At the back end of last year someone introduced me to Nigel Boterrill’s Entrepreneurs Circle. I’m prone to pay attention to such chance suggestions these days especially when I found out the local Surrey meetings were being held 2 miles from my house.

As a direct result of joining only in September last year, I had a light bulb moment while on holiday about how I could model the success of the Circle and create a vehicle for my writing, teaching and mentoring.

So here we are in January and the resulting site has just been launched – see Recipes for Fresh Thinking to see what has come together in the most remarkably short space of time.

I thought it would a great help to others starting new ventures to share how it came about.

Modelling Excellence

When I first went to an Entrepreneur’s Circle meeting, what struck me most was the energy. Everyone in the room had a desire and a determination to succeed and the content delivered is geared solely towards that goal. There’s no time wasted moaning about how slow business is or in gossip and tittle tattle. The sessions are geared to encourage attendees to generate focused and channelled energy into their business.

What is taking place is knowledge transfer of a successful model – i.e. Nigel’s – to allow you to replicate the bits of it that apply to your business. I was no stranger to modelling. I have used it extensively in human interface design when I was a software architect and more latterly in coaching and mentoring with my NLP practitioner’s hat on – although I’ve moved on, upwards and away from NLP per se these days.

Nigel’s model and modus operandi turned out to be just what I needed at that point in time. The seed was planted.

My local meetings are run by an amazing force of nature called Vanessa Lanham-Day – she walks her talk, delivers with wit and charm, doesn’t pull punches and leaves you both on a high and with razor sharp clarity. At said meetings, I also bumped into a contact of mine who I hadn’t seen for a while, Karen Skidmore. By chance, and there are no coincidences in my book, Karen had be running a membership-based portal called the Web Tech Club for some months very successfully.

So rather than reinventing the wheel, I looked at Nigel’s financial model (from a customer perspective of course) and modelled the bits I needed for Recipes for Fresh Thinking. I also found out what tools Karen had used to create her site and used all of those too. One of Karen’s webinars was even on the topic of how to build and run a site just like the one I was planning. I even heard about that webinar the very day she was running it. As I said, there is no such thing as coincidence!

As a result, I started the site build and population in week 1 of November, the first entry level product sold before Christmas and the first subscribers signed up this week.

Spirals of Abundance

There is another key factor in making all of this work that I sensed I had to model.

Our current financial system is, in essence, a debt spiral. It is ultimately propped up by selling someone some debt that they could do without and at a premium. There are other ways!

The most successful franchises generate abundance not only for the franchisee and franchisor but also for the people who buy the product or service at the end of the line.

In the case of the Entrepreneurs Circle, the product even allows the user (i.e. people like me) to generate even more abundance. It is in essence a no-brainer.

Again, I felt this nuance worth emulating so set about it in two ways.

Firstly, the product and service I am essentially delivering from the site is a simple and inexpensive way for each of us to change our mind set such that the world around us changes in our favour. To do this, I have taken esoteric (or hidden) wisdom and made it exoteric (or known). This has been the focus of my writing for the last few years.

My skill is to take stuff which is inaccessible and make it both accessible and useful in a contemporary setting. In essence, it is practical magic and, like all magic, it only appears to be a trick until you know how its done. Those that know the secret we call lucky nowadays. So when just a little of what I teach rubs off, life becomes easier, blocks vapourise and serendipity blossoms.

See the blog Slowing Down : The New Speeding Up to see how this even involves less not more effort

The second essential part of the model is to allow those who invest time and energy in the site to learn even more inner secrets to benefit financially from subscriptions and content delivery. In the Entrepreneurs Circle, these people are Business Growth Advisors like Vanessa. For Recipes for Fresh Thinking, I had already developed a Tour Guide Training programme for coaches, healers and therapists centred around even more arcane knowledge I have contemporised and called the Cube of Karma.

It’s too early to say how all this will go but I do know that pulling it together has been one of the easiest things I have ever done. It’s like having a guiding light showing you the way. It feels good.

I’ll report back on progress and Big Thanks to all mentioned here, my new Tour Guides and all those that subscribe over the coming months.

P.S. just back this week from an Entrepreneur Circle day with two massive, colour-coded Mind Maps of even more things to implement to make the site blossom – a day very well spent.

Related Links

Entrepreneurs Circle
Web Tech Club
Recipes for Fresh Thinking
Flavours of Thought
Tour Guide Training
Cube of Karma