Pam the sector that mentees belong to is immaterial when it comes to the value of the mentoring itself:

“Ultimately, I don’t think it matters whether a mentor and mentee are in the same or different fields. For the mentee it’s about the knowledge that you’ve gained and the support you’ve received. I believe I can be as useful to Joe as I can to someone like Viv, whose field I am very familiar with.”

Pam likes to meet her mentees face-to-face once a month for sessions which last around an hour and a half. During the interim she may exchange emails or speak on the phone with her mentees. When they meet in person, the content of the sessions is dictated by what’s happening within the mentees’ businesses:

“Sometimes there’s a theme to what we talk about. It might be developing a business plan or a marketing strategy. Or, a mentee may bring me the issues they’re currently wrestling with. Joe and I talk a lot about the burning issues of the day – whatever he’s facing right now. Viv tends to have an overarching theme she’d like to go through.”

For Pam, much of the mentoring role is about asking and listening, rather than answering and speaking. It’s about giving individuals new perspectives from which to view their business situation, as she explains:

“I think asking challenging and critical questions can be really important to a mentee because you’re getting them to think around the issue. It doesn’t matter if you’ve had that experience yourself because you’re getting someone to think about it themselves – you’re not giving them the answers.”

A serious advocate of the mentoring process, Pam believes strongly that mentoring is invaluable for entrepreneurs, particularly in early stage businesses. She says:

“It can be a very lonely experience to start a business. You may have friends, business advisors and your spouse but only another business person understands what running a business is really like. I love mentoring. I find it hugely rewarding and I will to do it for as long as I can. I get so much out of watching people grow and develop, and solve their problems. The feedback you get after a mentoring session when you’ve helped someone unravel their thinking is brilliant.”

These positive sentiments are echoed by Joe, who has often looked to Pam as a steadying force as his start-up has grown in under two years to become a company valued at £6 million. He says:

“I had never run a business like this before 2014. Pam’s mentoring gave me confidence to take bold decisions and believe in myself. She’s a sounding board – someone who’s been there and has that experience. I would 1000% recommend mentoring to anyone just starting out.”