It’s a busy week this week. As well as my coaching, I have an assessment report to write and all sorts of appointments. One of them seems to me to be pure luxury – for I’m just back from an extended lunch with Michael Crane.

I met Michael soon after I started my own business. Come to that, I met Michael soon after he started his, when I phoned to enquire about his company’s offering as stationery suppliers, early in 2003. I’ve watched Michael’s business grow in the time I’ve known him and I’ve appreciated the service I get from Michael’s team. Matthew, my regular contact, phones me every now and again to say hello and to ask if there’s anything I need. I don’t feel “sold to”. Rather, I feel looked after.

I’ve also watched Michael grow during this time. It’s one thing to buy a bit of stationery, sell it, and deliver it in your one and only van. It’s another thing to grow a business, to employ staff, to create approaches which can be replicated on a large scale… Many entrepreneurs fail to reach this stage. Michael comes to our lunch brimming with excitement and full of learning and of a desire – an eagerness – to learn.

Over a leisurely lunch we talk about the progress of our respective businesses, our plans for the future, the books we are enjoying right now (Michael has enjoyed Goleman’s The New Leaders. I mention my friend Rosie Miller’s book Are You A Badger or a Doormat? Seth Godin gets a look-in, too). And all this whilst our conversation circles round and then settles on a key topic – social networking and the law of attraction.

Michael has been studying the law of attraction via the DVD The Secret and is currently exploring what it means for his approach to building his business. Like me, he is actively starting to explore LinkedIn. We talk about our membership of various LinkedIn groups. Only recently, Michael put his Olympic Goal for his business on his LinkedIn profile – £10 million by 2012. He really is putting it out to the universe.

And I wonder, what is it that attracted Michael and I to go beyond the purely transactional? Surely, this is the law of attraction in action.