Find Your Mentor

Find your mentor, or more accurately, someone who can hold your hand and who shares some of your experience. Chances are you know nothing about running a business. Which is perfectly fine, since you’ll probably learn on the job anyway. But to lessen the number of things you need to learn, it’s great to have someone who can guide you.

We were happy to have three mentors during our days at Kompresor. First was kr-lik, the musician playing in both bands we invited to the first gig and also a concert organizer himself. He was the one who hosted the concert at Łódź that led to our “incorporation.” The second person was Piotr Orłowski, owner of the venue we chose for that gig, Wydział Remontowy. Both the place and the staff were amazing, so we decided to keep our future events there. The third person was DJ h_12, who we invited to play at the afterparty. Each of those people knew more than a bit about the business we were trying to get into, and they provided us with invaluable information.

Of course, even if you find a mentor, you need to be proactive. Don’t expect someone to answer all of your questions without you even asking. You have to know what you need and ask how to get it. You need to have your dilemmas and problems lined up ahead of time. A mentor is someone that will help you with your struggles as long as you are able to properly communicate them.

One last thing. A mentor is not somebody old and wise who knows all the best solutions to all the world’s problems. It’s just someone from whom you can learn. Even an intern you hire can become your mentor; after all, leading someone often teaches you much more about leadership than anything else ever could.

Networking Is the Key

Surround yourself with people smarter and more experienced than you. Your mentor can be such a person. But you also need someone to work with on a daily basis, and it’s much better if every person on a team knows what to do. Ideally, they know better than you what needs to be done. And this way, everyone can focus on one area of expertise.

At Kompresor, we each had our responsibilities, and we had little need to communicate about those. All we had to regularly exchange were high-level goals. There was no micromanagement, and we were adequately motivated to do our best. We still held meetings to align our work, but they served two basic purposes: alignment and mutual motivation.

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But networking does not only involve your own company. To thrive in any market, you need to have connections with other parties. For us, it was the bands we wanted to invite (including their management) and the audience we wanted to make these gigs for. So, when we tried to make a concert in another city, like Warsaw, all we needed to do was ask every known artist who played in Warsaw about recommended venues. This way, we didn’t need to approach the owners cold; we just got introduced via a mutual acquaintance who brought us straight to the business most of the time. In a more formal environment, this would still require some warming up. But in the artistic world, everyone is on friendly terms most of the time — artists and owners alike.

Check out Loic Le Meur’s “The Art of Networking” or Vanessa Van Edwards’ “How to Become a Master at Networking” if you want to learn more.