Photo: Shutterstock

It’s a startling statistic: Fifty percent of all businesses fail before their fourth birthday. Unless that is they undergo incubation and mentoring before opening their doors. In those cases 87 percent of businesses make it past the five-year mark.

Entrepreneur Zevy Wolman decided last year he wanted to bring the same kind of mentorship to the Jewish world. So he founded The Jewish Entrepreneur (also known as TJE) matching budding entrepreneurs with business owners and experts to act as mentors. Founded with 25 mentors 18 months later TJE counts more than 100 mentors and has helped more than 250 businesses.

More than just acting as cheerleaders these mentors offer expert advice and wisdom to their mentees often helping them to avoid the very same pitfalls they experienced themselves. These strategies range from making a problematic business plan viable to ensuring that a stable business is maximizing its profits.

Mishpacha spoke with three different mentor-mentee teams to get their take on how these relationships breed success.

Mentee: Sarede Switzer Bring the Gym to Me│Location:Brooklyn NY│Industry: Personal Fitness

Mentor: Deena Englander WorkStream Business Systems│Location: Baltimore MD│Industry: IT and Business Consulting

A successful start-up business usually originates in one of two ways: Either the entrepreneur has a stroke of genius and invents or upgrades an existing service or product or the entrepreneur’s personal interests or hobbies evolve into a revenue-generating venture. Sarede Switzer’s Bring the Gym to Me is a mix of both.

Sarede started off as a part-time yoga teacher giving classes in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood. By utilizing social media she generated requests for other kinds of workouts like Pilates and Zumba. She wasn’t qualified to teach those classes but instead of turning away business her entrepreneurial mind led her to another solution: take on the clients but hire qualified instructors to teach the classes. Crown Heights Fitness was born.

Still Sarede struggled. Participants flaked on classes and it was hard to make payroll for all of her instructors. All the while she had to pay rent for her studio while her revenue declined.

Then an idea popped into her head. A woman called and told Sarede she wasn’t interested in coming to a class but would like an instructor to come to her home. The “aha!” moment that every entrepreneur prays for had arrived.

Sarede realized that she didn’t need to be married to a storefront and a host of expenses. Instead she could simply send instructors to classes that were organized by groups or organizations such as camps senior centers or even groups of friends. Her clients include such organizations as Camp Ramah Beth Sholom Day Camp in Roslyn New York and various Friendship Circle branches.

Crown Heights Fitness was upgraded to a more viable business model. She called her new business Bring the Gym to Me and Sarede was on her way.