Cathy Belk, president of JumpStart, is one of the panelists for Smart Women 2016.

If anyone has a front row seat to observe success in the making, it’s probably Cathy Belk, president of the nonprofit organization JumpStart Inc., which has funded startups and helped accelerate numerous businesses the past 11 years.

But there’s a little more to it than that. It’s a good idea to know what type of success you may be seeing; is it the bottom line of company success — or is it more a personal level, the drive to an exciting development, Belk says.

“There is a growing number of successful entrepreneurs who are taking the experience they have and are using it to enable other entrepreneurs to benefit from that experience,” she says. “It’s mentoring, teaching, working one-on-one with other people to share those experiences and enabling others to gain from those stories and learnings.”

That willingness to share lessons and insight isn’t the only thing that is growing. The same group of entrepreneurs is investing from their success to help fellow businesses.

“Some take part of their financial wealth and reinvest it back into other companies and the community,” Belk says. “They are contributing back to the ecosystem we are building here.”

While Belk helps keep an eye on the successes or challenges of the companies JumpStart assists, she must also keep an eye on the success of JumpStart.

“Our success is defined by a couple of things,” she says. “One is we need to achieve our mission. We really work every day with our partners to economically transform the community.”

A for-profit business, for example, also would have to deliver returns for its stakeholders and investors.

“Our way to deliver returns is to enable the kinds of outcomes that our partners and vendors want to see: job creation, economic impact and transforming the Northeast Ohio community to be more entrepreneurial and more economically positioned

Read the full story at Smart Business.