Mentor: Mr. Joshua Meek

Profession: Owner of Meek Industries

Location: Virtual FaceTime

Date: February 19th, 2020

Time: 6:30 PM – 7:15 PM

Assessment:

This week, I was able to finally able to continue my regular schedule of weekly mentor meetings with Mr. Meek. Every week, Mr. Meek and I will meet so that I can provide him with updates on Groundify LLC, receive direct mentorship on my impact investing paper, and learn important aspects of leadership as I grow into a professional. Specifically, during this meeting, Mr. Meek and I discussed important aspects of my impact investing research paper and update him on progress with Groundify.

During this meeting, a large part of our discussion revolved around my Final Product. As we discussed last week, I had originally thought about establishing Kismet, an innovative web platform to connect social entrepreneurs with impact investors, thereby digitizing America’s private entrepreneurial ecosystem. However, this idea was altered so that I could develop the skill of traditional and technical research into impact investing, thereby putting my skills to the test and developing the ever-important skill of synthesizing important information into a comprehensive research paper. As we finalized this idea last week, I was able to deliver on the action point of creating a detailed outline for my proposed research paper. It is listed below:

Abstract

What is Impact Investing?

History of Impact Investing

Problems that exist within the impact investing field

Standardizing impact investing terminology

Importance of Impact Investing

Why is it better than profit-focused investments?

Applications of Impact Investing

ESG Investing in frontier economies

ESG investing during the COVID-19 pandemic

ESG Investing within the Biden Administration

Analyzing specific stock picks

Stock 1

Stock 2

Stock 3

The Future of Impact Investing

Within these categories, I will be able to provide a detailed introduction into what impact investing is, its primary focuses, and its benefits as compared to day trading or profit-based investing. This will serve to provide value to readers as it will give those who are not experienced with this field a primary introduction to what impact investing entails before reading about the applications of ESG investing in real-world situations. The reason I chose multiple circumstances was to understand how finance can interact among many aspects, thereby preparing my for a future career in any of these fields and helping me develop important skills in synthesizing information within different contexts. Lastly, by picking three stocks, I will be able to apply both mathematical technical analysis and ESG concepts to apply both learned skills.

I was also able to share updates with Mr. Meek, and beyond learning important aspects about entrepreneurship, I was also able to understand the importance of prioritizing different tasks. By dividing our time, Mr. Meek showed me how important it is to focus on small goals so that you make consistent progress rather than becoming overburdened with too many tasks. By focusing on contacting only three cafes outside of DFW I was able to do so without taking too large of a burden of managing Groundify and continuing work on my ISM II Final Product.

In conclusion, the biggest takeaways from this meeting were that I was able to continue developing my Final Product. Moreover, I was able to briefly discuss important updates and growth strategies for Groundify with Mr. Meek as he continues to help me with my startup. Ultimately, I look forward to continuing working on my startup while beginning to pen my research paper for Mr. Meek’s review.