Working With New Clients

There are two kinds of new client. There are those who are new to me and there are those that have just been born. I'm concerned with the latter.

I get calls from people who have ideas for enterprises and they want to know if they should become a non-profit or take the for-profit route. I always meet with them to hear their ideas, the way they're expressed, and the hopes and dreams of the people involved.

If their goal is to enrich themselves, then the answer is obvious. But if they want to add something to the community, help people, maybe even save people, then the issue becomes one of credibility. Do they have the money and the time to get started on their own? Better, have they already got a start of some kind, i.e. do they have community interest? Is there an established need for what they're proposing? Or are they looking for a grant to get them started? Probably the latter, I've found so far. They want someone to hand them a pot of money so they can go realize their well-meant dreams.

The trouble with most of the organizations I've encountered to date, if you could call them organizations (are they organized?), is that the people involved have not established much credibility.

For instance, one group approached me to help with a project to educate Americans about how they could live longer if they had healthier life styles. They had an interesting approach: they would teach the message of nutrition and healthy living via cartoons, because they figured that most people would not read, but almost everyone will watch a cartoon. I listened and then I asked (when I could get a word in...they were very talkative) "do you have a business plan?" No. "do you have a timetable?" No. "do you have a budget?" No. and so on.

Then I asked them if they wanted to get paid for doing this, and they made it clear that they did.

There were three people sitting at this table, eating, drinking coffee and talking. Plus me. One was the leader and she did most of the talking. A Ph.D. psychologist. The second person was an older man who was also a Ph.D., but not in psychology. And the third person was a man who came out of technology and was going to manage the animation. They all three wanted to quit their jobs and work on this project. I advised them to start a for-profit organization because I didn't see any way they were going to find enough money to do what they wanted to do and come out owning the product and earning good salaries.

Unless they could find backers. Backers, I said, might give them money to get started but they would want to see results. They said they wanted about $20 million over the next couple of years. I told them that they were dreaming if they thought any non-profit would fund it. But maybe government would if they could connect it to a government program. With any luck, they could get an earmark.

I think I was more exhausted when I left than when I came in, and I was finishing a ten hour day.

Another man came to me with a way of generating electricity from water.

He had found an invention on the Internet that he had perfected in his garage and shown to his satisfaction that it could generate electricity from water. He wanted money to scale up. He asserted that he was a religious man and he did not want to make money from this technology, because money would change him. Instead he wanted to form a nonprofit that would build the technology and give it to underdeveloped areas that needed electricity.

I listened to him as he explained the physics and chemistry of the device. Then I asked him if he owned the patent on the technology. He showed me a print out from a W\website and this print out depicted the machine. "Here's the patent," he said.

I read the first page. The patent had been issued to a man in California. I asked if that man had given permission to use his patent. My religious friend said he hadn't talked to him, but since the inventor hadn't built the machine yet, he figured that the patent holder didn't want to use the patent. I told him that nonetheless, the inventor still owned the patent, even if he never used it, and he would own it for years to come (it was issued in 1999).

I told him he couldn't do anything with the technology until he got permission from the patent holder. He said he'd look into it and that ended our meeting. He did not seem happy with my advice. I suppose he wanted to be told to just start up a 501(c)(3) and go ahead with helping the world.

I've got other stories I could tell. But here's what it comes down to: people come to me looking for approval and advice. I can't give them approval. I'd help anyone with any project short of criminal activity or something that would hurt people. But when these potential clients haven't thought it through or when it's clear they are foremost interested in making money from the project (including high personal salaries), I tell them not to bother. I think some people want non-profit status so that they can elude taxes and get a lot of free money from grantmakers who have nothing better to do than give it away.

Not by a long shot.