PRIME Initiative

Could you be a volunteer PRIME online mentor?

Have you already experienced the challenge of setting up your own business? Would you be prepared to share your experience as a PRIME mentor?

Mentoring online can be the perfect way to share your hard-won wisdom with those who can benefit from your experience and knowledge, all in a supportive, safe and secure online environment.

PRIME mentors assist people in the early stages of starting a new business. The emphasis is on being a sounding board and talking through and clarifying options rather than giving prescriptive business advice.

If you would like to find out more about volunteering with the UK’s leading mentoring website please get in contact with Harri Harrison, PRIME Mentoring Manager, harri.harrison@ace.org.uk

If you’ve started your own business or have become self-employed after the age of 50, here’s a chance to get some free publicity. We’d like to hear from you. We’re looking for stories to put up on the case-studies section of this web site.

There are two ways of entering. If you use Microsoft Word just download this form (in Word 2003 doc format), fill in some details and email it back to us at primebusinessclub@gmail.com

Or if you prefer you can fill in the form immediately here online. You don’t need to fill in every field in great detail - just enough to give us the gist of what you are doing. We’ll also email you a link so you can return to your online form later and alter or add details should you want to.

You story could inspire others - and also warn them of pitfalls to avoid along the way. And it could also drive traffic to your web site, from both customers and journalists looking for stories. We’ll link to your web site from any case studies we write up.

Ideally your business needs to have got to the stage where it has started trading and have enough customers on board to say something about how things are going. We are interested in businesses up to about two years old - but older is acceptable if you can still remember lessons learned from your the early days of your venture.

We don’t guarantee we’ll put every business submitted up. We’ll contact you to go through your story if it’s suitable. Since we are not sure how many great stories we will receive at the moment we can’t promise to respond to everybody.

We are currently actively seeking more volunteer business mentors for the Black Country in the Midlands and Doncaster and Sheffield in Yorkshire. And we expect to be recruiting more mentors elsewhere at the beginning of 2009.

PRIME mentors assist people in the early stages of starting a new business. The emphasis is on being a sounding board and talking through and clarifying options rather than giving business advice.

On our existing schemes (the Black Country, Yorkshire and Northern Ireland) mentors have all been experienced business people giving a few hours a month of their time on a voluntary basis. All mentors receive some training on the counselling approach we use, and work with a PRIME mentor co-ordinator.

In the New Year we expect to start more mentoring schemes in England, but are not yet sure of the exact locations. But if you are interested please drop us a line at prime@ace.org.uk