Improving Effectiveness With People and Data

Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in personal and business development but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Tom Mentink, Performance excellence consultant and Continuous improvement trainer based in Wageningen, The Netherlands.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

I’m a teacher and consultant of Performance Excellence and Continuous Improvement (CI). On my YouTube channel, I’ve been posting practical CI videos for over 2,5 years now, and the first paid course launched just last autumn. These are all geared towards CI / Kaizen / 6-Sigma specialists (beginner and medium experience levels).

Since this is just a small business so far (generating hardly more income than it costs to make and host everything), my main income is from a day job. Since this winter, that’s no longer a ‘regular day job’ – I quit my salaried job and went freelance as a CI consultant. It’s a whirlwind of new experiences: super cool, sometimes a bit frightening, and really still in the early phases.

Tell us about yourself

Almost since the beginning of my career, I’ve been active in continuous improvement – it started off in the quality department at a cheese factory; ever since, I’ve been jumping between management and CI roles.

On the learning side, I don’t really like books that much – I’m much more of a video learner. But when I wanted to learn more about Lean and 6-Sigma online, it was hard to find good quality, practical explanation videos. There are a couple of creators whose material is great, but much of it is very limited teaser material for some consultancy business or software company. That’s why I decided to go ahead and pay it forward to the CI community, publishing videos at least weekly.

I love teaching that stuff. In fact, I love helping people improve their effectiveness and achieving better results in general. But you, there is another thing I discovered: I also learn very well by talking about something. Making these videos and putting them out for the world to see (and judge) forces you to think twice about how you’re going to explain things and to also go over the materials once more. But the funny thing is that I get many next-video ideas during filming when I’m explaining things on the board. That process hopefully helps many others online, but it definitely helps me too!

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

So far, I’m just very proud that I took the step to quit my job and go fully independent. Granted, I still basically do the work I used to do for a corporate CI support team, but the feeling is very different. I’m my own boss now – which taught me more financial lessons in 3 months than I learned in 15 years of close collaboration with financial controllers (feeling it in your own wallet is a wholly different experience than hearing a finance director complain about tight cash flow).

It has put quite a strain on my available time for now, so the second online course is still in the planning phase. But that should come about in a couple of months.

What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?

Building a YouTube following is a long game. The hardest thing for me is to stay consistent – to publish a video every week. It requires two things: motivation/energy and good ideas. What works best for me is always to have a couple of videos ready (to work ahead a bit) because there will always be some weeks that I’m just not feeling it or simply want to enjoy time with my family (I’m a husband and father too). So having a small buffer of videos, I can always skip a week and catch up the next.

An even harder thing is to keep generating interesting video topics. For this, I’m really happy with my new work: actively supporting four different companies exposes me to issues faced by people in different situations. And the other great source of ideas is the questions asked by viewers of the channel.

Going freelance created a whole new set of challenges. The main difference is a cash flow delay: salary arrives during the month, and the company supplies most, thus that costs money, while as a freelancer/interim worker, many companies pay you about a month after the work is done and costs for travel and office supplies come up front. It’s not a big problem once you’re on a roll, but it does require you to have at least three months of income saved up as a buffer to get through that first period.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

Stay true to yourself – there are ways to market your stuff to best fit target markets, but if that takes you out of your own way of working, you’ll not keep it up for multiple years (which will be needed).
Choose efficient ways of working for yourself. Some people make video presentations easiest in a sort of webinar style, working from a presentation; drawing on a flip chart is much more efficient for me because it somehow guides my presentation in such a way that it requires almost no editing.
If going freelance, tap your network of previous employers for your first jobs – they know you and hopefully like your way of working, so it’s easier to get a few things going. Once the ball is rolling, you’ll feel safe again, and that gets you, new clients.

My advice to anyone: Do something to challenge yourself intellectually. For some, that’s art, games, or volunteer work; but work can definitely be that thing too. If your current job isn’t really challenging you to develop some new competence continuously, try sharing with others – explaining my expertise on video has seriously boosted my own learning and understanding; going freelance taught me another whole bunch of things; I’ll get some other thing started within a year or so, and give my personal development another boost.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://www.tommentink.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/tommentink
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommentink/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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