50 Days of Help

In the next 50 days, I am going to go a bit bananas and go on a helping spree. My aim is to solve professional problems people have, by introducing them to someone I know that might help. My aim is to do this as much as I can in the 50 days.

See my previous article — ‘Just Ask’, which explains why I’m doing this.

Here’s how it works:

1. Don’t be shy — PLEASE DO ASK or I can’t be as helpful as I’d like to be…
2. It should be a professional problem you have that could be solved, or helped by one person in my network — so I should be able to help in <10 mins.
3. Email me at tom at wholi (if you can’t guess the rest, I’m not sure I can solve your problems!) with a simple, “Know anyone who XXX in order to solve YYY”.
4. Here’s me on LinkedIn if you want to see what I’m likely to be able to help with https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomsavage77/
5. I want to be able to determine who’s best to connect you to, so don’t ask for specific people
6. I will only intro you to someone if I think they want to hear from you!

Some examples:

– Know anyone who knows about ‘transparent salary’ schemes?

– Do you know a good business coach in London or Bristol, I want to learn X?

– Know any angel investors in London who are interested in AI, we’re looking to raise X?

– Do you know anyone who might be willing to sit on our board, specifically someone with X skill?

– Know a good product consultant to solve X?

I won’t help with things like, “I need a software engineer”, or “do you know anyone who wants to buy my product”. It should be something that one person in my network can help with.

…and some guidelines:

1. This isn’t about achieving a maximum score. I want to focus on quality, not quantity. I’m not going to stay up all night, take class A substances to keep me awake or skip holidays. I am going to try my best to be helpful within ‘normal working hours’, where I can.
2. Don’t ask me to connect you with specific people e.g. I see you know X, can you connect me.
3. I’m not going to sell stuff on your behalf, or persuade someone to join your company. Use your judgement.
4. If I don’t respond, I probably can’t help. I will do my best!
5. The aim of the experiment is to maximise the help I can give. If it ends up being shared, we get press, or people want to sign up to Wholi because they want to help more — so be it, but that’s not the aim. The reason why we want to expose this campaign is simply to maximise the help.

I’ll do my best to share the journey as well my findings/learnings and thoughts as I go.

Thanks for helping me help!

Originally published at blog.wholi.com on May 8, 2017.