Your mentor is out there, you just might not have found them yet. In this case, Robert Ohlmann, owner of Tony's Brake & Allignment, found his mentor after reading through a Ratchet+Wrench story—Success Through Tracking—that he still keeps around to this day. Ohlmann looked up Dave Justice's shop, Express Tire & Automotive, and then sent him an email.
"Dave emailed me back later that day," Ohlmann said. "He was in Mississippi in a NAPA conference and said, 'Let me call you tomorrow.'"
The next day, the two talked on the phone for an hour about Ohlmann's shop that was going through a struggle, as well as an opportunity that later opened doors to Ohlmann.
"He said, 'My mastermind group is actually looking to add a couple of people,' [and] I was signing up for the mastermind group by the end of the week," Ohlmann said. "That's how I got into a 20 group mastermind group and that was an eyeopening experience."
Since building a connection with Justice, Ohlmann has been able to take advice given from the group sessions back to the business, where he now leads his shop in a way that wasn't done before.
"They gave me pointers and helped me along the way," Ohlmann said. "The one thing about that group was there was a constant theme of processes and procedures that seemed out of this world to me at the time—it's funny because I couldn't live without them today."
