BoomersPlus, a Halifax company that matches seasoned professionals with part-time jobs where their experience is needed, is testing a new initiative to help startups find industry mentors.

The Virtual Startup Mentor Pilot program will see a roster of retired and semi-retired people with experience in corporate leadership roles spend twelve weeks giving operational, financial and marketing advice to three startups. One of the three companies is HOLLO Medical, which is developing a pocket-sized spacer for asthma inhalers.

Once the pilot is finished, BoomersPlus CEO Kevin MacIntyre plans to make the program more widely available, with the help of startup support organizations like IGNITE Atlantic. About 4,200 former executives from across Canada have signed on to participate.

“I was reviewing yesterday, and we had 30 candidates that could work with one startup,” said MacIntyre in an interview. “They knew the sector, knew the space they were in, had the acumen, had startup experience. And so I called up our director of cloud services and said, ‘My God, like, that's depth.’ The match we can make is extremely rich.”

MacIntyre said startups will be able to work with up to three mentors with different areas of subject matter expertise. The initial matchmaking process will be automated, but the pairings will be reviewed by a person before they become official.

The three startups participating in the pilot will not pay for the service. Later, MacIntyre plans to monetize the process by charging startups and support organizations, with financial backing also possibly coming from government organizations.

He said he believes it will be important for startups to pay a fee so they will be incentivized to engage with the mentors as fully as possible.

“If a mentor or three mentors are going to commit to the time to help a startup, then there has to be commitment that goes both ways,” he said. “So, I like a little skin in the game... Because this is pretty huge value.”

The Startup Mentor program is the second such initiative that BoomersPlus has spearheaded. The first was a pandemic-era job skills mentorship program backed by Nova Scotia’s Centre for Entrepreneurship Education and Development.

That collaboration was part of a basket of new services that BoomersPlus rolled out as COVID-19 ground the job market to a near-standstill and the company’s main, gig economy-style offering went temporarily dormant.

MacIntyre’s team also added a corporate consulting and advising stream to its matchmaking during the same period, which he said many companies have found useful.

For example, he said BoomersPlus paired a struggling beverage-maker in Cape Breton with a former vice president of distribution for Sobeys, who helped stabilize the embattled drink company.

Now, BoomersPlus’s main business is ramping up again. And MacIntyre said his team has seen strong sales growth over the past year, considering prevailing economic conditions – particularly in the new ventures.

Founded in 2011, his company now employs 10 people. MacIntyre said more hires and a capital raise to finance future expansion could both be on the horizon in the medium-term, but that he has not yet decided whether either will be necessary.

In the meantime, he sees telecommuting as crucial to BoomersPlus’s value proposition because it radically increases the number of experienced businesspeople who can sign up both as employees and mentors.

“If some of them go to Spain for the winter, you take your laptop, and it doesn't matter,” he said. “The whole concept of remote (work) in this space, mentoring, coaching, advising, ... you know, if there's a silver lining in a pandemic, this is one of them.”