If You're So Clever, Why Ain't You Rich?

 A perfectly reasonable question I'd say.  I was just looking back at some of my conversations with Entrepreneurs and especially Life Coaches.  

You'd be discussing the issues in trying to find funding and yo'd get some idiot saying something along the lines of "Business Angels" or "Venture Capitalists" and of course, when you asked them if they'd ever done that, invariably they'd say no.  My colleagues and I had and that's where we differed and that's how you gain experience.  

Life Coaches telling you how to become a millionaire and I'd often ask them were they, in fact, millionaires?  Once again, they'd say no so I wondered how they knew that they could help someone achieve that whilst not achieving it themselves.

A trained Dale Carnegie practitioner also had the most disorganized business and approach and so it doesn't always follow that knowing the theory actually produces results.  

It also brought to mind these horrendous networking events I went to (I didn't go to many) that were just awful.  Lots of people saying they were entrepreneurs who came up and did their 60 second Elevator Pitch and dismissed yours or rudely walked away when you were speaking to them, interrupted you or pulled the person you were speaking to away, introduced to someone wholly inappropriate for your particular business.   As an INTJ it was the worst possible torture and I often left after 30 minutes and went to the bar or another bar away from these mad people.

One meeting I went to a chap waltzed up bouncing about from one foot to the other, dressed in part of a clown's outfit (I kid you not) and gave me his business card which was a roughly printed, badly ripped off centre bit of paper with name and address and his USP!  He'd help you launch a product or promote your business dressed as a character of your choice and that was what he did!  Before I could tell him what we did, he bounded off to interrupt and p1ss off the next person.  His bit of paper went in the bin.

You could go to some meetings where they'd have a speaker and quite often they would be OK but also, quite often, they'd be teaching me how to suck eggs.  It was always nice to speak to these people and let them slowly realise you knew far more than they did on the subject.

I am so glad to be out of that situation.  I did enjoy standing in for someone at his business meeting and doing his Elevator Pitch (everyone can give a 60 second presentation).  They said well you can do your elevator pitch and I said that I wasn't certain that they'd all be bothered.  I worked for an Indian Global Software House and I was heir UK guy.  So I explained that we did multi site, global software projects with financial analytics and the like and as I suspected, there were a lot of opened jawed participants looking at me in disbelief as I explained the size of the business I represented.  

Oh well, happy and sad days - looking back it was probably a bit more fun now than it was then!