Mentors and mentees are invited to the SEED Foundation

After intensive professional preparation, the National Entrepreneurship Mentor Program was launched on 6 February 2019. The aim of the project is the national introduction of indirect support tools to increase the competitiveness and efficiency of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The biggest challenge facing the Hungarian micro, small and medium-sized enterprise sector is to increase efficiency and thus to improve the competitiveness of the sector. The government considers the development and professional support of SMEs forming backbone of the economy to be of primary importance. This is why the project "Increasing the efficiency of the SME sector by improving financial knowledge, providing entrepreneurial mentoring" has been launched, for short the National Entrepreneurial Mentoring Program.

In this project, besides the Ministry for Innovation and Technology and the Hungarian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the SEED Foundation for Small Enterprise Economic Development is also consortium member.  Among others, SEED participates in this cooperation by developing and running a personal entrepreneur mentor program.

In the course of personal entrepreneurial mentoring, the mentor shares his professional-business knowledge, experience and wisdom with the mentee who is able and willing to use all these for stabilizing his business or put it on a growth path.

There are three target groups for personal entrepreneurial mentoring: Women entrepreneurs, young entrepreneurs and family businesses facing generation change.

The duration of the mentoring process is at least 9, maximum 12 months. During this period, a mentor works together with two or three mentees. Before starting the program, the mentors will receive two-day professional training organized by the SEED Foundation in order to learn professional skills of the mentoring work.

In the mentoring process the mentor shares his professional-business knowledge and experience with the mentee, thus it is necessary to have entrepreneurial experience of minimum 5 years together with experience in running at least a  5-person micro- or small business with an extensive relationships. Beyond professional qualities, it is important that the mentor should have authentic, open, accepting, constructive, creative and empathetic personality.

Mentee may be such entrepreneur who wants to put his business on a higher growth path, but feels that he does not have enough force and knowledge to do so, and that is why the help of a more experienced and skillful entrepreneur would be welcome.

The first and most important feature of the mentor is therefore the professional humility in a good sense.  It is a very important and related element that the mentee would be able and ready to transfer the knowledge gained from the mentor into the own entrepreneurial practice, to face the weaknesses of the business, to recognize strengths as well as the mentee would be able to think in (organizational) processes. Moreover it is very important of course to think very seriously the intention to change, to become better and to do a lot if even not everything.

During the mentoring process, knowledge sharing events, various mentor club events as well as special consultations within a voucher are available to support mentor’s and mentee’s work.

You can apply for the mentor program even as a mentor or mentee from 6 February 2019.

For more details, please contact our colleague Ágnes Danics at adanics@seed.hu or +36 30 647 1977. In case of registration and application, click on the link.