Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ's)

1. Tell us a little bit about Minneapolis Business Mentors

MBmentors is a premier source of free small business advice for entrepreneurs and established businesses.

MBmentors was founded, and is staffed, by experienced executives and business owners with the objective of helping entrepreneurs and established business owners move their ideas and companies forward.

We are a non-profit, volunteer company that focuses on 6 core competencies:

Free and confidential mentoring.
Free skill-based workshops and webinars on a variety of topics to small business owners and startups.
Free business plan advise. We also use LivePlan software a free service to our clients who need a business plan.
CEO/President Roundtables facilitated by experienced leaders.
Free Advisory Council for small business owners who need advice about a variety of issues. For example, new product line, buying/selling their business, growth and expansion, etc.
Women's Networking Group. By and for women entrepreneurs and small business owners.

2. Were some of your volunteers affiliated with other mentoring organizations?

Some of our volunteers were affiliated with other mentoring organizations in the past as mentors, workshop presenters, and in many cases Leadership.

3. Why did you leave these other organizations to start MBmentors?

We all had different reasons for leaving these organizations, however, what we all shared is a common desire to:

Be solely focused on clients and offer more tailored services to entrepreneurs and small businesses in Hennepin county, and
The ability to enter into Affiliated Partnerships with other local organizations that support our clients.
Take mentoring, workshops and advisory groups to the next level of service by utilizing digital social media to reach and work with clients.

MBmentors offered us the platform to realize these objectives.

4. How are you different from other mentoring organizations?

We formed MBmentors to allow our mentors to more closely tailor our mentoring services to our client’s needs. We do this by:

Provide mentoring when and where the client wants. We do this by allowing the client to self-schedule online appointments (day, time, location by either phone, email, online video, face-to-face)
Creating Affiliated Partnerships with organizations that support entrepreneurs and local businesses (chambers, co-working space groups, MeetUps, and more).
Maintaining the client-mentor relationship from business startup to the business sale.
Servicing a local, more focused area – Hennepin County.
Providing support to underrepresented groups.

5. Does MB Mentors Prepare Business/Financial Plans?

MB Mentors is a business mentoring organization and as such, provides counseling services on a wide range of business operations, finance, marketing and sales related issues to its clientele. Accordingly, MB Mentors will assist and guide clients in the preparation of business and financial plans as described below, but is precluded from actually producing a final product for the client.

6. Does MB Mentors provide Legal and/or Financial Advice?

Although some of our volunteers might come professional backgrounds (i.e., Legal, Accounting, Engineering, Medical, etc), MB Mentors volunteers are strictly forbidden from providing any advice to clients that could be interpreted or construed as acting in a legal or finance/accounting capacity.

7. What does the future hold for Minneapolis Business Mentors?

For a company that started during the COVID pandemic we have come a long way both from the standpoint of client development, services offered, and infrastructure, and we anticipate continuing that growth in the future.