While the party line says that long-lasting, solid relationships are key to entrepreneurial success–put simply, your friends are the ones who’ll make sure you’re always working–sometimes the best and biggest opportunities come out of left field, fully formed and ready to fatten up your bank account. This week has seen a lot of that.
Example 1: Way back in July (seems like light years ago), I put together a proposal for Diageo. The person at the company who requested it had been a good friend of mine for a while, had had me on his Christmas card list for five years and had often told me how big of a fan of mine he was. After receiving the proposal, he passed me along to five other people who gave me approximately a zillion noncomittal answers. The prospect of something materializing dwindled away over several heartwrenching weeks–and I never heard from the erstwhile friend again. I sat on the proposal until last Thursday, when a major travel site contacted me on the strength of one mixed-up communication. After a five-minute conversation, the editorial head asked me if I’d be interested in devising an original content product for them. I dusted off my poor, forgotten proposal, tweaked it, sent it in, and… three days later, it looks like I have a buyer.
Example 2: I’ve been pitching an urban Hawaiian culture story to Hemispheres, to Islands–basically to every domestic travel pub that supposedly knows Honolulu well enough to veer away from the “Waikiki, beaches, hula dancers” claptrap. For six months, I got no traction. A week ago, a colleague I barely know sent my info to a British publisher, who offered me the exact assignment for a fantastic rate. Then I was recommended to someone else within the company, who also is giving me a gig. Never met either of ‘em–never spoken to them, in fact. And they know nothing about Honolulu. They just know they don’t want to write the same story about it that everyone else has.
There are many other examples, but the point is always the same: No matter how much you nurture longtime connections or trust your friends, the unknown factor is always going to account for 25 percet of your business. And it’s going to be the fun part. Instead of pitching, revamping and staying awake nights hoping, you’ll just blink one day and–bzzing!–open your eyes to discover a fat little opportunity sitting comfortably in your lap. It’s almost like the universe is delivering you a hit of preemptive gratification.
I know many people who, upon receiving a few of these little zingers, take them as a signal that they no longer have to work so hard. They just sit back and wait to see what lands in their lap. Unfortunately, this tactic tends to decrease the numbers rather than increase them. To borrow a moral lesson from Pilgrim’s Progress, the hire powers, just like other powers, usually help those that help themselves.
This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 9:17 pm and is filed under Strategery, Laptop Meditations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.One Response to “The Ironic, Out-of-the-Blue Element”
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May 9th, 2008 at 8:07 am
Love these anecdotes - and the aesop at the end of it. When you tell some people that a quarter of their business is going to from unknown sources, they tend to get the impression that it will come from out of the blue with no work required on their part. Thanks for the reality check.