For the past few months, Trumpauto has had the great pleasure and honour to be taking part in Enterprise Estonia’s mentor programme, where entrepreneurs regularly meet with experts from various sectors and get the chance to expand their business knowledge, for their own and their company’s benefit. Our CEO Kenno Kink has been representing Trumpauto in the programme since last summer and found many great pieces of advice and knowledge from there with the help of his mentor, Riho Alas.

The programme has been designed to create relationships between the mentees and mentors. Each entrepreneur is linked up with a specific person, and together, over the course of ten months, they will take part in workshops and work with problems the mentee’s company might have. The mentors are chosen based on mutual interests and so that the people who will be working together get along on both a business and personal level. The first few meetings were spent getting to know each other—with about 20 mentees and 30 mentors taking part—and only after some time do the duos properly pair up to tackle the rest of the programme.

Trumpauto’s mentor is Riho Alas, an entrepreneur with decades of experience and the chairman of the board of Mikskaar Inc., one of Estonia’s leading peat producers. Riho was immediately interested in Trumpauto and Kenno has said that his mentorship has been a great inspiration and benefit for Kenno himself and the company as a whole. Together with the mentor, a plethora of workshops have been completed: the creation and implementation of a business plan, business strategy, process management, intellectual property, and much more. In particular, Kenno brought out the course on export, as something currently also very relevant for Trumpauto, and especially an idea he got from there, that in the grand scheme of things, export is just selling, only under more complex conditions.

Together with Trumpauto, companies and entrepreneurs from all types of sectors and with very different experiences are taking part in the programme. Among them there are software firms such as Costpocket and Sharewell, or the educational software Edumus, but also product and designer brands like Luuv and Nordhale, and even the juice drinks producer Ferla. Already just the chance to partake in a programme with such a diverse set of companies has been extremely eye opening and helped Trumpauto to solidify our vision and future plans even further. This outside perspective, both from our mentor and the other firms, has been one of the biggest gains from the programme for us.

Despite the fact that for the past few months the workshops have had to take place online, the Enterprise Estonia mentor programme has been one of the most interesting and fantastic opportunities for Trumpauto. We believe that with the knowledge gained from it, we will be even better equipped to provide our clients with the best software and bring innovation and reformed thinking to every car workshop!