Learning Faster: The Power of Mentors, Advisors, and Shared Experience

Thank you to Kelly Anne Parker, founder of Launch Grow Exit, a coaching business that helps founders launch, grow, and exit their companies, for sharing insights about mentoring both as a founder and a consultant. Kelly sold her company, Send Ribbon, to UrbanStems in 2020.The views expressed in this post are those of Kelly Anne and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Enthuse Foundation.  

There is a quote often attributed to Warren Buffett that says: ‘A smart person learns from their own mistakes. A wise person learns from the mistakes of others.’

Over the course of my entrepreneurial journey, I have been both the ‘smart’ person and the ‘wise’ one. After more than 15 years of building startup companies, including founding, scaling, and exiting my own business, I’ve learned firsthand how costly it can be to learn everything the hard way. Those experiences are exactly why I now share my lessons, mistakes, and insights with other entrepreneurs who are navigating similar paths.

After my exit, I founded Launch Grow Exit, an advisory firm dedicated to helping female founders build strong business plans and growth strategies at an affordable price.

The motivation was simple: it was the exact support I needed when I was bootstrapping my own company and couldn’t access it.

However, there’s a difference between being a mentor and an advisor.  

Mentors vs. Advisors: Understanding the Difference Matters

For some, life after an exit often evolves into a mix of advising and mentoring. While the two roles are frequently used interchangeably, they serve very different purposes. Understanding the distinction is critical for founders.

·       A mentor provides broad, long-term guidance rooted in lived experience. These relationships are typically informal, built on trust, and rarely compensated. A mentor is a guide, someone who helps you see around corners and grow into your potential.

·       An advisor, on the other hand, offers targeted expertise tied to specific goals or challenges. Advisors are often engaged for defined outcomes, for example, business strategy, financial planning, operational structure, or fundraising preparation. These relationships are more formal, often transactional, and may involve fees or equity.

For simplicity, here’s a comparison:

• Mentor (broad and holistic) vs. Advisor (narrow and specific)

• Mentor (personal and professional growth) vs. Advisor (solving a defined problem)

• Mentor (informal, long-term) vs. Advisor (structured, goal-driven)

  
  

Both roles are essential, but they are not interchangeable.

How I Found My Own Mentors and Advisors

Looking back at how I approached mentorship while building my first company, I sought out women who had built businesses I admired. While I didn’t have direct access to founders like Sara Blakely, I learned from them through podcasts, books, and interviews.

Closer to home, I identified experts within my own network for specific needs: bankers, accountants, digital marketers, and operators who understood areas where I lacked experience. For accountability and operational discipline as a solopreneur, I hired a business coach who helped me address the parts of the business I consistently avoided, like accounting, systems, and operations.

Hiring an advisor forced me to strengthen my weaker areas and evolve from a founder with a narrow skill set into a more complete operator.

How Founders Should Approach Mentorship Today

For founders seeking traditional mentorship, the best place to start is within your existing network. Be clear about what you need - specific skills, experience, or perspective. Ask people directly and be clear with your intentions. Editor’s note: Check out the Enthuse Foundation blog post “How to Not Be Afraid of the Mentoring Dynamic?” for more tips.

A simple, respectful approach goes a long way. Here’s my step-by-step recommendation:

·       Request 15 minutes to ask a focused question.

·       Come prepared and be thoughtful.

·       Follow up with gratitude and always send the thank-you note.

Mentors remember when you respect their time and when you don’t.

When Mentorship Goes Wrong

Mentorship breaks down when expectations and boundaries are unclear or ignored. One of the most common missteps occurs when mentees repeatedly make requests that are far outside the scope of a voluntary relationship.

This often includes asking for introductions to investors, partners, or potential customers without sufficient preparation or trust. These requests carry real reputational risk for mentors, and when mentorship becomes transactional rather than developmental, the relationship suffers.

Effective mentorship relies on mutual respect, clear communication, and an understanding of roles. Without those foundations, even well-intentioned relationships can fail to deliver value for either party.

Why Women Founders Must Pay It Forward

It is critically important for women founders to mentor others. Additionally, it’s just as important for women to use their platforms to share knowledge at scale.

One-to-one mentorship creates deep, personalized impact. It allows founders to support others through nuanced decisions and moments where lived experience truly matters. At the same time, technology and social media now offer unprecedented opportunities to educate and empower far beyond individual relationships.

By openly sharing lessons learned, best practices, and hard-won insights, women founders can create access, visibility, and momentum for the next generation. When paired with direct mentorship, this approach strengthens the entire entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Success should never be siloed. When women founders share what they’ve learned through mentorship, advisory work, and public knowledge-sharing, success is no longer individual; it becomes collective, sustainable, and scalable.

And that embodies exactly what is meant by women empowering women.

Bottom Line: At the end of the day, the most powerful thing we can do as women founders is turn our own hard-won lessons into someone else’s shortcut. So why not be smart and wise? Real progress happens when we choose to be both. Let’s continue to grow ourselves while making the path smoother for the next generation of women founders.

Kelly Anne Parker is the bootstrapped founder of Send Ribbon, a corporate gifting company acquired by Series C Flower & Gift Startup UrbanStems in 2020. Before the acquisition, Kelly served in various growth and leadership roles at startups like Doordash and Indeed and Managed by Q, which WeWork acquired. Since the exit of her company, Kelly has founded Launch Grow Exit to help other women founders; launch, grow, and exit their companies. Kelly supports the Enthuse Foundation, hosting and organizing entrepreneur panels and fundraising on behalf of the organization.