Finally, we launched Pitch Club! Here's what happened.

Ideas are amazing things.

Something happens and ‘pow’, you get it! Or it just emerges over a period of time. I’m talking about that awesome idea, product or venture that keeps creeping back into your head begging for something to be done with it. But what?

As mentioned above, there are many ideas spawned across the planet. The assumption is that the ones that don’t make it were just not developed enough, or as the MBA’s say, ‘feasible’.

Some of these idea originators visit an accountant, lawyer and maybe a friend, which is little more than an exercise in getting ‘buy-in’ from people who you believe ‘know about these things’. The truth is that few accountants and lawyers are equipped to provide any real guidance with respect to ventures. On the positive side, this is an activity that has the makings of an evaluation of sorts.

My experience is that people, generally, don’t have access to frameworks to evaluate their idea so they can actually make decisions on going forward, changing tack or stopping altogether.

They assume they just don’t have the money and time, but again, my experience is that this is generally not the case.

How can one decide they don’t have the money and the time, if they don’t know how much they need with any certainty.

Using the metaphor of climbing a mountain, you need to know the mountain exists (validate your assumption), know how to get to it (road map), equip yourself for the journey (tools, skills) and, if possible, take someone with you who can act as a guide,..not a leader,.. the leader?

That’s you!

There is an old, slightly crass saying in business circles, “Ideas are like assholes, everybody has them”.

It’s a fact that many people bump into ideas they think are business opportunities consistently. Studies show that about 6% of the working population have business ideas every year. Not including newly industrialised economies like China, that means that just between Australia, Canada, USA and the UK (about 410 million people), that about 10 million ideas a year, over 28,000 per day or 1 idea every 2 seconds.

Many of these ideas never see the light of day of course, but for the ones that are pursued there is a pretty consistent statistic. Of any 100 that viable or even practical; 90 will never get started, seven will fail, two will be the walking wounded and one will be a major success.

With those types of statistics, you wonder why anyone would even bother. Personally, in my experience, there is a euphoria that is like discovering a new land or underground treasures when one sees a new business opportunity then set out to make it happen. It is like the excitement I felt as a kid when, along with my two ‘investigator’ buddies Bill and Tom, we set out to discover the mysteries of our little suburb in Richmond . It’s an adventure, and the fact that we don’t know how it will go makes it all the more exciting.

Since then I have been a serial entrepreneur or what my wife calls a ‘Glitter Bunny’.

While I am content, my track record to an independent observer in terms of monetary windfalls would show both highs and lows. More recently, as a consequence of marriage and fatherhood, I have put some elements in place to shield my personal life from these highs and lows, but for me it’s about the adventure. The money is second to the freedom it gives me to live an exciting and fulfilling life where a simple idea over a coffee one day, becomes an asset on someone’s personal balance sheet a year later.

So, if you are young and want to make money safely and securely, I give this advice to you: sit quietly in the corporate work place, save 50% of all your money and invest wisely. Keep your outgoing expenses below $1000 per month and once you have $300,000 of funds under management in shares or property, you should be out of the rat race. You can then suntan to your hearts content, but for me that would be a less than ideal existence.