May 2010 As A Social Entrepreneur: The Fourth Deliverable

On returning from France, our intentions for T1ME are now threefold:

1. To be a worldwide Tribe of 1,000,000 entrepreneurs providing a community of  peers which supports and an academy of experts that accelerates you towards your Entrepreneurial Dream.

2. To be able to give back to the members every month 40-60% of their $10 sub in $10,000 cash prizes and other booty which will faciliate and speed the achievement of that dream.

3. To speak with the voice of that Tribe in our ezines, blogs, tweets and annual books, drawing to us the resources and recognition we feel is our due as we Entrepreneurs become a major healing factor in the global economy.

But as the month wears on, the plot thickens as you will read later.

The first weekend of May is a Bank Holiday in which we are “balanced” by Sunita’s friend, Margaret, from New Zealand. I offer up the Abundance Shed as a venue for Margaret to practice her Mind Gym kinesiology  in individual sessions on Carole, Ntathu, Hazel, Sharon, me, Janet, Sara & Erika.   This was a rather magical way to begin May courtesy of Sunita.   There’s that woman again!

We begin our weekly T1ME calls on Tuesdays and Yvonne is Mrs Strict who keeps us all to order. I speak to a contact of Marie’s at Cambridge University who doesn’t really get the project straight off the bat despite being an expert in Social Enterprise. But she doesnt put me off and I agree to get back to her on a regular basis and report progress.

I talk to Claire about heading up our Marketing team but it soon becomes clear that she doesnt have time to spend a lot of voluntary hours on this and before the month is out I am talking to other marketing experts, about which more later.

Sandra moves the servers to Liquid Web concerned that Go Daddy will not cope with demand. We get out our first weekly ezine, which Janet writes, and create our Affiliate Scheme.

Janet conjures up our Forum expert Sian and we go into bat with her about the size and shape of the ideal forum. We are fortunate that Sian has experience of working with one of our chosen and confirmed Experts, Tracy Repchuk, and this is deemed A Good Thing.   Oddly, I also picked Sian out of our list of our Entrepreneurial Dreamers without realising it was her, thinking her website sounded interesting enough for me to make her the subject of one of my early radio interviews.

18th May is A Bad Day.   Sandra moved JM.com’s servers in the middle of last nightand I lose 12 hours’ worth of emails – forever – until we realise what’s going on.   This causes me a great deal of stress and has a knock-on effect on Bianca with whom I have to cancel a social meeting; she is grumpy with me and disappointed.

On 19th I speak to a Marketer I know who might like to get involved with the project and agree to meet him in London on 2nd June.  

On 20th I talke to an Online Business Manager, as I am feeling rather swamped about everything which needs doing on the site, but as is so often the way with VA people in my experience to date, she over-eggs it by trying to tell me how to run my business as part of her pitch and that’s never what I want.   I know how to run a business already and I just want someone to take some of this online stuff off me under my direction.   So I put that project on the back burner, for now.

Michael Neill agrees to be one of our Experts – woo hoo! – and we spend the month confirming all but four of our original Dream Team.   I speak to Ann Ross to explain to her what will be involved and she’s excited to be working with me again, bless her. Clare Evans agrees to be our Time Management Expert which is great, since she wrote the book Time Management for Dummies.

I agree with Ben, my lawyer, that he will move his day each week with me from Mondays to Wednesdays.   This is great for two reasons. Not only will I be able to put my best, fresh energy each week on Mondays into what is now my most important project, but I have been able to ask for my own needs to be prioritised which is what Sunita’s friend Margaret “balanced: me for at the beginning of the month.   Result!   Ben and I start our new routine in June, after he gets back from his holidays.   And that means my weekly meeting with Janet & Yvonne can be on Mondays, which Yvonne requests and prefers.

On 24th I send out an email to everyone I know asking if they would like to invest in the business on a non-recourse loan basis, which is the same as taking a bet on T1ME being successful.   It is gratifying that the first two people to take me up on the proposition are a friend I was at school with and have known since the Sixties, followed by another long-standing friend I met in the Seventies.   And hot on their heels, a handful of newer friends and clients.   If you would like to invest in T1ME, just let me know.

On 25th I postpone a virtual meeting with a potential Affiliate Manager, on the basis that its a bit premature as yet, but I wake up with a Universal Nudge to talk to a well-known Internet Marketer who I would dearly love to be one of our Super Affiliates. It had been my intention to get our list of member up to 1,000 or 2,000 before talking to Super Affiliates, but again I am just trusting and following the nudges.

And boy am I glad I did!   I travelled to meet him for a thrilling meeting in which he totally got my vision and asked how he could be involved, indeed how he could own part of the business.   We are talking.

What a way to end the month!   I had some results to share with The Creation Experiment.  

But I’ve saved the best till last.   On 18th May, Sharon and I were talking in what turned out to be a midnight Skype call which lasted nearly three hours. During the course of that we decided to become a “bank”.   Of course, T1ME can’t actually be a real bank and we wouldn’t want to be, but we do want our 4th aim to become a source of funding for small businesses.  

The plan at the end of May was that $1 out of each $10 sub would go into our “banking” pot.   That we would use orthodox banking to grow that pot (compounding) but lend it to our members using unorthodox banking methods. Sharon then proceeded to go to an event where she sat next to a woman who’s partner “sets up banks” and we we have arranged to meet him during June.   Do you remember my earlier post about relinquishing ego-based control, and just drawing the right people to you?

That Sharon’s a wizard at manifestation.   My manifestation cycle is three years and Sharon’s is three days!

The brilliant thing about being to give grants and micro-finance and lend money to our members is that their loan applications would be decided by a panel of their peers, and if they don’t yet have a lending proposition, all they need to do is pop back into the site and hang out a while longer with our panel of Experts and hey presto – they can come back and ask again when they are ready.

Lending to Entrepreneurs by Entrepreneurs!   T1ME takes on a whole new meaning.

When we were in France, Janet said she thought there was something “big” behind the project.   Once we decided to become the future of entrepreneurial lending, Janet decided this was part of what she had in mind.

Janet also brought Experts Joe Noonan and Jennifer Hough into our panel of Experts. We are so lucky to have them on board because they entirely get the vision.   We are looking forward to meeting them both again in June.

I’m very excited about our Fourth Deliverable; it’s the icing on the cake.