The orientation sessions
Three core sessions of an hour each, plus an optional practice session. Summarised here so you can go back to any of it without hunting for the slides.
Session one1 hour
What is SCORE?
By the end you should be able to explain what SCORE is and what your role is, know the difference between the district and a chapter, and know what else you could do here beyond mentoring.
The organisation
A nonprofit dedicated to helping small business owners start, grow and reach their goals through education and mentoring. Founded in 1964. Over 10,000 volunteers across 250 chapters, making it the largest volunteer business mentoring organisation in the United States, and it has worked with more than 11 million entrepreneurs.
Mentoring is free to the client, but it is not costless. SCORE’s funding is set by Congress each year and administered by the SBA, alongside the SCORE Foundation and local funding — and SCORE is working toward funding itself rather than depending on federal money. Maine’s in-kind sponsors include public libraries in Portland and Bangor, chambers of commerce, coworking space, banks and foundations.
SCORE Maine
Maine is District #172: one chapter, the SCORE Maine Chapter, in three sections:
- Southern Maine — Portland
- Central Maine — Auburn
- Northern Maine — Bangor
Around 110 active volunteers. In 2024 that produced 4,481 client sessions, 19,101 donated hours, 110 webinars and workshops, 1,700 jobs created and 568 new businesses started.
Your role
You are the lead mentor: you own the client relationship and guide the client, and you are explicitly not expected to bring topic expertise. Where you need it, invite a co-mentor — usually after a session or two, and with no limit on how many.
There is also room to lead: chapter and district roles, and committees covering volunteer services, client services, and community outreach and fundraising.
Session two1 hour
What is mentoring?
SLATE, understanding what a client needs, preparing for the 60-minute first meeting, the client survey, and the requests that come up most.
How a client reaches you
- The client fills in a Mentoring Request on SCORE’s website.
- A Regional Client Intake Coordinator matches them to a mentor, with help from AI, and an email goes out.
- You accept in Engage and propose a time, within two business days.
Watch for mail from no-reply1@score.org. How to accept a request in Engage
Every contact is a point of engagement
Clients value fast responses and positive communication. Engagement starts long before you — the website, outreach, a phone call to the office, the matching process — but you are the part that decides whether they become an advocate for SCORE.
Two kinds of client
Start-ups often have little or no business experience and largely face the same set of challenges. They are looking for a mentor who will listen and understand the dream, actionable steps that give their journey some structure, information or where to find it, and the counsel of someone who has run a business. They tend to be self-motivated, persistent, hard-working, and to have a support system and some industry experience.
Established business owners bring more detailed and complex questions.
Session three1 hour
Know your resources
Four things to be comfortable with: this hub, score.org, Engage and Slack.
- This hub
- Internal, for Maine volunteer mentors. Resources for you, and resources to guide clients with.
- score.org
- The public site. Clients use it to find a mentor, find workshops and events, and browse templates.
- Engage
- SCORE’s client system. Client requests, session records, and the volunteer database.
- Slack
- Instant messaging between SCORE Maine volunteers. Ask a question, find a recorded ShopTalk.
The rule about sharing. This hub is internal. You can download resources and pass them to clients, but do not send clients into the hub itself. The pages under For your clients mark clearly which links are safe to send.
Bookmark Engage, Slack and this hub before you need them. Get familiar with the topic areas so you know roughly where things live, and ask your Buddy Coach which resources they reach for most.
Session four1.5 hoursOptional
Practice session
Two role plays, your role as lead mentor, a debrief, and a follow-up plan.
Optional, and worth doing. You practise leading rather than observing, then debrief the session to sharpen how you work — including deciding which resources you would actually have recommended to that client.
The debrief uses the same SLATE observation questions you use for co-mentoring.
Why any of this works
After two years most start-ups are still going. After five, roughly half have failed.
Seventy per cent of mentored businesses survive beyond five years, and people who are mentored are five times more likely to start a business at all. That figure comes from SCORE’s Simple Steps program.