MentorDay : The accelerator that connects entrepreneurs from all over the world
Jaime Cavero is an entrepreneur from Bilbao based in Tenerife who has created MentorDay (https://mentorday.es/), an accelerator that helps entrepreneurs to move forward with their projects. It is a private and independent association made up of volunteers, businessmen and professionals. “We give them above all accompaniment, we listen to them and advise them, because we have all undertaken and we have all gone through that valley of death.”
They have a three-week acceleration program and then accompaniment for a year. It is a very intense acceleration, all online, where the entrepreneur goes through a personalized itinerary, “we make a tailor-made suit”.
Cavero embarked on this initiative as a vocational issue inherited from his great-grandfather, who created companies and used part of what he earned to help others. “This comes naturally to me, it doesn’t cost me any effort, it brings me a lot of happiness and joy.”
All this comes out of Dyrecto Consultores , his group of companies based in Tenerife that works for the whole of Spain, “which is what feeds me, I do very well and part of the profits go to MentorDay”. To carry out his projects, in addition to the contribution of Jaime’s companies, he uses other options such as public tenders. But at the end of the month “there is always a hole for expenses, things that are not covered, which I put in by taking it out of the profits of the companies I have created”. “At the time, we saw that entrepreneurs had to be given something, that they were not profitable for us, that we were not interested in them as clients at Dyrecto, and that is the origin of MentorDay. We thought of setting up a CSR or something social where the entrepreneur is not charged, because we are never going to earn money from them, but we do want to help them, right, because they are the ones who are going to create jobs”.
The virtual mentorMentorDay has created a scalable model to help people. “We just came out with a virtual mentor that answers questions from entrepreneurs in any country in any language. We’ve put in the knowledge of all these years, since we started accelerating, and the virtual mentor is now able to reach any country.”
All this without going into further expenses. It must be taken into account that in Spain there is a lot of help, but in any African or Latin American country there is no help, the entrepreneur is on his own, Cavero points out. “I see MentorDay helping in emerging areas with the program we have for mentors, Mentors without Borders; that is, a Spanish mentor responds to an entrepreneur in Latin America. And this movement that started with four friends, we are already a thousand volunteers.
Every month they have 300 requests from 20 countries, mainly from Latin America, then Spain and then Africa. What entrepreneurs always need is financing, “but when they enter the acceleration program, they often realize that the model is not well validated, that the client is not clear about it, that they have to do other things before going for financing,” he explains.
Bringing together people from different countries with different languages “is the richness of the program, because they work together for three weeks. They work with each other and add value.
MentorDay uses a translation tool to help them understand each other. With it, they have been able to achieve one of Jaime’s dreams, which was to bring together entrepreneurs from different countries, Spanish, Latin American and African, in simultaneous training sessions so that they could understand each other at all times, each speaking in his or her own language. “Each entrepreneur sees what the other is speaking subtitled in his or her own language. It’s like the tower of Babel, each one speaks a different language, but they understand each other.