Next Level Networking: Mentorship Like You’ve Never Seen Before
With Next Level Networking, we help small business owners find mentors to help their businesses flourish to new heights.
Contributors: Sharmila Roychoudhury, Ani Harriott, Nick Nagari, Shang Li
Problem and Solution Overview
After graduating from college, many people go on to start small businesses, and are faced with tasks like creating a business plan, drafting contracts with vendors, finding rental space, and so on. To new small business owners, these tasks can feel very intimidating, especially without someone there to guide them through the process of building their business from the ground up. While several small business owners turn to personal connections to help them set up their business, most small business owners do not know any other business owners in their industry which can serve to their detriment. To combat this lack of mentorship and networking opportunities, our application reinvents the networking process. Our application uses innovative networking technology to help users find business mentors in the same industry and other businesses to partner with. By providing users with a mechanism to find other similarly-minded people and businesses, we help small business owners focus on building their business without the added stress of having to network as well.
Design Research Goals, Stakeholders, and Participants
The goals of conducting our design research were to understand the existing ways in which small business owners network, tabulate the struggles they face when using these avenues, and understand about how the networking process ended up working for them. The stakeholders we considered in our research were small business owners and their team members. When deciding what design research mechanism to use, because the networking process can inherently take a long time, we decided to use self-reported research methods as opposed to observational methods. To ensure that we were able to get both a wide range of data as well as in-depth data, we decided to use a combination of online surveys and interviews. We decided to use online surveys as they could be conducted anonymously, maintaining the privacy of business owners, and because participants could fill them out on their own schedule, a critical facet as small business owners tend to often be busy with prior commitments. After conducting our survey, we followed up with a round of interviews of small-business owners. We decided to use interviews to get more in-depth anecdotal data on participants’ networking stories, and to capture the feelings and frustrations on a deeper level which participants had during the networking process. We decided to use Seattle-area business owners as they are the target audience for our application. We turned to Seattle-area business owners through online social platforms such as Facebook groups and university alumni organizations. Our twenty participants owned businesses of all types, ranging from a restaurant to an artificial intelligence lab. All our responses were from companies of less than 70 employees, with the majority of responses being from companies with under 6 employees. Over 80% of our participants had founded their company less than two years ago, and all had attempted during that time to network with other small businesses.
Design Research Results and Themes
Through our user research, several common ideas emerged. According to our online survey results, interviews with small business owners, and through our own general observations, we noticed four high-level themes:
- Most people turn to their relatives and friends (ie. personal connections) before anyone else when they look for a mentor or new business to partner with. While most small business owners are interested in mentorship and partnering with other businesses, they do not have a solid plan for how to do so. For instance, one business owner writes that their search process for a new business to partner with stalls if none of their personal connections’ businesses are interested in partnering, as they do not have an external networking plan.
- When given the chance, most people utilize both online and in-person networking events. For example, a participant with a crafting business said they take advantage of craft fairs, both virtual and in-person, in order to find potential business partners.
- Among the people who had a mentor, they think their mentors helped them improve key communications skills and expand their business. For instance, one restaurant owner wrote that their mentor recommended a few local meat suppliers which proved very useful for their cooking.
- Most small business owners find it hard to meet other business owners within their industry. For instance, a restaurant owner writes that they wish that they could meet other restaurant owners in order to exchange business tips, but are unable to do so.
Underlying these high-level themes, we noticed mentorship to be critical as mentorship provides professional socialization opportunities and strategic support that helps to facilitate future success for small businesses. Having limited time makes it difficult for small business owners to develop meaningful professional connections while operating their businesses, connections which would help their small business reach a new level of growth.
Proposed Design
Throughout the design process, we had focused on how to support our community of local (by neighborhood) small business owners. From our research findings, we discovered that the primary underlying issue that we could attempt to resolve in order to benefit the community as a whole was promoting mentor-mentee relationships. Initially when we had started working on this project, we focused on networking as a whole being the primary issue for our target group of small business owners, but our user research illuminated that even though this can be an issue, a mentor-mentee relationship can effectively offset a large portion of the problems which small business owners face, and is a problem that does not have a unique solution yet. Because of this, we felt that promoting mentorship would most directly facilitate business development and community among local small business owners.
Based on our finding that mentor-mentee relationships could benefit our target group in several ways, we narrowed down two tasks to focus on supporting in our design. The first task that we chose to focus on is creating a one-on-one mentorship connection between the user and another small business owner that is geared towards advice sharing and interpersonal networking. The second task that we decided to focus on is creating a business-to-business mentorship connection which would help small businesses grow through partnering with another business. Because both of these tasks involve the mutually beneficial connection of two parties, we felt that both of these tasks could be accomplished through facilitating mentor-mentee relationships.
After several design iterations on how to approach this problem, ideating everything from a novel device to a voice controlled networking system, we settled on a phone application being the most useful and realistic for our target group. Because we are focusing on promoting mentor-mentee relationships, private information will likely be shared through our design in situations where mentees are asking a mentor for advice. This facet steered us away from a more public design, such as a billboard or interactive installation in public, as these forms would violate the inherent privacy that users seek to have with their mentor-mentee relationship. Similarly, we anticipate that businesses that are partnering and mentor-mentee pairs will want to be able to communicate at a time that is convenient for them, whether it’s when they are at work, on their way to a meeting, or finishing up the day at home. Given this need for flexibility in when to use our design, we felt a phone application would best serve the needs of small business owners over a website or other stationary design, since a phone is something small business owners bring everywhere.
The first task that we chose to focus on is one-on-one mentorship connection between the user and another small business owner. As shown in Figure 1, while looking for mentors or mentees, users can filter people in their local communities whose interests align with their own, for example a person running a restaurant may want to look for another person running a restaurant. The user can also see the badges owned by the potential mentor, showing them how much experience the mentor has had working with mentees. When the user finds a mentor or mentee whose interests align with theirs, the pair can use the chat functionality built into the application, and can discuss either for general advice, such as the steps to crafting a business plan, or specific personal advice, such as a discussion on how the mentee’s business has performed in the last year. This functionality means that users like Shelley, in Figure 2, will be able to use their mentor as a resource to turn to for support whenever they face day-to-day business questions and struggles, such as how to find the best rental space to house their business. The app can facilitate a personal mentor-mentee connection which leads to business growth. By finding a mentor within the community, the small business owner is able to make advancements that would have been much more difficult without the connection made through the app. This promotes beneficial mentorship where small businesses can rely on the advice of more knowledgeable businessmen and women in their community.
The second task that we decided to focus on is a business-to-business mentorship connection which would help small businesses grow through partnering with another business. After filling out their profile with details about the type of business they operate, users can then search for a type of business to partner with by pressing on “Find Business”, as shown in Figure 3. In Figure 3, the user wants their business to partner with a pet food company. A page showing businesses which are potential matches will show up and present basic information about themselves. For instance, profile information such as business name and business location are shown. If the user desires to work with a particular business on the list, they will be able to chat with that business within the platform to propose a potential partnership between their businesses. This means that Next Level Networking can help facilitate business partnerships that lead to business growth. Through this functionality, small business owners will be able to potentially increase their revenue and accumulate enough money to expand their businesses, helping them to be more successful than ever before.
