Bloomberg Television is debuting new show tomorrow entitled The Mentor, in which experienced, successful businesspeople visit ones in the same field just starting out in order to help them along. In the first show, which airs tomorrow, Boston Beer Co. founder Jim Koch travels to Oceanside, California to help out the guys at Oceanside Ale Works.
From the press release:
This Thursday, November 4th, 2010 at 9:00 PM/ET, Bloomberg Television will debut “Bloomberg The Mentor,” an original new series that features top CEOs mentoring small business owners across America.
Every entrepreneur hopes to strike it big, but the reality is that 80% of small businesses fail within the first 18 months. What if entrepreneurs from around the U.S. had the chance to get real-life advice from some of America’s best-known CEOs? This season, “Bloomberg The Mentor” tests that concept with four small businesses.
In the series premiere, Jim Koch, founder and chairman of The Boston Beer Company, the largest independently owned American craft brewery and brewer of award-winning Samuel Adams beers, brings his national business expertise to a pair of budding brewers at Oceanside Ale Works in California.
Mark Purciel, a former teacher, and Scott Thomas, a firefighter, initially started brewing hand-crafted ales as a hobby. In 2005, the duo co-founded Oceanside Ale Works, one of the only manual brew houses in the nation. Now, Purciel and Thomas dream of transforming their passion for beer into a nation-wide business. But without significant management experience, how can Purciel and Thomas make the right decisions about scaling their business and finding a way to increase sales and distribution?
During the episode, the unconventional entrepreneurs wing it through a sales meeting with LA nightclub impresario Sam Nazarian before finally meeting their ultimate mentor, Jim Koch, who offers the brewers some tough advice on next steps for their business.
I confess I didn’t realize that our cable company carried the Bloomberg channel, but it does. To check if it’s available where you live, they have a handy page where you plug in your zip code to see if you get the station.
Here’s a trailer for the Oceanside Ale Works show:
And this is a trailer for the show, The Mentor, itself: