A dreamer? An inventor? Someone who never makes it?

So then, how do you become a successful entrepreneur?

You need to open your shop or market stall or website.

In simplest form, success as an entrepreneur is when you take a great idea AND turn that into revenue (and then into profit too!).

And, interestingly enough, this is the point where many good ideas and inventions fall by the wayside – they just don’t get from the creators den into the market place, or if they do, they arrive too late or don’t fit what the market is willing to pay for.

And that’s why I am offering to help a select few entrepreneurs.

If you’d like the opportunity to learn how to commercialise your products, services and proto-types, and to do this from someone who has been there, done that, got the T-shirt, then drop me a line.

I have a small number of places for an initial free programme including advice, access to key people and events. After the initial free programme, we can discuss terms and decide to whether to proceed further or not.

If you’d like to know more, please drop me a brief line telling me why I should pick you.

Here are the key criteria

1. - you don’t need to live in the NW of England, but you must be able to reach the region for events and meetings
2. - you should have a clearly articulated idea and be talking (or getting ready to talk) to customers
3. - preferable your product or service will be built or at least in the form a prototype
4. - you need to own the product / service / idea
5. - you need to be willing to learn
6. - you need to be able to work with others
7. - you need to be able to turn up on time and keep to deadlines

If your business is just an idea, then this programme would not be for you.

So, if you are ready to move from the invention phase to the real business building and entrepreneurial phase, then please contact me for more information via the Media Modo website.

I am using parables – or stories – to express the ideas about business which will form the basis for this blog and the subsequent book Rags to Wreckages … to Riches.

Lots of people are asking me why, or expressing scepticism that it is worth writing business parables. So let me explain why…

Parables are used to teach and change us. They reach beyond the mere logical or reasoned understanding to touch our hearts and our emotions. Perhaps parables are a little like the picture above, they stir us up and allow each of us to see what we need to see.

Our actions are mainly based in our emotional thoughts and responses are only occasionally driven by logic, although we might like to think otherwise. This does not mean we are unthinking, but that we tend to think with our hearts first and

foremost and usually engage our rational mind later. After the event rational thinking is usually in the form of worry and is often more of a hindrance than a help.

The fact that we think emotionally explains many things including why stock markets are famously driven by the emotions of fear and greed despite the many maths experts attempting to reduce it all to a calm irrefutable logic.

Likewise great entrepreneurs and investors alike learn to develop and act on their instinct and not just logical deduction.

Therefore, for any business book to be successful – and by that I mean it inspires you to make changes in how you run your business or investment life – then it must speak to your heart. It must stir you up so that you emotionally buy into the decisions and actions that you must embrace if you wish to be successful.

In using parables, I don’t claim to be unique or original. In fact the world’s best selling book the bible – uses the parables of Jesus to teach. When asked why Jesus uses parables we are told

Though seeing, they do not see;
Though hearing, they do not hear or understand

and

You may be ever hearing but never understand;
You may be ever seeing but never perceiving.

For when people’s heart’s have become hardened,
They hardly hear with their ears,
And they have closed their eyes
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
Understand with their hearts

In writing business parables for Rags to Wreckages and speaking to business owners and investors I’ve been told that the advice they contain is ‘common sense but rarely considered because they it is so obvious’

So the challenge for us as entrepreneurs and investors is not that we don’t know what needs to be done, but that it is a supremely harder to do it than to talk about it.

Many times our business lives become too complex with a constant barrage of new opportunities and risks, from social media to finance and leverage, such that we lose sight of simple common sense actions that we need to take or focus on.

The aim of Rags to Wreckages is not to lay out new management theories or grand business ideas. We’ve had enough of those already in the past twenty years. Instead, its aim is to reignite our understanding and perception of ourselves our business and investments more clearly and most importantly to do this with our hearts as well as our minds.

For if we see with our hearts, then we perceive and we can act.

This is why I have write these business and investment stories and experiences in parables and then to explain the meaning and implications those stories.

My desire is simple. That the parables will lodge themselves somewhere in your heart and so give you a framework for dealing with the decisions you need to make now and will need to make in the future.

I hope that you avoid the mistakes that I have made without having to repeat those mistakes yourself. If this book can succeed in that goal, then it would have achieved all that I had hoped for.

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You can download and read the first chapter by subscribing in the right hand bar. I’ll be added more parables and stories as time goes and will send those out to anyone subscribed…   >>>>

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Asked the question, “what advice would you give a young graduate entrepreneur looking to start out in business“, he shared three key and controversial principles from Rags to Wreckages;

• take no debt – find ways to build a business without debt (this is how the internet can help)
• employ no one - use contractors, freelance etc but don’t write employment contracts that accrue liabilities
• follow your passion – you will only be successful if you deliver excellence and for that you need to follow and stick to your passion

Testimonials from the evening which was sponsored by Best of Chester, include:

“This was certainly a thought-provoking event.  Mr Lewis was an excellent speaker, imparting valuable advice based on his first-hand experiences”

Chris Pyke, Head of Chester Business School

“very thought-provoking and useful for me as a business owner”

Simon Yates, Yates & Co Financial Planners

“It was fascintating to hear some of Neil’s Rags to Wreckages views, particularly regarding keeping debt low, contracting workforce and the evolution and learning process. All common sense things, but attributes that are rarely considered, probably because they are so obvious.”

Darren Mercer, Mercer & Associates Wealth Management Ltd

• Why Many Great Sounding Businesses Ideas Don’t Make Money – and – The Rock that Wouldn’t Budge
• Why Brittle Businesses Break – and – How Glass was Cursed with Brittleness
• Goldilocks and the three Shareholders
• They Know What Needs to Be Done But They Don’t Do it – and – The Bug and the Light
• New Entrepreneurs Don’t Say No – and – How the Rhino got his Thick Hide
• Why Government Schemes are the Death of a Great Business – and – How the King was Fooled by his White Knight
  
• If You Could Hire the Best Person Tomorrow Why Would you Traditionally Employ Anyone Today – and – Why Fear Drives Man More Than Success