Two careers spent watching people outgrow the systems around them.
MentorPlace was built by two people who kept arriving at the same conclusion from opposite directions. What actually changes how someone performs is a conversation with the right person, not another course.
The gap nobody was budgeting for
Luke spent eight and a half years inside a high-growth global learning platform, through the hypergrowth years, building the global Customer Success function from the ground up and then scaling a content partnership ecosystem to more than 250 partners worldwide. He could see exactly what organisations were buying to develop their people, and what happened next.
Often, not much happened next.
Organisations licensed content libraries and reported completion rates. The people who actually grew were usually the ones who had someone in their corner: a manager who invested, a senior colleague who took an interest, or a mentor they'd found by accident. None of that was on the invoice or in the reporting, and nobody had designed for it. It was left to luck.
Chris arrived at the same place from a different direction. Across a decade of building and leading teams around the world, across Australia, Asia and Europe, he kept seeing the same pattern. When teams were struggling, the fix was usually people investing in people, not another process. He built a consultancy around that idea. The flagship initiative was a coaching and mentoring community designed to lift staff retention. It worked, but it didn't scale. Every pairing, session and follow-up was done by hand.
Between us, one of us could see the hole in the market, and the other knew why filling it by hand would never work.
Mentoring, engineered
MentorPlace exists to make mentoring something an organisation can actually run, rather than hope for.
That means getting rid of the reasons a program dies in month three: spreadsheet pairings, scheduling ping-pong, lost notes, invisible outcomes, and L&D managers left wondering whether any of it worked. Two-way calendar sync, in-built video, goals that live inside the session rather than in a document nobody opens, and reporting that shows you what's changing.
It also means solving the other half of the problem. Most organisations don't have every kind of expertise they need sitting inside their own walls. So alongside the platform, we built a global marketplace of mentors and coaches. A senior leader can reach a perspective their organisation simply doesn't contain, and guidance isn't confined to career ladders: finances, health, relationships, and the other things that determine whether someone shows up well on Monday.
And it has to be cheap enough that it isn't the first line item cut. For less than a cup of coffee per person per month, mentoring stops being a perk for high-potentials and becomes infrastructure for everyone.
Who's behind it
Luke Turner
Founder & CEO
Luke built his career in the middle of one of Australia's fastest-growing EdTech companies. Over eight and a half years there he established the global Customer Success function through hypergrowth, scaling a team of 15+ across SMB, enterprise and global accounts, and building the retention frameworks that held it together. He then took on the global content partnerships portfolio, reshaping acquisition from volume to quality, negotiating multi-year, multi-million-dollar agreements with the company's top strategic partners, and conceiving and piloting a flagship partner-connectivity product. In his final chapter there he led partner operations, designing the lifecycle framework that made a 250-partner ecosystem governable.
Before Australia, Luke started out in London in data and web support, the unglamorous end of the business. That work taught him that most operational pain is really a design problem.
He founded MentorPlace in 2021.
Chris Winfield-Blum, MBA
TECHNICAL FOUNDER & COO
Chris is a product and operations leader who has spent his career at the intersection of software delivery and team culture. As COO of a data consultancy he built and led teams around the world, across Australia, Asia and Europe, and grew technical teams by 40%. As founder and CEO of his own consultancy he advised organisations across the offshoring and BPO sector on building teams that stay, and launched a SaaS product of his own along the way. As COO of a sports-tech company he took a mobile platform for young athletes from roadmap to market.
Most recently he spent five years inside the WordPress ecosystem, first as a solutions and business analyst shaping conversion-focused product, then leading operations and customer support. That stretch confirmed something he'd believed for years: product quality and customer outcomes are the same problem.
At MentorPlace he designed the platform architecture, built out the delivery and deployment processes, and continues to lead technical operations. He holds an MBA from the Australian Institute of Business.
Find us on LinkedIn
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The next chapter
We think the market is moving our way. Organisations have spent a decade buying content and are increasingly honest about what it does and doesn't change. Retention is expensive. Internal expertise is under-used. And until recently, the tooling to connect the two hasn't existed at a price that makes it a default rather than a pilot.
Our ambition is simple: to make structured mentoring as normal and as measurable inside an organisation as performance reviews or onboarding, and more useful than either.
We're building a platform where any organisation can stand up a mentoring program in an afternoon, extend it into a global marketplace when internal knowledge runs out, and see what it returned, in numbers.
We'd like to hear from you
If that's a problem you're trying to solve, request a demo and let's talk about what MentorPlace can do for your organisation.