Still working on that idea you had?


Just wondering if you gave up on it.

What reminded me was that I was keynoting at an event and spent some talking to a very nice woman who asked to speak to me.

She had been coming to the event for years and was making steady progress on her idea. She had all of the tools in place and was wondering how to get her idea out to the people who needed it.

So I asked her what she liked to do and she told me that her perfect day was getting on the phone with someone or a group of people and helping them with their relationship problems.

For years, she’s been working on getting all of the pieces together. She wrote the book, she learned about marketing techniques, she got the technology down, she got the website up, linked in the autoresponder. Great success story ready to launch!

But she doesn’t have an audience yet and for many reasons, she doesn’t have much money right now to finance her dreams.

So I talked to her about “Going Doink” — a great concept I got from my friend Mitch Axelrod.

Sometimes we just need to go straight to the place we want to be.

The problem is, she needed to put money on the table and TIME is EXPENSIVE.

How do you balance the limited time you have and the limited resources to make sure that YOU are alive to help the people you want to help?

Or even BETTER, maybe you have time and resources and want to get the greatest LEVERAGE possible.

When I do a HUGE project — and yes I’m working on one now — I ask the question, what is the minimum viable part of this project that will generate revenue with the least amount of time and resources.

For this wonderful, giving lady all she really needed was a phone and a few people who were having trouble with their relationships.

So I asked her if there was anyone at this event who she thought was having relationship problems right now.

YOU know the answer to that one.

But you can’t just go out and help people out of the goodness of your heart and neglect the fact that YOU have limited time and resources and the ONLY way that you can help is if YOU are functioning at your best — alive, well and thriving.

This amazing woman needed to value the limited time and resources that she had at their TRUE value.

We all have VERY few hours to do everything we need to do.

So I asked her what was stopping her from having her group of people today and why she couldn’t have income from her idea today.

After all, there were MANY people at the event who needed her help desperately and they needed it TODAY, not 3 years from now.

And they needed to have skin in the game. Because advice is cheap. Investment in ourselves pays off.

If you don’t invest in something, you won’t get the return.

Now investment can be time or it can be money, but either way, we all have to invest to get a return, because if we don’t we don’t pay attention.

The truth was, there were dozens of people at that event who needed her help and would be willing to pay for it.

And even if they couldn’t pay for it, if she STILL asked them to invest what they DID have — time, expertise, other resources — she could have had all of the things she had created over the last few years, the website, the tech stuff, the book, the … well you get the idea.

And she could have been doing what she LOVED to do and helping so many people if she had only talked to the people who needed what she had to offer all these years.

She asked me what she could do for me and I told her that the biggest value that she could give me was to come back to me and tell me that she had created her group today.

I ran into her in the hall later and I asked her how she was doing.

She said, “I’m on fire!”

At that point, she had 4 people in her group and was hot on the heels of a 5th.

Joy.

Sometimes you just have to do it.

All the best,

Ken McArthur
KenMcArthur.com
jvAlertLive.com
OneDayIntensive.com
TheImpactFactor.com


About Ken McArthur

Ken McArthur is the founder of ConnectLab.live, an AI relationship-intelligence and warm-intro platform that helps founders who are raising find the funds that fit and the people who can introduce them, and helps fund managers connect with the founders they back. He was recently accepted into Harvard Business School Foundry. He also writes Raise Smarter, a daily newsletter on what's really moving in early-stage fundraising. Ken challenges us to realize we ALL have an impact, whether we want to or not, on thousands of people we touch in our day-to-day lives, and he shows that simple things make a HUGE difference. ConnectLab.live grew out of that belief. Connection is the currency of the 21st Century, and the right introduction can change a company's future. Long before ConnectLab, Ken was the popular host of live events that brought together top-level marketers, entrepreneurs, business owners, corporations and non-profit organizations to build multi-million dollar joint venture relationships. He has managed product launches ranked in the top 400 sites on the Internet and is regularly asked to speak at leading marketing events. He created AffiliateShowcase.com, a pioneering affiliate program search engine and directory. He also founded the MBS Internet Research Center, which conducted the world's largest survey ever attempted on creating and launching successful information products. Ken was the official mentor for Sterling Valentine as he took his launch from zero to over $100,000 in less than 8 days, a proof of concept documented in Info Product Blueprint. Today he puts that same skill for connecting people and launching ideas to work for founders and the investors who back them.

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