How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/b58d5664e7bd7649

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So if you can just give me some advice on why it will work, why it won't work.
I promise you coming from defense contracting, I have a very thick skin.
So if you think that this doesn't have legs for my baby is ugly, tell me why so I can fix it.
Janice Omedecki has always been hungry for feedback. It's one of the reasons she wrote a book and built a platform to help people find mentors.
Like so many of us, Janice personally appreciates the power and potential.
of a truly great mentor.
Entrepreneurs were stubborn.
We are a stubborn lot, and I think also part of me was very ego driven of like, let's get that next round, like let's go, like why not?
And everything inside me told me to
Explore an alternate route.
You gotta have incredible talent at every position.
Huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to this is totally gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right.
Not ball ten years later and be like, well that's just how you do it. We haven't made it just how you do it.
This
is masters of scale.
I'm Jeff Berman, your host.
This week on the show, serial entrepreneur and author Janice Omadecki.
Janice is no stranger to breaking barriers. She ranks among the first hundred black women to raise over a million dollars in seed funding and was Austin, Texas's first black woman to secure a venture-backed tech exit.
Her book is Mentorship Unlocked.
The science and art of setting yourself up for success.
Mentorship has played an incredibly important role in my life, too. So I was eager to get into this with Janice.
Janice, welcome to Masters of Scale. Thank you.
Thrilled to be here. I cannot wait to have a conversation with you. Thank you for having me. I have been so looking forward to this chat. Before we dive into
mentorship and the company you built. I'd love to just start with where did you first get the entrepreneurial bug? Where did it come from for you?
Being a proud daughter of immigrants, my parents always taught us to think about how we could amplify our lives and live as
big as possible, you know? And while my parents did face hardships, they always instilled the importance of education and problem solving and how you can continue to work to improve yourself. And so around the dinner table, my
Dad would ask myself and my two siblings to play this game of what was a problem that either you or your peers encountered at school or you saw on the bus home, wherever, that you would want to build a business around. What problem would it solve?
Who would you sell it to? I mean, he would ask questions around not realizing what it was, but just what would be the go-to-market strategy? How big do you think the TAM actually is and things. And out of myself and my two siblings, they definitely were kind of rolling their eyes at it and weren't as enthused, but 11-year-old Janice was locked in.
in. That was my favorite time of the day because I've always thought in an entrepreneurial space. I've always come from a space of empathy and wanting to help others. And
The way that my brain would light up.
in solving those problems and getting that sort of dopamine response of okay I might be eleven.
But my contributions to the world could be much bigger than that if I really refine these concepts. Um, that was extremely powerful. Dennis, do you remember any of the businesses that you thought about starting or the problems you wanted to solve with Eleven? I
Hated the way that it felt on a rainy day or a snowy day in DC when you would wear jeans and then get on the bus and the bottom of your jeans were just
Oh, just not a comfortable feeling. So I wanted to create some sort of device that you could clip your jeans and roll them up without taking up too much space in your backpack. And then once you're back at school, then you just unclip them and you're good to go without that feeling of what.
Denim around you. Since I grew up in the in the DMV as well, and we had a lot of snow days back then. I have a sense memory of that musty smell of the wet jeans as everyone's like clambering onto the bus and all of that. So um I love you bringing that back. I have three kids and in COVID as we were like
Desperately trying to figure out how to occupy time and not be on screens all the time.
We invented a game called Netflix or Startup where I would give the kids four totally like random disconnected elements. So it would be like
Kangaroos
Naval oranges
airplanes and the country of Chile.
And you have to pitch either a startup or Netflix show with like one minute to prep.
It's still like so much fun to play this game, but I love the idea of games as a way to inspire entrepreneurial thinking. I love that story from your dad. What a wonderful set of seeds he planted with you through that. My parents having both immigrated from the Congo to the United States through college scholarships from missionaries. You know.
learning to make it on your own.
Learning the importance of community, learning how to believe in yourself that even when things are hard, you will find a solution and one that builds a better life for yourself. Those are all transferable skills into entrepreneurship. And so seeing that across my parents and the communities in which they were a part of.
To me.
when I had the idea for the mentor method or even in my earlier career days in management consulting and defense contracting.
I always approached it with that head space of
This is a problem that I need to solve.
And of course I'll find a way to solve it. You referenced being a management consultant, being a defense contracting. Where did the switch flip for you to say I have to go
Do this thing.
I myself had several Steve Job quotes in my dorm room and, you know, in various apartments of follow your heart and dreams and do what you love and everything. But I was also very intentional about wanting to pay off student loans and just be like strategic with it. And so
When I had the idea for the mentor method, I was in
year two of my strategic management graduate certification from Harvard in my disrupting technologies course. And the final project was to, similar to my upbringing, pick a problem, disrupt the industry, how would you do it and build out the complete business plan. Coming from defense contracting
which was predominantly the all boys club, and coming from management consulting, which was very similar, I
Was always eager to expand my learning and
Any way possible. And so within that space, I did find that it was extremely difficult to find mentorship. Oftentimes people would want to match me to the only underrepresented professional that had made it to the top, and that felt
odd to me that a large corporation would
Take
A high performing
over eager, very moldable talent that I was in my early twenties and default to something that doesn't even matter in the long term land. Just because you happen to be a black woman. Exactly.
Exactly. And
This was around the time where Bumble Tinder was just blowing up, and I couldn't understand.
How?
I could theoretically meet
someone for a larger relationship just by using my phone, yet
I had to beg people and hunt them down in their offices to try to find mentorship. That felt way too hard and too difficult for me. And so looking at the market, seeing that
There was space to make
Building meaningful connections accessible as it was in, say, the online dating space and the dating app space, to me it felt like a no brainer. Thankfully I'd already studied entrepreneurship from MIT and so started following a lot of their process, but that's really how it started.
ineffective, perhaps unhelpful even attempts at pairing you with mentors. Had you found great mentorship along the way before you started the mentor method? One person. Who is that person and how did you find them or they find you? Her name was Amy and she was the creative director of the team I was on. So
It was myself and then
My manager.
and Amy and I met her during the interview process at PWC and
She was so
Unapologetically herself, she practiced a high level of self awareness and approachability, which
I hadn't seen yet coming from defense contracting at that point.
Not not an industry well known for its its high EQ and
Not quite. Not quite. Good reason to get out. But there was just something almost an oxema refreshing feeling about being around her and the space to ask questions and not have to worry if they were dumb questions. It was just such an important
season of my life, but that was the first and probably the only until I started venturing into entrepreneurship networking groups when I was still working nights and weekends on the mentor method and it was essentially a PDF in a dream. That's where I really started meeting my mentors. How did you go about finding
the people, the mentors to get to actually launching and then building the company. To this day.
I still have several
Google Docs?
With running lists by category. So individuals I hope to have the opportunity to learn from one day, companies that I hope to contribute to their growth using my strengths and backgrounds, as I know that I will one day. And then there's also one of these are the problems I'm seeking to solve right now.
broken out into different categories. Now at the time of the mentor method and building that, that was all I was thinking about. You know that feeling. It's all consuming. So every question that I had, every thought that I had, every
Time I left my um townhome in Old Town Alexandria at that point was spent on learning how to move the mentor method to the next step. So
My first set of questions weren't even to other entrepreneurs, but just
What is the market? What are the incumbents doing? What are my core differentiators? And why do I feel that
I could take this forward.
And how come other incumbents and other
businesses haven't done it this way. And if they have, why did they fail? Why did they grow? Just kind of getting a sense of where the landmines were, so I could mentally prepare for what I was going to get into.
From there, when I saw it had legs and I was like, okay, let's let's continue taking this on. Then I started going into networking events and my questions were around
Where else should I be spending my time? While I am technically classically trained in entrepreneurship from MIT, we all know there's a difference between a case study and actually getting into the arena. So what don't I know? At this point, I was still teetering the line of trying to decide between a B.
B to C concept of going straight to consumer.
Or going enterprise. And I just wasn't sure which one. I actually felt more passionate about the B to C, but quickly realized in talking to people in a similar space that B to B was the right way to go. And I said, Thank you for that feedback.
Tested it myself, they were a hundred percent right. So there were a lot of questions around what industry I should focus on.
Because mentorship is just so broad, I didn't want to boil the ocean. I was really urgently seeking my beachhead market. Like where would I go first? So I was exploring ed tech in the university system from a B2B perspective, management consulting, of course, and various other places. So my questions were to
leaders and CEOs that were dominating in those industries with their respective businesses.
what their go to market strategies were, how they were communicating with their buyers, how long it took them to acquire their first set of customers, how they did it, if there were prospective customers that maybe we could collaborate, which is such a sweet thought now, looking back with this that level of gumption.
But that was my first set of questions. These are busy people. So can we just spend a minute on how you persuaded them? You don't have a product yet. You have an idea. You're super compelling. You're energized, you're fired up. But to persuade people to come be an advisor to a company that doesn't
really have a product yet and help you shape it. How did you get them to do that? In twenty eighteen, I got accepted into the Mass Challenge accelerator. I made a very specific mass challenge list, looking at previous sponsors, looking at partners, and looking at those who are
In the mentor registry of where they were working.
Cross-referenced that with HR leaders within those organizations, made a spreadsheet and my Google Doc so that I could go to specific mentors. I also cross-referenced with things like best places to work and wanted to make sure from a values perspective that I was only speaking to companies where
They either
in the press or in some way, shape, or form have indicated an interest in an enjoyable work experience. So by having that list, anytime I was meeting with a mentor or there was some energy around like, oh, how can we help? And otherwise, I knew exactly who I wanted to meet from that first conversation.
I sequenced a lot of my mentor conversations based on the companies that I saw were hiring pretty aggressively at that point, and thinking, okay, well, there's a use case there around new hire onboarding. So five of the 10 people I want to meet, I'll pitch that concept.
And see what they think. I also think too I never came in.
thinking that I was going to save an entire company's problems. I always approach these leaders as
Can I have fifteen minutes?
Of your time.
I am too early for you to purchase this, just so you know, I'm not selling you yet.
I know we're too early, but I know that I can come back and pitch you in a year, two years with your guidance, and that this really has legs. So if you can just give me some advice on why it will work, why it won't work, I promise you coming from defense contracting, I have a very thick skin. So if you think that this
doesn't have legs or my baby is ugly, tell me why so I can fix it. So that in the next several meetings, we're building out that pipeline towards yeses, towards sponsorship, towards, you know, strategic partnerships and just over time coming in through the headspace of
I want to learn from you.
I want to listen.
I want to hear what your experiences are. Why is your job so hard? Those sort of real questions without any other ask, but just
Tell me about your day.
Sillahead, how a tragic loss changed Janice and her approach to business.
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On our YouTube channel.
So Janus.
You've got your first paying customer
You get into the accelerator program, you move to Austin, you're building
And you're scaling
And then
You've got
A curveball, the pretty big one that comes in your personal life.
Can you tell us what happened there and and how that changed your trajectory and your your path?
Yeah, so
At the end of twenty seventeen my
Mom grew gravely ill.
And then top of twenty eighteen, January third, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, stage four.
So we'd anticipated about four months based on what the surgeon said, but we
We're very fortunate and grateful to have had eight months before her passing. And
I
I always try to find some type of movie analogy.
When I talk about this, but there isn't one. Someone who has loved and lost.
a core piece of themselves through a parent know that there isn't an equivalent to it. You know, I used to call it my sort of Christian Bale Dark Knight origin story. And in a way, yeah, it is, but it was really a strong motivator in reflecting on the power of what I was building and what it could do for an individual. So
I get him to math challenge.
I called my mom, asked for her blessing, and she said, Absolutely, this is what I immigrated for. Like you have to go. And so
I was going back and forth between DC and Austin during that four month period of the program, making sure I could go to chemo appointments and I I was still getting that quality time.
At the same time pitching the business continuing to grow, I don't have an explanation for
The way it felt to see my star rising and my business starting to grow as my mother and the nexus and the reason I even was empowered to do this, her health declining. It was something very motivating for me because I wanted at the time.
I didn't have a win outside of getting into math challenge. My parents were very much like, Okay, we want you to do this, but also what
is this? What is this risk? We had no idea that you were this entrepreneurial, right? And so I wanted like a massive win for her. I wanted her to just see it while she still could. And you know she passed away in August of 2018 and
That was a pivotal moment for me. Our last conversation the night before, my siblings and I all took shifts because at this point we were doing at home hospice and we all wanted kind of that one on one time with mom, right? So it was my turn. It was like three in the morning and
I just remember having this like whispering conversation with her of like, I'm going to do this. I'm sorry I didn't do it in time.
But I'm going to do it.
Just like keep watching basically. It was like keep watching.
I'm so sorry.

And she must be so proud of you.
Oh, absolutely, there's no doubt.
Um
So the way that math challenge works, they were about
Eighty entrepreneurs.
Whose businesses were chosen.
And so the mentor method and I was part of the top eight. So four days after my mom's passing, I was fly back to Austin because it was the finals and we got our first win.
The first big win, a twenty-five thousand dollar non-dilutive investment for Mass Challenge. And that win means the most to me more than anything because
The only people who knew that I was suffering going through this emotional turmoil and the situation, managing director and just some members of the team that knew. So
To have received that win and to see the joy on their faces and to just feel.
Energetically the source of that wind.
Yeah you can't replicate it, and so since then.
I really reflected on my mother's journey and I've reflected on her experience. And it was baked into both the DNA of how I built the team for the mentor method, but also how I built out the product and how I've just operated as an entrepreneur. I saw her
So afraid during her chemo process because her boss and the culture of her employer, she was in finance, even in her chemo appointments, she would still be on her laptop answering questions because she didn't want to lose her benefits in healthcare. And that was a heartbreaking thing for me to see. But then I also
hook that consideration into how employees experience work.
That is a terrible and disgusting culture for somebody to be losing their life and still feel like they need to answer an email or be in a spreadsheet? Absolutely not, within my sphere of control.
Mm-hmm. I promised myself that
I couldn't save my own mother from that experience, but if I can help somebody else's child not feel that because they got connected to a mentor, which gave them a new career opportunity outside of where they're currently working or helped them see that there might be another team or opportunity where they can continue expanding, then I've at least done.
Something.
To make the world a better place.
Mother passes.
Continue to grow.
Janice, can I just ask, when you say continue to grow
Were you
If you're comfortable talking about this, working with a therapist, with a coach, how are you processing your grief and also your ambition at the same time?
Who was helping you through that? I stayed very curious about my own well being. So the first thing I did was find a therapist.
I also had a leadership coach. I let very few mentors know kind of what was going on and thankfully they shared their wisdom. So immediately found therapists and, you know, the power of journaling and just keeping
track of how my body was responding to things and knowing when I was feeling flooded, like, okay, maybe I need to just work from my apartment. And maybe today is just sending out the cold pitch deck.
emails for today. And then tomorrow, let's go out and do networking when I'm not necessarily in as much of a grief hole. But I really optimized the way that I worked with stakeholders and teams and advisors and business partners around that. And people that I worked with were understanding because I was
always consistently professional and I never made my grief somebody else's problem. I knew that was mine. And I knew that the people I had the opportunity to work with had their own things going on. So I never wanted to monopolize a situation, but I also didn't want to be one of those people that just self-sabotage and just completely
ignored the most detrimental thing in my life. So
Mom passes.
pandemic happens, I hadn't been home because
It wasn't safe to fly.
I
Come back home september twenty twenty one visit my dad and he tells me that my mom wrote me a letter.
That I didn't know about her last month or so with us.
And at the top it's labeled
For Janice and the mentor method.
And it's just one page front and back from a notebook and
It's just
The most detailed
information of like well when you're stressed
X, Y, and Z. Think about these things. And I didn't know that she was seeing it because, you know, I'm on my laptop and I'm hustling and doing all of these things, but I never allowed myself to be seen as an entrepreneur in those moments because I just wanted to be her daughter. So I didn't know what she was picking up on. And so at that point, you know, reading it made me feel like I was catching fire. So I just
brought it home with me, I wasn't ready. And then about two months ago, I was just doing general spring cleaning and organizing and
There's just a voice.
Similar to the voice I felt when I needed to start the mentor method, that was just like go read that letter again.
Why not? Let's just see.
You've grown a lot.
Just read it. And so I did.
And
The synchronicity of it was just unparalleled, where I think sometimes in those moments people can ask themselves, Did I do the right thing?
Did I prioritize my time accordingly? Am I making that individual proud? And just based on that letter alone, I know that she saw it. There was so much guidance and wisdom as if she knew.
seven years later that I would randomly reread this, you know, at thirty-seven.
in a very pivotal kind of turning point in my life that I'm in right now. And that's been just such a gift and almost a continuation of that origin story and like why I'm so passionate about advancers and continuing to evolve in my career. Thank you for sharing that. It's beautiful. And I wanna come back to
the turning point you're at now, but in twenty twenty two.
You
decided to sell the mentor method. It's a critical and often really difficult moment for entrepreneurs, right? Do I keep going? Do I sell? There's an opportunity. Sometimes you have to sell.
Why did you decide to sell the company?
The same voice that told me to build it?
Told me it was time to let it go.
So it's twenty twenty two, we had just graduated from Techstars.
continued through the fundraising process and then July twenty twenty two, I was at Happy Hour with a friend, fellow entrepreneur, and there's nothing better than being able to talk about pipeline and deals and what you're going through with a fellow early stage entrepreneur in the trenches. So
What's typically an enjoyable conversation for me in 2022 turned into my very first panic attack when I started discussing the future of the mentor method. I'd never felt that before. So Benmod, my friend, quickly got to my car. After twenty minutes of kind of B A C and calming myself down, I just said
Okay.
I surrendered.
I'm hearing the wisdom.
I get it.
Yeah, and entrepreneurs were stubborn.
We are a stubborn lot, so
I had ignored that voice for quite some time. And I think also a part of me was very ego driven of like, let's get that next round. Like, let's go. Like, why not? And
Everything inside me told me to explore an alternate route. And so after that, talk to my mentor and business partner, Joseph Copser, who has been
instrumental in every step of the way at this business since we conducted in twenty twenty one and
You have to trust your gut.
Follow the process. He had gone through his own acquisition process several years ago. I spoke to several CEOs in the Austin community about some of the indicators I was seeing and what my gut was saying, and everyone was very supportive of that decision because they had also gone through it themselves in
earlier chapters before I knew them. So I felt very empowered that it it was the right thing to do. So
started exploring relationships with our strategics and other opportunities and the acquisition was just the perfect opportunity in September of twenty twenty two.
You mentioned that you are at a pivotal moment in your career now.
Can you tell us what's going on?
When I started the mentor method, we were at the beginning of
This current what we'll call it presidents.
First.
Turn.
And
I've been reflecting on who I was then and
And while
I'm a completely different person as time does. That fire in seeing
The bigotry?
And the hate, the misinformation.
The intentional emotional abuse.
That is being distributed.
Globally now?
I can't sit with it, and I can't live with it, and so

I am now actively interested in collaborating with builders and visionaries who are really gonna co-create the world that I want to live in. I'm very motivated by that. How can I use this experiential scar tissue as an entrepreneur to
Amplify.
Those that need a voice. And that takes multiple forms.
Being an angel investor for black woman led businesses.
And providing that mentorship and information of, okay, you know, I started a business under this person's first administration. So here's how I did it. Here are some ways that, you know, you may be able to get like grants and other opportunities, but don't lose focus. Don't let that distract you.
That's an important piece of it. But then also in, you know, philanthropic endeavors where I choose to work in the future, just really evaluating how I can use those strengths to amplify the businesses that are optimizing other people's way of living and not just in the traditional kind of
Going to mentorship to
another talent management company. There's a lot of diversity of thought and perspective that is kind of untapped powder. So for me now having mastered that particular space, I'm eager to learn again. I I want to get into a new industry. I want to continue expanding because that's that neuroplasticity, it it's hard to shake.
Does that mean you've another startup in you? Is there another startup coming? I am thoroughly enjoying being the one holding the microphone and kind of holding the spotlight to other founders and leaders right now. But that entrepreneurship bug, I'm sure we will talk again.
Last piece of advice.
For
Someone seeking a mentor.
What's the non obvious thing that people should know as they're trying to find someone to help them on their journey?
You know
Seventy five percent.
Of what you need to do already?
Your gut is telling you?
Do not build an emotional dependency.
on your mentors. Your mentors are not a place for your codependency. They are not a replacement for a parent, let's say. Your mentor
Is there to support
advise and guide you to become the best version of yourself. So don't lose sight of that when you're building those mentor relationships. Make sure that when you're approaching a mentor relationship, you have other avenues of building connection and get very clear on the objective of what you want to work on.
with that individual and be okay with
The relationship
Lasting.
Three meetings, three years,
30 years, who knows? But be open to allowing that relationship to run its natural course, however long that may be, instead of always trying to force the individual to fit and meet you where you are. That's just not human condition. And
The more that you can stay open to receiving mentorship, open to receiving wisdom from all sources, right? Like not just a mentor, but just
Anywhere that you find that educational moment
Take it.
Take it and run with it and study it and do what you can, integrate that into your life, and you will be unstoppable easily.
Great advice. Janice, thank you for being on Masters of Scale.
Thank you for having me.
Janice Omedecki's advice about mentorship is spot on. She's living proof that proactive
Intentional focus in this area can create monumental ripple effects in your career.
We can't wait to see what she does next.
I'm Jeff Berman.
Thank you for listening.
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