The Channel Community rocked London last night with its first face-to-face networking event of the year.
The brainchild of Yvonne Matzk, The Channel Community is on a mission to ensure everyone in the channel – especially new starters and those in solitary roles – can access free mentorship.
Held at Natilik’s HQ, the face-to-face shindig was a follow-up to last week’s webinar, which saw experts including The Channel Recruiter’s Zoe Chatley dish out tips on achieving career goals.
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At the event, Matzk repeated her previous plea for more mentees to join the initiative.
This was echoed during the evening’s panel by Daniel Evans, who became a mentee in 2021 and is now one of two ‘mentee matchmakers’ for the initiative.
Daniel’s mentee journey
“I’ve done three years at Distology, and although I’d been in a sales career before that I had no clue about cybersecurity or the channel.
“As a salesperson you quickly have a target over your head and you’re thinking ‘okay, I need to hit that but I also need to understand the vendors we work with, and partners; why am I one step away from the customer – I’m not used to that’. So there was a lot to learn in a short space of time.
“It was an email that came in from Distology that said there was an opportunity to get mentorship. I thought it sounded amazing but I questioned myself and thought maybe I’m too junior. But I threw myself out there and did it. And that’s one of the things l learned – you’re never too junior.
“Two-and-a-half years ago I met Yvonne in a restaurant in London and there were about six of us and every single time we meet the community gets bigger and bigger, so it’s been amazing to see it grow.
“I needed to align myself with someone that I thought would be able to support me in my career, and that’s when I found [DocuSign channel leader] Harvey [Smith]. He has been there and done it in terms of working with partners, and has offered me support not just in making more success of my role day to day but also career development and presenting, which is something that terrifies me. He gave me some advice not to be too planned and I think I do that better now because I’m not thinking ‘I’ve forgotten to say that’. I’ve learned so much from Harvey and from doing the mentorship.
“One of the concerns I had was how rigid it was going to be. Is it going to be structured or really formal? There is some structure to it – we meet on a monthly basis. But now it’s developed into something really fluid. We still work with each other today, but more on an ad-hoc basis. That’s one of the things about mentorship – don’t feel you’re over-committing yourself. Use it the way you need to to reach whatever goal you’re working towards. There’s nothing to say you have to do it forever. It’s all about communicating expectations about what you want to do and where you want to get.”
