Put Your Worst Foot Forward: Twenty-Five Years of Growing the Helzberg Entrepreneurial Mentoring Program

It takes perseverance, passion, and the support of many to create a life-changing mentoring program that matches successful, seasoned entrepreneurs with eager-but-green business owners willing to share what keeps them up at night.

But that’s exactly what Barnett C. Helzberg, Jr., did a quarter century ago after selling his business to Warren Buffett. He launched, and then led, the Helzberg Entrepreneurial Mentoring Program (HEMP) in Kansas City. Today, hundreds of Kansas City businesses have benefited from his wisdom and HEMP’s overall mission of fostering bold, spirited entrepreneurism. Not surprisingly, HEMP has also emerged as a national model for business mentoring.

In Put Your Worst Foot Forward, Helzberg openly shares the challenges, successes, and failures that accompanied HEMP’s growth. It’s a dramatic story of ups and downs. It also provides lessons to other business communities in how they, too, can foster the magic of mentoring in their cities and towns.