How a Mentor Helped Launch a Vision—and Then Joined It

Mentoring entrepreneurs is an extremely rewarding experience.  As a mentor you are able to explore the mentee’s business ideas and use your experience, expertise, and perhaps most importantly, your curiosity to help them on the path to creating the business they want to create.

But mentor relationships can also evolve the longer you work together.  At MCE we have seen many different relationships develop.  We have had mentors stay on as unpaid advisors, we have had entrepreneurs hire their mentor as a consultant and we even had one entrepreneur hire her mentor to be her interim CEO.  And all those examples evolved because the mentor-mentee experience was relationship based.

In the Top Gun session of 2024, for various reasons we had fewer available mentors than needed and then we added a late Top Gun applicant.  As a result, Terry Johnson, the Mentor Network Manager,  took on the mentor role for that applicant himself even though it was in an industry he knew nothing about.

Helen Harrod Clark was not sure what to expect when she joined the Top Gun cohort in Portland but was excited to get help to propel her business - OPTImind Labs - forward.

At the time of joining Top Gun, OPTImind Labs was simply an idea - and not a very fleshed-out one at that. “Being at a very early stage of development, I was unsure what a mentor might think when faced with the task of guiding me through realizing my vision. Little did I know that I joined at the perfect time for my business to build from the ground up with a mentor who was more aligned with my mission and vision than I’d ever have guessed. Having Terry as a mentor didn’t only elevate my business, it led to me finding the person who would help me launch OPTImind Labs to a new level.” 

Through the course of Top Gun, Helen and Terry, worked on exploring OPTImind Labs and what it could become.  At the end of Top Gun, Terry felt like there was more to be done that he could help with and volunteered to continue mentoring on a weekly basis.

Working together through the summer and fall, it became apparent that, though Helen was coming at it from a different perspective, both Helen and Terry literally had the same vision and mission on what they were creating.  Both want to enable individuals and teams to optimize their performance to create the results they want to create.  And both want to do that through the long term development of a Center for Learning and Performance Optimization.

Once that realization was in place and Terry had thought through what had been holding him back, in December he spoke with Helen and recommitted to the vision and she accepted his offer to join OPTImind Labs as the Director of Strategy & Operations.

For Helen the experience of having a mentor and eventually a colleague was key. “All entrepreneurs talk about the importance of having a team, and when Terry offered to join OPTImind Labs, a new layer of collaboration and creation was uncovered between us. Our conversations went from how he could help to what we would create together. From the land of ‘this is not a fully formed thought’ to collaborating on a program that made us both buzz with excitement and bringing a new idea into the world - Terry joining OPTImind Labs was more than simply adding another name to the team - it is another person stepping up to the plate to shape OPTImind Lab’s future and impact on the world.”

For Terry, this experience has rekindled a passion for helping individuals and teams create the results they most want to create, to help them understand the Why and the How of optimizing their performance, and to do that with someone else with the same vision.