I am now an ABM Volunteer Mentor on the Help to Grow: Management Course. The badge is not the point.
The point is sitting with a founder who is stuck on something I have already been stuck on, and saving them some of the time it cost me to get unstuck.
Mentoring Note
Role: ABM Volunteer Mentor, 2026 to 2027
Programme: Help to Grow: Management Course
Where I can help: Ecommerce, growth and hiring
Paul Ryazanov · MageCloud · Ecommerce Camp UK · The Association of Business Mentors
What People Gave Me When I Had Nothing to Give Back
I moved to the UK in 2022. I had twenty years of ecommerce behind me and almost no idea how anything worked here.
People gave me their time when I had nothing to give back. I have written about how slow it was in building a network in a new country, and about how we went on to win over twenty-five UK customers after relocating. Neither happened on my own.
Volunteering as a mentor is the simplest way I know to hand some of that back.
What the Help to Grow: Management Course Is
Help to Grow: Management is a government-funded leadership course for senior decision-makers at UK businesses with five to 249 employees. It runs over 12 weeks, and every participant gets one-to-one mentoring alongside the course. The Association of Business Mentors is one of the organisations providing those mentors, and that is the badge I now carry for 2026 to 2027.
The people on the course are running real businesses with real constraints. They do not need theory from me. They need someone who has been stuck where they are stuck.
Why Time Matters More Than Advice
I already mentor founders on GrowthMentor, and I wrote about why I mentor there. The reason is the same here. The lessons that hurt most in my career were not about money. They were about the time it took to work out something another person could have told me in an hour.
Mentoring is not about being the expert in the room either. You do not need to be the smartest person in the room. You need to have been stuck in the same place and be willing to say what got you out of it.
Where I Can Help
I have spent more than twenty years in ecommerce. I co-founded and run MageCloud, an ecommerce agency working on Magento, Shopify and WooCommerce, and I founded Ecommerce Camp UK, where founders share real numbers instead of pitches. The questions I can usually help with are about ecommerce, growth and hiring. I have since also joined Enterprise Nation as a mentor.
If you are on the Help to Grow course and want a second opinion on ecommerce, growth or hiring, message me on LinkedIn.