Mentors and experts,
sourced and managed.
We find the design specialists, sector operators, trainers and policy voices your programme needs, contract them against a deliverable, and manage them through delivery. One contract, whatever the size of the panel.
On the World Bank's Jordan programme, one sourced partner reached 400 firms.
We will not put a mentor in front of a cohort we have not diagnosed.
What the engagement gives you. The volume — firms mentored, sessions run, guides produced — sits in sections 4 and 5 with the programme it came from.
The expert was excellent.
The cohort learned nothing.
Three failures, none of which is about the expert's ability. Each one is about how they were procured.
The name on the proposal, the associate in the room
A recognised figure is named in the bid and appears at the opening event. The eleven working sessions after it are run by someone else, who is often perfectly good and is not who anybody agreed to. Nothing was misrepresented, exactly. The contract simply never named a person against a session.
The expert who does not know this market
Genuine international seniority, applied to a context it has never operated in. The advice is correct in general and wrong here: pricing that ignores what a courier charges to Amman, a channel strategy for a payment method nobody in the room can open, a growth plan that assumes a bank account.
Days bought, deliverables assumed
Twelve consulting days at a rate. The days are delivered in full and at the end the programme owns twelve days of attendance. Nobody agreed what should exist afterwards, so nothing does — and the mentor is not at fault, because that was never in the scope they signed.
All three are procurement failures dressed as delivery failures. The fix is unglamorous: name a person against a session, test them against your actual context, and contract them against something that exists at the end.
A market search,
then a trial.
On the Jordan programme the design intervention began with rapid market research to identify a firm capable of the work, and the report records it that way.
Diagnose the cohort before writing the brief
What they make, what it costs them, who they sell to and where it fails. An expert brief written before that is a wish list, and it produces a shortlist of people who are impressive in general.
Search the market rather than the address book
Our contacts are a starting point and not a shortlist. On the Jordan programme the design partner came out of a search, and they were chosen on capability against that cohort rather than on who we already knew.
Trial them on one real case
One participant, one session, before anything is signed for a series. It costs a day and it settles the question that references cannot: does this person hold a room of owners in this market, in this language.
Contract against the artefact
Guides, reports, videos, revised designs — the things that exist afterwards. Days are how it is paid for and never what is bought.
- 200Firms given group workshops
- 50Firms given one-to-one mentoring series
- 150Firms sent guides, reports and videos
- 9Product-category guides produced
The output of one sourced and managed design partner on the World Bank's Jordan programme, from section IV of the published report. Four hundred firms reached in total, from one relationship we found, tested and ran.
An expert's day reaches
one room. Their artefact
reaches the programme.
The most valuable thing a sourced expert produces is usually not the session. It is the thing that gets written down, because that is the only part that reaches the firms who could not travel, could not attend, or joined the programme after the session ran.
What this changes in a brief
Write the artefact into the expert's scope on day one. A guide, a template, a recorded walkthrough, a set of worked examples — produced as a condition of the engagement rather than requested afterwards as a favour.
Experts price that in when it is in the brief and resent it when it arrives in month four. Both are reasonable, and only one of them is your problem to avoid.
And the honest limit
The written tier is cheaper and it is not equivalent. Of the seventy producers taken through the full design cohort, thirty sold — and those were overwhelmingly firms with direct contact, not firms that received a document.
Anyone telling you a guide substitutes for mentoring is selling you the cheap tier. It extends reach; it does not replace depth.
Size the panel
for your cohort.
The tier ratios below are the ones the Jordan programme actually ran. Set your supported cohort and how deep you can afford to go, and the panel takes shape. It is arithmetic, and it is the arithmetic we do on the first call.
Starting values are the Jordan programme's: 400 supported, 50 at one-to-one, 200 in workshops, 9 category guides. Ratios for panel size come from how that engagement was actually staffed.
| One-to-one mentoring series | 52 |
|---|---|
| Firms in group workshops | 200 |
| Reached by guides alone | 200 |
| Category guides to produce | 9 |
| Workshop days to run | 5 |
| People on the panel | 5 |
Five people for four hundred firms. On the Jordan programme that was one design firm and its team, found through a market search and managed by us against those four outputs — 5 people, one relationship, 400 firms reached.
Arithmetic rather than a quote. Real panels change shape once we have seen the cohort — a single sector needs fewer disciplines and more depth, and eleven sectors need the reverse.
Four kinds of expert,
and what each is for.
Programmes tend to ask for “mentors” and mean one of these four. Naming which one changes the search, the price and the deliverable.
Product and design specialists
They change what is being sold.
Materials, packaging, finish, price point and market fit. The tier that produced the visible before-and-after work on the Jordan programme, and the one most programmes discover they needed after the training is over.
Ask for them when the cohort makes something physical and it is not selling.
Sector operators
They know what this market pays.
People who have run a business in the sector and the country rather than advised on it. They answer pricing, margin and supplier questions with numbers, and a room can tell the difference within twenty minutes.
Ask for them when the cohort's questions are commercial rather than technical.
Local trainers and facilitators
They hold the room, in the language.
Recruited in the delivery country, briefed on the curriculum, and paid to run sessions well. This is the tier that scales a programme past what a senior team can personally attend.
Ask for them when delivery spans more governorates than your core team can reach.
Policy and institutional voices
They open a door the cohort cannot.
Officials, regulators and institutional leaders in the room for a specific purpose. Our co-founder led more than thirty workshops in the European Union's EU MED Means Business initiative, alongside industry experts and policymakers, which produced twelve strategic recommendations.
Ask for them when the barrier is regulatory or the outcome is a recommendation.
A programme that asks for all four usually needs two. Part of the diagnostic is arguing you out of the other two before you pay for them.
Search, trial, contract,
manage.
The third and fourth steps are the ones a programme usually does not buy, and they are the ones that decide whether the first two were worth anything.
An expert nobody reviews is a booking, and a booking cannot be held to anything.
Four times this
is not worth buying.
The first is the most common request we turn down, and it is the one that would be easiest to say yes to.
- You want a keynote name for an event. That is a speaker bureau and they are better at it than we are. What we do is find people who will be useful in session seven, which is a different search with a different answer.
- You already know exactly who you want. Then hire them directly and keep the margin. We would only be adding a contract layer. Where we are useful is managing them afterwards, and that is a smaller engagement we are happy to quote.
- The budget covers days but no deliverable. Everything on this page depends on there being something at the end. If the budget genuinely cannot carry a guide or a set of worked examples, buy fewer days and produce one.
- You need a very large trainer pool very fast. A hundred facilitators next month is a staffing operation. We recruit and manage panels at the scale a programme actually reviews, and beyond that you want an agency built for volume.
Umbrella500 is the only partner we found that blended business strategy, e-commerce execution, and not-for-profit empathy.
Halil Can EmreProject Manager · SPARK TürkiyeThe reason that matters for sourcing: you can only judge an expert against a cohort if you understand both. A broker who understands neither is selecting on reputation, which is what the three failures in section 3 all have in common.
Judge a mentor by what
the maker sells afterwards.
Three products from the cohort the sourced design partner worked with. All three are figures from the World Bank's published report.
The ones that decide it.
Do we contract the experts, or do you?
We do, in the normal case, and you hold one contract with us. It is the arrangement that lets us replace someone at our own cost, which is the part of this service that has any teeth.
Where your procurement rules require direct contracts, we will run the search and the management and let you sign — but say so early, because it changes what we can promise about replacement.
What if an expert is not working out?
We sit in sessions, so we usually see it before you do. If an expert is wrong for the room we replace them and absorb the cost, because we selected them. That is easier to promise than to do and it is why the trial in week four exists.
Can you find experts outside our region?
Yes, and we will usually argue for a pairing: international expertise on the discipline, local expertise on the market. The Jordan programme used local and international experts together, and the pairing is what stops advice being correct in general and wrong here.
How much of the budget goes to you rather than the experts?
We will show you the split. Sourcing and management is a real cost and we would rather it were visible than buried in a blended day rate you cannot interrogate.
What language do the sessions run in?
Arabic where the cohort is Arabic-speaking, and we treat that as a hard filter rather than a preference. An interpreter between a mentor and a maker holding a product removes most of what makes the session work.
Can you source mentors for a programme somebody else is running?
Yes, and it is a common shape. We need the diagnostic — either yours or one we run — because sourcing against a brief nobody has tested against the cohort produces the second failure in section 3 every time.
How do we start?
A thirty-minute call about the cohort and what should exist at the end. If you already have an expert brief, send it — the first thing we will do is tell you which parts of it describe a category rather than a capability.
Tell us what should
exist at the end.
The cohort, the language and the artefact you want out of it. Send an expert brief if you have one and we will mark it up. We answer in a day, usually less.
Or write directly: [email protected]