Warning: Don’t be a Victim of Intellectual Rape
Being a social entrepreneur, you are inevitably going to come across tons upon tons of people who are going to want to get to know you, possibly take you out for lunch, wine and dine you, and all sorts of strategies, stratagems, and even subterfuges to get inside your head to learn more about you and your organization.
Now this is great, sure. And I strongly recommend connecting to people any chance you get, but you also need to be careful of these highly aggressive people who appear to want to get to know you more than your family even knows you.
You’d be surprised on how many meetings I’ve gone on that ended up being a complete waste of time. Sure, these are the risk that we entrepreneurs take and for the most part, this sort of risk of time and energy is acceptable. But there comes a time when you have to learn to choose whether or not it’s really worth spending the 2 hours with this or that person when you can be using that time more wisely.
Not too long ago, I went on a meeting based upon a phone conversation I had with a potential client that needed my help with a web project. On the phone we went over the details and our partnership was practically sealed.
So I took the time to travel roughly 50 miles to go visit this client in person to make sure everything was legit. I spent the money and about 6 hours of my day to make this visit. While meeting with this client, everything went smoothly.
I even met the president of the company and other various important people who all seemed to be very enthusiastic about my plans to help build an online presence for them. Upon leaving the meeting, the Chief Technology Officer – the person who I came to meet – said to give him a call in 2 days to get the contracts signed and being work.
I made that call 2 days later and more-or-less found out that this person was full of sh&t and really didn’t need or plan to use my services. How did this happen? Not sure. Basically, the guy simply wanted to talk to me for some reason or another. Looking back at the situation, he most likely wanted me to come to the office to use me for my intellectual property.
I was a victim of intellectual rape.
Keep in mind, while there, I spent hours on the whiteboard planning out ideas, strategies, web solutions, and all sorts of innovative ideas on how I planned to help them. Ideas that he was in possession of after I left the office and probably is using right now as I type this article. Ideas that took energy and brainpower to produce.
Grrrr….
Believe me guys, there will be people out there who really have bad intentions when wanting to “get to know you.” Many of these people will simply want to piggyback your ideas after wanting to “take you out to lunch” to “talk business.”
I’ve seen this happen time and time again. And to be honest, it’s usually the older – over the hill – entrepreneurs whose idea wells are pretty dried up, who run this type of ploy on the younger entrepreneurs.
You really need to consider who you plan to meet and why you plan on meeting them. Because there will be a lot of time wasting if you simply jump into meetings by saying “sure, I’ll meet you for lunch” without considering whether or not the meeting could be beneficial and fruitful for you, not just him or her.
2 Comments
Anthony
October 3rd, 2006 at 1:00 pm
Dave,
This is very true. In my time running a business, though, there are a couple things I have learned:
Intellectual rape is a cost of doing business.
You should look at it the same way you look at any other expense: you never want to waste money (or in this case, time), but on the other hand, you don’t want to be so skimpy that it comes back to bite you in the ass.
While it’s never a good idea to waste your time, it’s also not a good idea to become too skeptical. Most worthwhile opportunities require a huge initial time investment. And while there may be some people looking to extract free information from you, there are also a lot of people genuinely interested in purchasing your product/service. And while it would be ideal to get a feel for which person is which beforehand, the truth is, it’s hard to do that without just spending some time and meeting with him/her in the first place.
Everything I just explained above is exactly the reason an “entrepreneur” is different than an “employee”. Employees work on projects/products which are handed down by people higher up within the organization. And when you’re an employee, being high up there sounds great. But once you become upper level management and/or an entrepreneur, you realize - it takes time to acquire worthwhile opportunities. For every 5-10 your pursue, 1 actually works out.
That’s why, as the owner of a web design/development firm, I realize that my job is NOT web design/development. My job is to spend all day on the phone, travelling, and managing opportunities/logistics. Because intellectual rape runs rampant, and if I spend 4 days a week as an employee and 1 seeking opportunities, I will get nowhere. You need to spend 5 days a week seeking opportunities, and in the end, 1 will pay off. That 1 payoff will be enough to pay a couple employees for months.
- Anthony
David Askaripour
October 3rd, 2006 at 6:03 pm
Well said, Anthony.
You’re right, that’s does separate the entrepreneur from the employee — hence me and many, many entrepreneurs around the world busting our asses to constantly seek out opportunities even though 9 out of 10 of them will be garbage.
The things is, though, to try and filter those opportunities to the best of your abilities to help prevent or at least marginilize unfavorable outcomes.
It’s the risks we take and yes sometimes it really, really sucks wasting that time, but I wouldn’t trade this life for anything — the life of an entrepreneur, that is.
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