Since the beginning of FooPlugins.com we’ve had the intention of adding members to our team both internally and in the form of vendors on our site. Scaling our internal team has been a struggle.
Although FooPlugins has been successful financially, we haven’t been able to invest fully in the goal of bringing on as many full time team members as we’d hoped.
This is when an old idea became new again and has also allowed us to both help other aspiring Internet Entrepreneurs focused on the WordPress space, whether they know it or not. It’s why we started the WordPress Mentorship project.
Mentorship is a personal developmental relationship in which a more experienced or more knowledgeable person helps to guide a less experienced or less knowledgeable person. However, true mentoring is more than just answering occasional questions or providing ad hoc help. It is about an ongoing relationship of learning, dialogue, and challenge.
The Mentorship Model
There are several approaches we could take with this, but we’ve started slow and we’ve purposefully looked for people who aren’t currently as entrenched in the WordPress space as we are. We did this for two reasons:
- We wanted fresh eyes on everything. As you know, when you get too close to something, your opinion can become skewed.
- We are WordPress evangelists and strong proponents of helping others break out of the “employee” mindset and showing them how possible it really is to create your own future.
If you’re looking for a deeper dive into a WordPress business mentor program, then you should see what Matt Medeiros is doing.
We’ve already started with a couple people and we’ll be announcing more details on our company blog at a later date.
Our Guiding Intention
Our first intention is to teach others how to work online, specifically within the WordPress space. This includes basic usage and blogging to start and will move into more advanced topics like theme and plugin development depending on the person.
In short, we are really promoting the “create your own future” aspect of working within WordPress. If you would have told me after my first installation of WordPress, that I would fall in love with an online community and make a full time living from this software, I would have thought you were nuts. My mindset was all wrong and fortunately, I changed that.
That’s the driving force for us. To show others (and specifically beginners) what’s possible.
Incremental Team Building
Becoming a WordPress mentor is also a way in which we’re building our internal team. Our goal is to inspire the people we’re mentoring into action with the hope that the enjoy the time spent with us and find value in what they’ve learned and will want to continue with us and eventually help our business grow.
Slow and steady wins the race right?
The Payoff of Knowledge Sharing
There are a few payoffs we hope to gain from sharing what we know.
- Inspire others to learn more about the benefits of WordPress and therefore inspire others in the future. Paying it forward as they say.
- Teach others how to build their own financial future independent of working for someone else.
- Build our own content offerings for our future Foo projects.
- It just makes us feel good:)
What do you think? Is it worth our time and energy?
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