Mentoring is a professional activity, a trusted relationship, a meaningful commitment. Volta organized a group of experienced mentors with diverse backgrounds and experience and two common features: Commitment to startup community in Nova Scotia and history of past success.

It is your opportunity to gain advice, access to connections and coaching from the leading Entrepreneurs in Atlantic Canada. Once you are matched with your mentors, your mentors will work with you to establish strategic goals and actionable items and then check in with you on a weekly basis and help you reach those goals. Basically, they are the person who will call you up once a week and ask, what  you did, what you are going to do next week, and how they can help.

How does the matching work?
Each company gets 5 minutes to present themselves and tell the mentors a little bit about what they are working on. This is not a formal pitch, matching is as much about you personally as a founder as it is about your company so use your 5 minutes to tell the mentors about yourself, your team and what is it that you are trying to achieve. Pitching will be followed by half an hour of networking so that mentors can get to know you  better. After the networking, mentors will mark up on a sheet of paper the companies they are interested in mentoring.

What do the mentors get out of it?
Mentors are looking to give back to the community, however, Volta will provide a framework  document that allows you to compensate the mentor with between 0.5% to 1% equity stake,  vested over two years with a condition that mentor attended at least 75% of scheduled meetings/calls in those two years. This is again, non-mandatory and up to you as a company to  offer to your mentor if you wish so that he or she “has some skin in the game”.

This province wide program is also envisioned to help get some of the seasoned executives back in the startup life and get those founders with recent exits to find the next big thing to get involved in.

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