Mar 13, 2009 GATE Fold

I had a chance to meet with a few friends of the recruiter that found Penny for us, where I met a VP of a very large consulting/auditing firm, a long-time computer expert with far more impressive credentials than I have, a business development expert working for a network provider, and a few fellow recruiter staff members on Friday (which is one of the reasons this is so late). This would probably mark the first real 'cold' presentation where the audience really didn't know who I was, though it was still a relatively receptive and friendly audience as they were friends and associates of Howie. It was a good meeting, the message was well received and yet it also provided me an opportunity to reflect somewhat on the GATE business strategy. I walked away with more confidence in the idea and yet a tad anxious as well. It is abundantly clear that once GATE Village is fully realized and has the critical mass of membership that I've spoken of before, it will be almost easy to attract new members, the meeting reinforced that view. However it also became clear to me that I have a bigger up-hill battle in membership attraction at the start than I had anticipated.

It is from our failures that we learn the most, while I had a good meeting and I wouldn't really call it a failure, I wasn't overwhelmed with membership requests either :-) I found myself driving home from Toronto at 3pm on Friday afternoon which meant I had a lot of time to think about things because there was not a lot of driving going on. Alone time is good thinking time and I do believe that that time was productive and that I have figured out the solution to my recruitment problem. It is too early to share it in public but I can say that I had a good night's sleep Friday night and I didn't think I was going to at lunch time.