Steve Gordon — How To Automate Networking And Referrals

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float Shark with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf.

Joe. Hey, yo. Welcome back to another episode of the Hustle and Flow Chart podcast, brought to.

You by evergreenprofits.com nailed it.

Today we're talking with the Mr. Unstoppable CEO himself, Mr. Steve Gordon. We had the pleasure of meeting Steve at a local event, actually, Rise25. It was part of the whole trafficking, conversion thing. I can never say that perfectly. It doesn't roll off the tongue.

Okay.

TNC in San Diego a few months back, and I was on his podcast. It went really well. He has a cool audience and we're having the pleasure of having him here. And he breaks down. He's basically a guy that will. He looks at a business and he can. He can kind of basically figure out how to generate more leads, referrals, and really grow your networking efforts. You know, if you're out there talking with folks either on the phone, in person, online. Yeah.

He's a master at systematizing the process of growing your network. And we're going to dive in pretty deep on some of these networking strategies because it was something that we really sort of clung onto and loved the topic. So he's going to talk to us about systematizing, networking and. As well as systematizing other aspects of your business.

Yeah. So have fun with this one, and let's get started. Hey, Steve, thanks for hopping on the show with us. How you doing?

Hey, guys. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

All right, no problem. Well, it's. It was cool. I think we met in San Diego. I know we met in San Diego, but a couple months ago or so during traffic and conversion and. Yeah, with the Rise 25 guys, it's a cool group over there, but. Yeah, I mean, since then I was on your podcast. You have a really cool audience and podcast as well.

Yeah, thanks. It was. It was a lot of fun having you on. Great meeting you guys in San Diego. And traffic and conversion.

What a.

An amazing event. That was the first time I'd been to it. And, yeah, it's just a huge, huge event.

Right? Yeah, it's. It's definitely one. I think that's like the only summit really we go to per year now, and luckily in San Diego, but you have all walks of life there, but.

Just about everybody you could imagine in marketing and a great place to connect.

With people for sure. So let's get into what you do, which I think. And I would love to understand it a little further as well, you run unstoppableceo.net give us a little background of what that company is and also a little bit of your background and how you got there.

Yeah, absolutely. So at the Unstoppable CEO, we're really focused on working with service businesses and some of them are kind of old world. It's probably a bad way to describe it, but old world pre Internet industries that were around then that are now looking at how do they market themselves better online and use some of the new approaches to marketing. And we also work with service businesses now that are almost 100% online. And so our goal with them is, is to help them build systems to attract high end clients. And so that's what we do. It's a lot of fun. I love trying to solve that problem of how do you get somebody to spend an awful lot of money with your business? It's just a fun challenge. And so we've been doing that since 2010. And the way that I got there is really I was our client at an earlier stage of my career. My degree is in a little tiny, small discipline of engineering called geomatics. And I went to work for a company. I was the 10th employee at this company that I worked for out of college. And four years later I got asked to become the CEO of that firm. And I didn't know what the heck I was doing. Didn't know anything about marketing, didn't know anything about selling.

And we didn't have any processes for any of that back then. I mean, the company had just kind of grown through organic, you know, word of mouth and it was doing okay, but we were trying to grow up and.

So I had to become a student of all of that stuff. And through a lot of expensive education.

In the school of hard knocks, we slowly figured out how to grow that business. And so we took a lot of those lessons and we've added a lot to it since then in the work that we do with our clients.

Interesting. Yeah, no, I love that. What's a common thing for a company you're working with offline? Or maybe that one that just isn't Internet marketing savvy or Internet savvy. What's a common issue that they have to kind of go through a roadblock that you work them through?

Gosh, there are a number of them. The biggest one in most service businesses, they go through this kind of roller coaster existence. And even the ones that we see that are marketing online, unless they've gotten really, really good at online marketing, most of the time what happens is they need business, so they go market like crazy and they get some clients and then they get busy working on those clients and they forget to do the things that they need to do to keep that pipeline full. And so they get all those engagements done and all of a sudden it's like, oh, we don't have any new work coming in, we don't have any new revenue coming in. We're in trouble.

Yeah.

And they just live on this roller coaster of up and down and you know, and of course, often we'll talk to them when they're on the down cycle. And you know, you talk to business owners that are a little bit, you know, frustrated and freaked out because they felt like they had it all figured out and they went and got a bunch of work and then they just kind of took their eye off the ball up just for a second and. And now they're in this situation that they thought they had freed themselves of and you can just sense that frustration. That's the big thing, is just kind of taking their eye off the ball.

Yeah. And I know I could relate to that back in the day when I had a service agency in the video marketing space. And definitely, yeah, you get some projects and you think you're on the top of the moon, top of the world, and then you totally forgot to fulfill. Well, you don't forget to fulfill, but you just forget about the marketing aspect of it all. So like you said, it's like if you take your eye off of that thing, the thing goes down, you know, whatever you're not measuring or paying attention to.

Oh yeah. I mean, we experienced that even just outside of the service business, just as far as, you know, our business model, we've always sold info products and we've recently shifted towards more promoting, like affiliate type products. And whatever we seem to put our attention on is what gets all the, you know, is where the income comes from. But whatever we take our attention off of is where we see all the dips. So I mean, I feel like that's something that you can relate to pretty much any business that we've been involved in.

Sure. So what are some cool. Because something we're going through right now is, is really processing everything we do, even if it's a minute thing to like creating a graphic for this podcast.

By processing, you mean creating processes.

Yeah. Oh yeah, sorry. But like mapping every little granular detail of everything we do and then hiring the right folks to kind of fulfill that. If we're not going to do it, what are Some like, is that a common, is that something you work companies through? I know it's a little tough if they're looking for new leads, but how do you approach things like that in terms of, okay, get them new leads, but also let's, let's make this thing actually scale at the same time for the long run?

Well, you know, the two problems are related. So when, once you've solved the problem, the marketing and lead generation problem, now you've got a capacity problem and you've got to deal with that. And of course, you know, systems and people are the answer to the capacity problem in most cases. And so, yeah, we will help. I mean, oftentimes that'll just be advising the client of, here's how to approach this. And I'll tell you how we have kind of boiled this down.

You know, we try and anything that we know that we're going to do more than twice, I mean, if we're only going to do it twice and we're never going to do it again, we're probably not going to create a process for it. But if we're going to do it more than two times, then it's probably going to happen over and over and over again. And at that point we're going to break that down into a process.

And I've described before to, you know, to our client group when we'll put on summits where they come in a couple times a year and we work with all of them at once. And I've described what we do and they're always like shaking their heads because they think it's so much work. And what I think where most businesses break down with this whole process creation thing is the business owner thinks that they've got to create all the processes themselves. And I think that's actually a bad idea. So we actually have. And I created. The one process I created was the process for how to create processes, which is really meta.

Yeah.

You know, but it teaches everybody on the team, look, here's how we document things. And there's a kind of a, you know, three steps that we go through to build one of those out. And it's an iterative process.

So that I don't have to go around and do them and I shouldn't be doing them because half the time I don't know how to do the thing that they need to document.

Sure, sure. Well, that's actually good for us to hear because we're kind of in the motions of trying to document everything for our team. But then again, we have team members that can probably do that slightly better than us in some cases. Is there anything you can share? And I know that might be something you give to your clients, but any ways that we can kind of dig into that? So how to set up yourself for success when you want to process your stuff out?

Yeah. So for me, the big epiphany with this.

Was a couple of years ago, I'm in a program called the Strategic Coach. And one of the tools that they've got in that program is this thing called the Impact Filter, and it's this little one page sheet of paper, and it basically walks you through some questions. And I started using that as the way to get all the thinking out of my head and get clear on the result that I wanted from a particular process. Then I could hand that off. So just as an example, this week, one of the things that we do to help reactivate our existing for our clients, go out to their existing list and reactivate people, is we have them go interview them kind of like this in an audio interview and publish in a podcast. And then each of those guests that they interview or might be a prospect that they haven't been able to reach or a past client or something, we send them a promotional package to that guest. Hey, here's how you take this interview and you go promote it. Well, I could have created that myself, but instead I sat down with this thing called the Impact Filter, and it asks you, okay.

What'S the ideal outcome here? What's the end result? What's the best thing that'll happen if you do this really, really well? What's the worst thing that'll happen if you don't do this at all? And then list out what are the five or six or seven things that have to be true for this to be a success when it's done? And so I sat down and in 10 to 15 minutes, I was able to just write out what my thinking was on that and get clear. Because instead of trying to just get on the phone with a team member and tell them how to do this, I actually had to commit it to paper, which refined all the thinking just a little bit more. And then I was able to give that to a team member, said, you know, sent it to him, said, hey, look at this, and let's get on the phone for 15 minutes later today and ask me any question you want to ask me about this. Let's get clear. You know, so. So that we both are kind of holding hands here. We know what, you know, we're in agreement that we've communicated well. And then, and then she was able to go off and create that. So it took, if you think about that, here's something that we're going to do over and over and over again for our clients. It's going to deliver a ton of value for them. And it took me getting really clear with my thinking for 15 minutes. And it took, you know, we set a 15 minute call. It actually took us only about five minutes on the phone because she got it right away because I was so clear in the thinking up front.

That's smart.

I love that because we actually just hired an operations manager and I think that's probably going to be the first thing we do is let her sort of pick our brain on everything that happens in the business and then get her to go create systems out of those. And I mean, I think that's a really smart way to go about it.

Exactly. Yeah. No, I dig it. Well, cool. Let's shift gears. And I want to kind of learn about. I know you have some books out there and they kind of interest me. So you Talk about the 10 times you have this kind of for referrals, for networking and you kind of have this process, it seems like, of how to do that all effectively. You want to talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, be happy to.

Let's do that.

You know, with so much emphasis in kind of the marketing world these days on all the ways to get a customer online.

Sometimes I feel like we've forgotten that the biggest asset in your business are the relationships that you have. And particularly in a business where you're selling something that's expensive, you know, if you're selling, you know, a relatively inexpensive thing that's more transactional, maybe not as big of a deal. Well, we could argue that. I actually think that the higher level business relationships that you have that can, that can get you sort of to that next level deal are pretty important and you need to pay attention to them. And this will apply to apply.

But I think also that we've forgotten this whole idea of how to use referrals. And most people will complain that they don't get referrals or if they do, it's unpredictable, it's unscalable. And the truth of the matter is that if you approach referrals the right way, they, they can scale up at least to a degree, very much like you might scale up advertising. And.

You can create a predictability around them very much like you would with paid media. But you got to Approach it the right way. And you've got to take all of the risk out of it for the client or the referral partner that you want to introduce you. Because right the way we, we typically approach this, there's tons of risk for them.

Sure.

You're asking them to, you know, pull you into a relationship that they have that probably has a value on it for them. And you're asking them to maybe introduce you to someone and set up a meeting. Well, everybody knows that's a sales meeting. Like, there's no way we're hiding that. We can call it whatever we want, but everybody knows that the reason that someone is making that referral is, is ultimately so that business can transact. And that just creates this huge amount of pressure on it as a first step to a new relationship. And so really what we have done is we've taken some online marketing approaches, some direct response marketing approaches, and brought them into the referral world. And so if you've ever used the lead magnet, if you've ever done two step direct response lead generation, then that's really what we do with referrals. So we create something called a referral kit with our clients and then they use that information piece to go out to the clients that they have or the people in their network that might be able to refer them and have what we call the value conversation. And the value conversation is really just going out to somebody and saying, hey, Joe, I'm really passionate about solving this particular problem that we solve, getting leads for these service businesses and I know the problems that they run into and I'm on an absolute mission to help them solve these problems. And I, I know we can't work with everybody in the world, but I've put together my knowledge in this book or in this webinar or in this special report, and I would love to sit down with you and let's brainstorm together everyone that you know who would benefit from getting this, and let's send it to them as a gift from you.

Love it. That's cool.

And so by doing that, you've taken all the risk out of it for them. You're allowing them to give a gift to people in their network which is going to create increased social capital for, for that client of yours that you're asking for the referral instead of putting them at risk. I mean, think about it. The last time somebody sent you a book as a gift, even if you thought, I'm never going to read this, it's not even anything I would like, were you offended? No. You wrote them a thank you note.

Yeah. I could speak firsthand about that.

That was really cool. I know you did that. You know, I was on your podcast a few weeks back, back, and lo and behold, I was out of town. And a couple days later I saw there was a book sitting on my front step. And that was super cool. So thank you in the digital airwaves to you for that because it's something that I don't think I've ever received that for one. I know the rise 25 guys. Matt, they sent you a really cool gift after the event. What were they? Moana cookies.

They invited me to a mastermind in San Diego before the traffic and Conversion summit, and I wasn't able to go because it was my daughter's birthday and they asked about the birthday party and we were having a Moana themed birthday party and a few days after, I told them that I received a giant batch of Moana shaped cookies in the mail from the Rise 25 guys.

That's awesome.

Super cool. But it's that lateral thinking like, like you just said there. It's. It takes, it takes the, I guess, whatever blockage or a wall that might have been in between there and now. You just made a friend. You just open up, up that pathway.

Absolutely. And we've seen it with our clients who maybe weren't getting referrals consistently or any leads consistently. We've seen them be able to go out and generate 40, 50, 60 leads in a month, which for a service business, when you're selling something at a high ticket, maybe an average sale is 7 to $100,000, you don't need million leads.

Right.

You just need a handful of the right ones. And so it can make a dramatic difference for that kind of business. And what we tell most of our clients is, look, the great thing about starting there, that might not be where you end up with your marketing, but if you haven't done a lot of marketing and if you don't have a message really dialed in, start here. Because there's not a whole lot of risk. It's not like you're going to Facebook and putting money in the machine to figure out that your message is wrong, where you're targeting is wrong. That's when you're doing it. With referrals, there's no cost. And it's, it's pretty forgiving. So you can experiment with message and delivery and all of that. And then oftentimes what we'll see is our clients will then take everything that they've now proven and then step it up into paid media.

No, it's so smart, because I think we're all in. This is something I know Matt and I have neglected. Not neglected, but we haven't really seen as the most valuable part of our business. But it's our network. It's the people around us over the last almost 12 years that we've grown to know really well. Even the ones that just popping on our podcast, we don't have a prior relationship with. This podcast is kind of that way to break down some of the barriers?

Oh, yeah. Essentially, this podcast was our way of systematizing networking. Right. Every time we get a guest on this show, whenever the episode goes live, we send out an email. Hey, your episode's live. Oh, by the way, is there anybody that you know that would be a great fit for this show? And so this was our process of systematizing, networking, and growing that network. I think our struggle has always been, all right, once we make these connections, once we've met these people, once we sort of know what their core competencies are, what do we do with this information? How do we best leverage this network? How do we stay on top of the network? How do we, you know, make sure that they're feeling the love? You know what I mean? And that's always been our biggest struggle, is we're good at growing the network. We're not the greatest at making sure we stay on top of following up with that network and making sure we're constantly feeling connected with that network. So I was wondering if maybe you could speak into that for a minute with some of maybe your systems or processes or ways that you handle that stuff.

Yeah, and I would love to. And I want to take this whole idea of referrals and. And for those who aren't in a service business.

Make it maybe a little more relevant. So everything that we just kind of talked about there can be replicated if you're in an Internet marketing kind of business. And if you look at a JV webinar, that's a perfect example of you or your business getting referred massively.

And that's where this next piece comes in, the networking. Right. So how do you get connected with people who can do that?

And that's actually really the topic of my latest book, which is called the Exponential Network Strategy. And just exactly what you described, using the podcast as a tool to grow your network. I gotta tell you, we've had our podcast for about, I guess, almost a year and a half now. I have never Found anything to work as well as the podcast for growing a network that actually produces results.

In terms of time leverage. The amount of effort you put in, which is relatively small, I mean, compared to what I. I think back to my first business where, you know, it was a pretty traditional service business. You know, we had offices in three different locations in Florida. I would have to go to each of those cities and get out and go to the chamber of commerce meeting and go to the after hour mixers and all this stuff. And it took so much ridiculous time. And now I can connect with you guys and you have a really big audience that I'm sure some of those people will ultimately come back to us passively. You don't have to do anything more than have this interview with me and share it with your audience. And I can go out with every one of our guests that we have, and when I interview them, they're going to immediately share that interview. It's in their interest to share the interview because just like you guys are doing here with me, when somebody comes on our podcast, I want to make them the star of the show. And so they're absolutely going to share that with people. Well, we get referrals from that fact. Just before we got on this call today was actually on a sales call with someone who had come because they had heard our podcast because it was shared by a guest.

I love it.

Where else does that happen? Right? And all for a very small amount of effort. And so. And it can just multiply itself because just like you guys are talking about, you send that email out after the episode goes live. Every one of your guests now is referring you to people in their network. And it just, it never ends. It's one of the reasons we named the book the way we did. It's exponential.

Yeah. And the cool thing with podcasts is what we've kind of found out, because we've done this for years as well, is podcasts almost. And we'll get back to how you follow up, because I know Matt's, Matt wants to get that. But podcasts, it's more of like a word of mouth thing. Like, you don't see a lot of people really share them online. I mean, they will. But really what we found, it's a word to mouth thing. It's like it's telling your friends, your colleagues or whoever, you got to check out this episode. You know, Steve was on this podcast or whatever topic was being discussed. And that's almost where the power lies with podcasting. Even though it's Kind of hard to track sometimes. That's what we've, we've found from our experience at least.

Yeah, I mean, just speaking into the podcasting thing for just another minute is, you know, when, when Joe and I go out to events, when we're at places like Traffic Conversion, when we go to local networking events and meetups and stuff, you know, Joe and I have run service business agencies, info product businesses. We've, you know, we've done a lot over the years and the thing that everybody always seems to say to us is, oh, I know you guys from your podcast. And that, that seems to be the thing that gets spread the most and talked about the most and that people seem to know us for the most is that podcast. Despite, you know, all of our other achievements and stuff we put out in the world prior to the podcast, the podcast is always that thing that we're noted for, which is, you know, it's just so interesting because we don't really get that with anything else, not with our blog or our courses or anything else.

So going back to what Matt was saying, though, our questioning, and I'm curious as well, how do you. So with the podcast, let's just use that as an example with all the guests. I know you sent out a book to me, so you have a follow up mechanism there.

What are some ways to keep in touch with your network? Maybe it's on a, you know, for specific time intervals, software tools, follow up systems.

You know.

Very few people have this, this whole follow up thing completely wired. And we, we certainly have a lot of areas we can improve on. But what we do for anybody that is a guest on our podcast, we'll, we'll usually send them a book or, or some food or something. And we change it from time to time. And if there's something in particular that I know that the person would be interested in, then I'll send that.

And so we just try and make it a really good experience.

These two things go together like pulling somebody onto a podcast, particularly if you're not in the marketing space.

You know, so we've got a client that ensures merger and acquisition deals in Silicon Valley. And so we've just launched a podcast for him where he's going around interviewing M and A experts, you know, private equity guys and all this stuff. Well, they're not on podcasts all the time. So when they get asked to be interviewed, it's this really unique experience for them and it's a lot of fun for them and it creates a really strong bond in relationship. So the first thing is you've opened the relationship with something really unique. Well, and then, you know, we like to follow up with a gift after that. Just thinking for, you know, that that person's time because they've invested some valuable time with us, but then ongoing from there.

I always like to look for ways that periodically I can promote the people, people that are in our network that I feel like I've got a good connection with, you know, and that's not everybody, but, you know, so right now, one of the things we're doing, you know, actually today, along with our podcast, we. We're doing a guest. Not. Not really a guest post, but kind of a roundup post, excuse me, on our. On our website. And so I've got. I reached out to lots of people who've been on our podcast in the past, lots of people that I want to connect with in the future. Just other people on my network saying, hey, what are the top three podcasts that you've listened to that you liked? We're putting together this big, long list of, you know, what the top, you know, 50 or 100 experts in online marketing think of, you know, think the best podcasts are right now. And really what that is, that that's a promotional opportunity for that person. And so I'm. I'm able to come back around and touch them in a way and say, hey, you're important to me and I want to include you in this thing that's going to put you in front of my audience again. And, you know, and we're going to link to your website and all that stuff. And it's. And it's a really small ask of them. You know, all they've got to do is just shoot me an email and give me three names of podcasts. So I'm not imposing on their time very much. But it's a way I can say, hey, I care about your business and I want to try and send people to.

I love it. And it's an interesting other benefit if you're naming other podcasts that by way of the person, you know, now you might get introduced to that person, or they might see that you're sharing their podcast on your platform and it's this interesting, you know, circle of ways that you can potentially get introduced to more folks and expand your own reach that way.

Well, I mean, if we really want to kind of pull back the curtain, I mean, as soon as that post goes live, every podcast that mentions, that's mentioned on there, we're going to Send an email to the host saying, hey, you were just recognized by the top, you know, 50 or 100. However we finally end up getting. Yeah, Marketing Experts is one of the top podcasts. Check it out.

I love it.

Yeah, we do something similar every year. We only do it once a year. We should probably do it a lot more often. But at the end of the year, I always look back and go, okay, these were the top 10 episodes from the year by number of downloads. And then every single person that's in that top 10, of course, is sharing it on all the social media channels. A couple of them might even email their list about it. And you know, it's, it's, you know, I've always called it ego baiting. It's not quite the best word for it, but, you know, when people are being talked about on other people's websites, they're going to go out there and boost their ego a little bit by sharing it around and telling people that, hey, this website's talking about me.

Hey, I, you know, you could call it ego bait all you want, but there was a point a couple of years ago, I had been interviewed right after my first book came out on a buddy's podcast and I, you know, every time I would talk to him every, every few months or so, yeah, yours is still the number one download. Like, really? Okay, cool, I'll tweet about it again, I'll send it back out.

He probably goes around and tells that to every person who's been on the podcast. Just so everybody's doing that.

Now that I think about it, I.

Should start doing pretty smart. I love it. I mean, this is, and these are the types of things, I mean, people are more likely to not look so I guess douchey really, if they're just, you know, pumping their own chest, but they're sharing something that someone else said about them and it's. And obviously people listen to that. I feel like a little bit more, they resonate with it more. Higher credibility boost. So.

Absolutely. And so, you know, to come back around to this idea of follow up, I mean, the other thing, things that I've found over the years just been really effective are sharing books with business owners in particular.

And just because it's such a valued thing and particularly among entrepreneurs, if you find a really good business book, especially if it's kind of an off the wall book that maybe not everybody has read, although it's harder and harder to do these days.

People appreciate and remember that stuff and they don't tend to throw them away.

In fact, in my office, looking behind me, I mean, I have a whole bookshelf full of books that I couldn't possibly get rid of. And many of those are gifts that people have given me.

And I remember who gave them to me. So those things can be really valuable. And they hang around a long time.

Absolutely. Now, do you ask for people's addresses before they get on your podcast or how do you follow up with. With them so that it's still kind of a bit of a surprise that something's popping up in the mail to them?

Yeah, we ask them in the booking process. So when they go and book the interview appointment, there's a form that they fill out.

Where they put that stuff in.

Cool. Yeah, that's something we should probably start adding into the mix too.

Yeah. And I was just thinking, I mean, I'm relating it to. Exactly. I'm proof that literally I did not expect a gift from you. I've been on a lot of podcasts, never received a gift, and I know we're a little bad at doing that as well. So I don't know, that might change pretty soon here, but I didn't even think that you had my address. And it was the newer Leonardo da Vinci book written by Walter Isaacson.

Isaacson.

And that book, I mean, if you look at it, it's huge. It's got its full color pages. Beautiful. And that's definitely something very unique.

It's a great book too.

Yeah.

I don't know how far you've gotten into it. I kind of starting. I've read at this stage most of it, but I go and kind of pick parts and I haven't done the COVID to cover thing.

I'm still working on the Steve Jobs book.

Oh my God. I know. About the same size.

Well, so the trick to making this stuff work with follow up, and I learned this in my first business, is that.

As much as we want to personally handle all of that, as the business owner.

If you think that you're going to do that, it's never going to work because you've got too much on your plate, most likely already. And so coming back around to where we started this conversation around like, like systems and processes, your job as the business owner is to figure out how to build the system to create that experience, both for your customers and for the people in your network. Like in this case, with the book that you got. So I would love to say that I sat and I went and I personally ordered that on Amazon for you. But no, I'VE identified the book that I thought would be really interesting to you. And my assistant and I have created a process around, you know, at the end of an episode, we, you know, there's a decision. She asks me, okay, what are we sending, you know, to Joe in this case? And, and so that, that can go out and we can create a good experience without it relying on my own flawed behaviors.

Right. And we all have them. Yeah, I know. Yeah, we, Matt and I, I think we've been guilty of that for far too long and, and luckily now it's in. I, I don't know exactly what the reason was, but there wasn't really a specific time. But it's like we're sick of it. We're sick of stuff kind of sneaking through the cracks. You have all these great ambitions kind of speaking for us. But I know a lot of the folks listening have the same exact thing is there's more. And you could just like you said, you can hire a va, very part time, inexpensive VA with a simple system and to kind of help you with that follow up. Just the little things that, that can exponentially grow your network and, and kind of scale that way.

Yeah. And I can guarantee. So you mentioned the rise 25. You know, John and Jeremy followed up with those cookies that were perfectly, you know, in alignment with what you had mentioned to them about, about, you know, your child's birthday party. And I'm pretty sure that neither John nor Jeremy ordered those. I could be wrong. I mean, I know them fairly well. My guess is that, you know, I know they have team members who are really good at this. And they probably said, hey, wouldn't it be great if we found something that was around this theme and sent it and, and then they, so they built that system to deliver that experience. And that's the key takeaway, I think, for folks.

I love it. Well, cool. And in terms of networking, so I know. You do. Yeah. So it's, I mean it's all one in the same. I feel like, is there anything like, if you're face to face with folks, do you have any networking kind of strategies or ways like say if you don't know anybody.

I'm just curious, are you asking for best pickup lines?

Kind of. But no, I mean, nothing sneaky, nothing like that, but just to use your time the best. If you go to say, even just a little mixer, it could be a local meetup.

Yeah, I used to do this a lot in my first business and, and actually I did it a lot when I started our Current business and kind of got it off the ground with clients here locally. And yeah, I'd be out at a networking event, either breakfast, lunch or dinner almost every day of the week if I could find one. And the way that I always approached those was first to have an idea of what I wanted to accomplish. And usually it was a quota of, okay, I got to get, you know, two or three or four really, you know, solid contacts that I can go and have a follow up meeting with. And they weren't always prospects. Might have been somebody that I thought where we had, you know, complimentary service and they were marketing to the same people, somebody I wanted a relationship with and.

I'd go to those things. And the way that I always found that worked best is I, I didn't really, I take business cards, but I'd never hand them out unless somebody asked me. And I'd just go around and, and ask people questions and, and often the best way to do that was to look for the people who were kind of stuck at the edges of the room, who weren't talking to anybody else and just go up to them because they're looking for somebody to save them at that event.

That's true. Yeah.

And, and start a conversation and ask, you know, hey, you know what, tell me about yourself. What are you working on? What, what's your business? How long have you been doing that? How do you like it? What's the most interesting thing about it? Kind of, you know. Yeah, good old fashioned conversation. And that was always a test for me. So if, if I ask questions and ask questions and ask questions and they just kept telling me about themselves and it, they never sort of stopped and said, well wait, wait, I want to know a little bit about you. Then I knew that this was not a person that I was likely to be able to develop a referral relationship with, which is what I was really looking for. But if they flipped it around at some point and were interested in me and my business and ask me questions, then I'd gladly share that information. And that was my test for whether or not I was going to follow up with them after that.

I love it. And that's a, that's a great simple, I guess, strategy. Yeah. You could use is to, is to just, I mean, it doesn't take that much time. It's just simple questions. Okay, are they opening up? Are they opening up? Are they reciprocating? No. Okay, let's break this off and try something new fairly quickly.

Yeah. And. Well, and the other key thing is have A have a quota in mind, have a number that you're looking for because you can go to these events.

You know, and just be the one that's hanging around until the end. And pretty soon, if you do enough of that, it gets tiring.

Oh yeah.

And so if, you know, like, this is my goal and when I accomplish this, I'm done here, you get really, really focused on what you're trying to, you know, walk out of there with.

I feel like you have a good little pressure on you too. It's almost like a deadline you're setting on yourself to just hit my goal and then I'm done, I'm out of here.

Now would your goal be like 20 talk to 15 people before I leave or is a goal like I want, you know, two new potential client leads? What, what, what are, what's a typical goal that you're shooting for at those types of events?

Most of the time when I would attend, I was looking for people I could develop a referral relationship with. If I ran into a prospect, great.

You know, but.

I never wanted to be that person that was just buttonhole and people with a business card. So.

You know, because that's typically a turn off. So I would, I'd be looking for these referral relationships and usually it would be, you know, X number of people that I thought, okay, if I just on, on this short two to five minute interaction. I believe there's enough here that A, they're, they're marketing to the right people, B, they've got the right attitude. They're, they know that they want to get something out of this, but they're also interested to figure out what I need to get out of it to make this work. So it's worth scheduling a coffee or a lunch or whatever to follow up. And I'd look for two or three or four, five of those, however many I felt like I needed to hit. And when I felt like I had that many people that I was going to schedule a meeting with, and I'd schedule it right then and there.

And once that was done, I was out. But I got to tell you, that was a grind.

Oh yeah.

You know, and it's good to have a system to do it if you're going to do it. But it was a grind and, you know, I went cold turkey on that and, and started really focusing on, you know, doing some of these other approaches which I've written about in our books and, and really haven't looked back since.

Love it. Now, do you, do you. When you do go to things. Do you, do you even bring business cards or are business cards kind of dead?

You know, it's funny, traffic and conversion. When we met out there, that was one of the first times I'd been out doing that sort of thing in a couple of years and.

Live and in person. And I was scrambling around the day before trying to find my business cards because I knew he had a whole bunch of them printed up. I couldn't figure out where they were. So, yeah, I took business cards and thankfully they weren't too outdated.

They worked. I mean, I got one from you. I think I literally got your last one. One, I mean, I think very, very well may have. Yeah, yeah. So, hey, living proof. It does work.

Yeah.

Our approach lately has been we don't bring business cards, but if we really connect with somebody, then we, you know, swap text messages or something because we, we tend to find that we actually follow up with people once we get their, you know, their phone number in our phone, where if we just get a business card, a lot of times they'll go kind of in a stack somewhere, Right?

Yes. Everybody's got that stack in the back of their office.

You know, we're trying to get a little better with systems. And I don't know if you've tried this tool Contactually. I know the rise 25 guys do it. I know John specifically uses it. And it's just a tool for helping us with exactly what we're talking about. You can kind of tag folks. You can, once you get that business card, enter them in, maybe have a period of time 30 days from now, do a follow up, something like that. It's more of that system of CRM that you can use to kind of just unload your brain so you don't have to think about it.

Yeah. And I've recommended Contactually for a number of years.

Good.

It's a great tool and they've added a lot to it. It's become pretty powerful with some kind of entry level automation that you can put to it. And so, yeah, super, super way to keep all that organized.

Good, good. Because we tried a bunch of tools and we're like, nothing, nothing works. And then Contactually came around like, oh, okay, this is it.

Well, the nice thing with our podcast, what we do with Contactually is I.

Create.

A custom form inside of each Contactually contact record where when somebody's on our podcast, I actually plug their podcast URL into Contactually and then anytime I email them in the future, it automatically appends the podcast episode that we did together in future emails for with them.

That's awesome.

Always in there. Cool. So any other. Are there any kind of tools or processes you think we're leaving out that you'd love to share here regarding referrals, networking or just, just kind of business growth in general that you focus on?

Oh my gosh. I know there's a lot, I'm sure there are a lot of them, but we've, we've covered a lot.

Yeah, we did.

And I mean, I think the big thing is, you know, and I tell this to our team, I tell this to our clients, is that, you know, the most important thing is to be intentional and, and, and just take that pause and whatever you're trying to do, you know, whatever process, because everything really is a process, whatever that process is, be intentional about it and you're going to get a lot better results if, if you just kind of approach it, like kind of. I'm going to let whatever happens happen. Well, well, there's still a process in place there, but you don't have a whole lot of influence over it. And sometimes that leads to results that we don't like.

Love it. Love it. Now, so you've got a few books out there. Would you mind just kind of listing off the names of your books? So if anybody's listening and they want to go pick them up, we'll link to them in our show notes as well. But if you want to go ahead and drop those titles for us real quick.

Yeah, absolutely. The first book is Unstoppable Referrals and it's available on Amazon and Kindle and paperback and all of that and you can find it there. And if you're in a business where you really do need to generate referrals and you're selling high ticket and particularly selling high ticket service, although it does work for products. We actually worked with a company that sells elevators for homes for high end homes. And they've used the process successfully, but that's really who that book is for. And so that's probably the first great resource. And then our newest book, which was out in the end of January, is the Exponential Network Strategy. And that's really our approach to using interviews like this to really rapidly grow your network. You will also create referral business through it, but you'll really rapidly grow your network. And then we talk in there about how to use those relationships and turn them into sales opportunities that are really beneficial both for the person you're networking with and obviously beneficial for you. And so we Close the loop so that you're actually getting business out of it as well. And you can get that if you want the paperback, it's available on Amazon. If you would rather have the ebook, then the only place to get that is on our website and you can get it for free. That's at theunstoppableceo.net hustle and you can get it there. Again, it's free. And. And when you get the ebook.

We actually have a whole series of videos. Actually had one of our most successful clients come in and he interviewed me chapter by chapter. There's a video for each chapter explaining it all, so.

You can get that at that URL as well.

Cool. Love it.

Now, do you have any, any books that, that that have had a real big impact on your business or your life that, that you could recommend to others? Obviously, we're going to link up the. Your books and the, the link that you just shared in the show notes as well. But I'm curious if there's any books that you find yourself recommending to others. Quite a bit. You know, it could be on the topics we talked about or just something completely different.

Yeah. So, I mean, first to the Bible and Think and grow rich. And I don't care if you're, you know, religious or what religion you are, there is a tremendous amount of business and life wisdom in the Bible and it happens to align with the things that I believe.

Think and Grow Rich. If you haven't read it, and I'm shocked by the number of business owners that haven't read it. I read it annually because there is so much in there.

That will help you get the right mindset for what you want to do. So those would be the two biggies. If you're into systems and want to really figure that out, don't rack your brain about it. Go get a book called Work the System by Sam Carpenter. And I actually just interviewed his partner, Josh Fonger for our podcast, which will go live in a month or so. But they've got this whole thing wired for how to build systems. So don't reinvent the wheel there. Go, go figure out what, what they've got in that book. It'll help you.

I love it. Yeah. Now, Work the System. I read that years ago before. I think I was mentally ready for it.

Yeah.

But now's the time to probably go through it because I know Matt both and I own that one. But that is, I'm looking at. On your bookshelf, Matt. It's up there. I was going to say something, but definitely with your book@the unstoppableceo.net hustle, I believe it was. I'm definitely going to go through that as well. I'm very curious of what those videos and in the ebook is, so check that out. That'll be in the show notes. We'll also link these books as well. And I think other than that, any other URL you'd like us to send people to? I know Unstoppable CEO.net's the main site of yours.

Yeah, I think that's the best place to go. And then, of course, if they want to get the book, they can go and get that. And. And it's a great place to start. And, you know, if you're trying to grow a business and grow your relationships, this will show you a really easy blueprint for doing it.

Awesome. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Steve. And go check out Steve's podcast, too. It's. I know it's on the tab on the top. He has some pretty cool guests in there and definitely talking about a whole range of cool topics.

Some. Some guy named Joe.

Yeah, some schlub.

He's got a lot of really great guests in one. Okay, one.

All right, Steve. Well, have a good one. Thanks for being on the show.

Hey, guys, thanks a lot. This has been fun.

Alrighty. All right. Thank you. And I hope you just enjoyed this episode you just listened to. Now, right now, before we sign off, I have a few things I would love for you to do. So the very first thing is to go find our guest on Facebook and tell them that you loved their episode with us. That's going to help them just feel good about themselves, but also it's gonna spread the word a little bit more for us. Go find them on Facebook. Everybody's on Facebook. And go say that you love their episode and maybe one cool thing that you learn there. The second thing is to go to itunes and subscribe to our podcast. Just look up Hustle and Flowchart and hit the subscribe button. And the very last thing, the third thing, is to leave us a review on itunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast podcast and help us spread the word more. That's how more people are going to get this awesome knowledge, this, this cool podcast training and a whole bunch of other cool, free training that we give out@evergreen profits.com so that's about it. Go find them on Facebook, go subscribe on itunes and leave us a review. You would be amazing if you did that. But you're always amazing. So thanks for listening, and we'll catch you in the next episode.

You're awesome.