Unique business opportunity: 67 minutes of mentoring from top SA CEOs

Unique business opportunity: 67 minutes of mentoring from top SA CEOs

Paula Luckhoff | Bruce Whitfield talks to Yolanda Cuba, founder of The Mentorship Boardroom, about this year’s Mandela Day initiative.

• Email
• Print
• Tweet
• Share

Mentorship can give entrepreneurs just that guidance they need to make a success of their business.

To mark Mandela Day (18 July) The Mentorship Boardroom is offering the country’s future leaders the opportunity of 67 minutes of top-quality mentorship.

The organisation describes itself as “a bold professional’s platform that connects mentees to renowned mentors around the globe”.

For this year’s Mandela Day initiative, it called in the services of past and present CEOs of JSE-listed companies.

This is your chance to be mentored by experienced CEO’s….

Apply on https://t.co/g6vYn5hyZi and let us know which past or present CEO of a JSE-listed company you want to be mentored by or select any of the CEO’s that have already signed up…

Take the chance…#Mentorship pic.twitter.com/bSwIH6cT0u

— Yolanda Cuba🌍 (@Yolandacuba) July 5, 2022

Bruce Whitfield finds out more from Mentorship Boardroom founder Yolanda Cuba, who says the online platform was actually launched on Mandela Day last year.

The Mentorship Boardroom’s an idea that was born many years ago, however I decided to really upscale it to an online platform last year…. We had people right across the board from media to CEOs and so on…

Yolanda Cuba, Founder – The Mentorship Boardroom

Really the idea is how do we give people access to leaders they wouldn’t normally have access to… How do we actually engender hope in people, especially in times like these…

Yolanda Cuba, Founder – The Mentorship Boardroom

Cuba says the Mandela Day event will actually take place on Sunday 17 July because many of the mentors would not be available on the Monday.

We are literally asking them to give us 67 minutes of their time and be able to inspire someone younger than themselves, a younger professional… although last year the people were all 56 years old who asked to be mentored…

Yolanda Cuba, Founder – The Mentorship Boardroom

… so it’s not only for young people it’s also for experienced professionals in the field, executives who want to perhaps change careers…

Yolanda Cuba, Founder – The Mentorship Boardroom

Selecting the successful applicants is a heart-wrenching process Cuba says – fin 2021 there were over 1 100 applications with just 92 mentors available.

We ask every applicant that applies on our platform to give us a justification for why they want to meet that particular mentor on Nelson Mandela Day, and we choose based on the reasons they give us.

Yolanda Cuba, Founder – The Mentorship Boardroom

She notes that The Mentorship Boardroom is a permanent platform including people who are willing to do one-off mentorship and others who continue with their mentees for an entire year.

With the world in flux people are confused and want to be led she concludes.

“This actually provides that route for a lot of people.”

And a last word of advice from Whitfield:

Some of South Africa’s most extraordinary business leaders are available… It’s really worth putting your pitch in and applying your mind to your pitch… Make it worth their while to choose you.

Bruce Whitfield, The Money Show host

You can apply for a mentorship at thementorshipboardroom.com, or click here to access the registration form.

For more detail, listen to the conversation with Yolanda Cuba below:

This article first appeared on CapeTalk : Unique business opportunity: 67 minutes of mentoring from top SA CEOs