What does a mentor do?

Having a mentor has been described as having your own personal Board of Directors. The role of a mentor is to act as a sounding board to help you sort out your priorities and grow your business. A good mentor can also help introduce you to his network of people and to identify new business opportunities.

Terry Fullerton   

Terry has been a mentor for a number of years and  offers commercial mentoring services to people interested in selecting their own mentor who they feel best matches their business interests.As you will see from the case studies he has mentored a wide range of people at various stages in their careers and while he is happy to work with businesses in difficulty he finds that most of his mentoring is with successful people wanting to take their business to the next level.

He has spent most of his working life commercialising technology and acting as the interface between technical specialists and industry. He has many years experience at protecting intellectual property rights and he was the CEO of Canterprise Ltd at the University of Canterbury for 5 years.

Since leaving the University he has started up 6 new businesses in the IT sector and taken each of these through to a trade sale. These included a website business, a company importing training technology from Israel, a company marketing share trading software, a social media marketing website and an online toy website.

He has a PhD in Chemistry and for over 10 years he was the Director of Pulp and Paper Research Institute at the Forest Research Institute in Rotorua before becoming the CEO of Canterprise Ltd at the University of Canterbury. Both at FRI and at UC his role was to provide the link between the needs of industry and the scientific capabilities of the academics for the mutual benefit of both sectors.

At UC he was involved in commercializing a wide range of technologies and was the Director of a number of joint venture companies. These included a nanotechnology company with local investors, a superconducting high voltage transformer company with Meridian Energy, a water purification company and a JV company with ASCO (NZ) Ltd involved with removing CO2 from fuel cells.

He has always been active in the community and has been a Rotarian for over 20 years. He was appointed as a Paul Harris Fellow in 2010. He is a member and Past President of the Christchurch Business Club and a member of the Canterbury Club. He enjoys going hiking, bike riding, fishing, playing golf and traveling.