I was literally speechless when a complete stranger called me up and said that he wanted to donate money to BizStart. He’d listened to me talk about my project on the radio and liked what he heard. He also wanted me to introduce an additional component and his organisation would pay! I felt incapable of making a good impression during our first meeting. The terror of worrying whether my real life presence could match up to my radio voice, combined with being utterly gob-smacked by his proposal, rendered me wooden and open-mouthed. Clearly I am a complete amateur in professional business territory.

Anyway, this potential prospect – and he remains ‘potential’ as nothing has been agreed upon yet – was in a hurry. Meet now, send a quote by yesterday, meet again, new suggestions thrown at me, prepare a presentation for the Board (with a capital B) by the end of this week with new creative ideas, show landing page, portal page, new designs, come up with a cartoon idea ….

There followed a flurry of excitement and anxiety as I harangued and harried my web design guy and my graphic design guy to come up with new stuff in record time, do it now, work this weekend, etc. They are not my employees, but they good naturedly and very professionally delivered what I needed.

But wait, the prospect was not ready for me after all. Can’t do the presentation this week, the Board is busy, maybe next week, maybe the week after. Be patient said the prospect, in finance things take a long time. So, suitably chastened, I wait. As I am also waiting for a twice-postponed ‘big break’ meeting with potential government sponsors.

Michael Lusk, whom I met on Inner Circle, put it in perspective for me. Stay excited, he said, you’ve got these two great prospects still lined up; in the mean time go out and find two more! Quite right, so that’s what I’ll be doing for the next week. This is the nature of the beast. No matter what promising deals or sales are almost in the bag, you also constantly need to be working on the next ones if you want to keep afloat.

And I’ve also learned that if there is a Board involved, it’s always a case of hurry up and wait.