Genius Network Presents: The Tale of the Handwritten Note with Steve Sims

This postcard has a handwritten note on it. If that note was from you being sent to someone you only dreamed of connecting with or meeting with, it could make the impossible possible, even if it's the Pope or Donald Trump. For decades, Steve Sims and his Bluefish team have made impossible meetings and events possible because of his amazing personal connections using one very simple yet overlooked tool. Steve's title is the Tale of the Handwritten Note. Please welcome the Englishman who looks more like a bar bouncer with his piercings, because he actually once was my good friend, Steve Sims. I love you, buddy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, shut up. There's no whiskey in the green room if you're wondering. All right, so a little while ago, Joe reaches out and he says, right, Sims, we want you to come and do this 10 minute talk of the Genius network. And I thought, great, you know, I commenced the entrepreneurial two step. And we all do it. We're entrepreneurs, we know this dance very well. Step one, you accept everything. Fantastic, brilliant, love it. I think I even said awesome, which British people don't do. Then you get step two, stark realization. You know, shit, fuck, crap, what am I going to talk about? So I thought about it and I sank a few whiskies and looked at what I did. And for the smart people out here that listened at the beginning, I write notes. It's what I do. Simple as that. I write notes. I love it. I think it's fantastic. It's well worth doing. And I'm going to be encouraging you to write little handwritten notes to your people. I'm about those. You work with, your vendors, your suppliers, your family, your kids. You write notes. Now you're going to wonder why. You're going to listen to me. Why should you pay attention? This is not what I do. This is what I do. Last year I got a client married in the Vatican and blessed by the Pope. I had a client that wanted an exclusive dinner in Florence. So we kicked everyone out of the Accademia, set up a table of six at the feet of Michelangelo's David. Now, it's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah. Was when we got Andrea Bocelli to come in and serenade him during the dinner time. I'm the guy that sends people down to the Titanic. I've arranged people to have lunch with the Trump family in New York and sadly, I put this guy up here and the fucker hasn't turned up. This is Dan Fitzpatrick, CNBC commentator, very serious, nice guy. Otherwise known to us and the fellow 25k as the shortest Term lead singer of the rock band Journey. That's the shit I do. That's what I get up to. Now, what I want you to do, first of all, is I want everyone to put their hand up in the air. Left or right, I don't care, it's your choice. But put your hand up in the air. Put your hand down. Only not yet. Only if you don't sell anything. A book, a course, anything. All right, Put your hand down. I don't know of. Yeah, loaded question, of course, but we needed to get a line in the sand. I don't know of any greater sign of respect and trust than someone putting their hand in their pocket and giving you their money. It's something you should never, ever take for granted. Someone writes me a check, someone gives me a credit card, I literally get goosebumps. That person is trusting me to do something. And they want something from you. They look at you as an asset, they look at you as a value. They're only giving you that money because you have something that they don't. Which is fine. You know, we all pay for things and that makes sense. But what I was thinking about when I was coming here was these people pay us because we have something they want. Have you paid attention to the room that you're in? You've been here two days now. Have you seen the icons, the myths, the legends that are in this room? Joe Polish, Dan Dean, there's heroes in this room that most people would get nowhere near and you're knocking into a mini urinals and stuff. You know, not physically. I don't know how you play, but you know, these people are here and you should pay respect to it. So this actually got me thinking and it came up with a big question. Who knows you're here? How many of you actually reached out to your people and, and told them you were at this event? Now look around you. Keep your hands up, please. Look around you. That I find a little bit sad. What have we got here? What's about 40%, 30% that you've told people? These people are giving you money because you've got a value. You were smart when you got here on Sunday. You're fuck smarter on Wednesday when you leave because of the people you've been hanging around with. You've increased your valuation purely by the simple people you stand next to. I try and stand next to Peter because he makes me smarter just by location. So I reached out to a bunch of people a while ago and I said, well, okay, you know, I want to get this whole hang of this thing. And this is the moment in time where I piss off all the techies. So I reached out and I said, well, how many subscribers do you have? How many followers do you have? And I spoke to some people in this room. I got answers from thousands to millions. The reach of this room is incredible. So I thought, alright, we'll play with an example. We'll go with 5,000 subscribers. You've got 5,000 people in your database now. I know a lot of people are like, more than that. Stick with me, you'll be alright. 5,000 subscribers. So I phoned up Constant Contact, mailchimp and a couple of others. I actually had fun doing this because I hadn't really researched it much myself. And I said to him, look, want to work an example? 5,000 subscribers, we send out an email blast. What's the accountability? How does it actually work? How many does it come through? And she said, well, the average is number one. Whoa, I don't want average. There's no one in this room average. We move as shakers. We're captains of industry. Fuck all average about us. I want to know what a really good rate is. So she went, okay, fair enough, 20%. She said, 20% open rate. I went, oh great. So 20 people read the email. She said, no, no, no. 20 people opened it. She said, maybe your email client opened it up. Maybe it was a autoresponder that could actually class as an open as well. I said, so how many people read it? She went, oh, you're talking about a click through rate. All right, okay, click through rate. What's a decent click through rate? She says, 7%. I said, all right, I just want to make sure I got the math right here because I'm getting a little bit confused. You're telling me that for every 5,000 subscribers I have, I can be pretty sure that 70 people are getting my message. And she said, yeah, that's right. That's a horrible number. That's a worse number. 4,930 people have no freaking idea what you're doing. Now they want to follow you, but if they're not hearing your message, what are they going to do? They're going to wander over and find someone else that does. So that's a very, very scary number. But would you open this? If you got a letter come to you, handwritten, got a stamp on there, would you open it? Because the simple fact you get thousands and thousands and thousands of emails, but your mail, now you're getting all this stuff, it's paperless, so you're paying all your phone bills and everything like that. Your mailbox is now telling you about the local Chinese, your best buy certificates. And every now and then you get this land in your letterbox. You. You'll open it. Is it an invite? Is it a party? Is something cool going on? When I travel, and I know there's a lot of people that travel, there's a lot of people here that fly around a lot. When I was in Florence in Italy last year for the Vatican thing, I actually nicked a bunch of cocktail menus. I just shoved them in and just sent a little bit on the side. Brevity is key here. A little note got sent out, and I send that out to 2,000 people. Now, I know a bunch of you out there going, you don't expect me to mail out to all of my people, do you? Yes, you won't. But I want you to. I want you to try doing it to five. I want you to then try doing it to 10. And I thought to myself, you're here, and you spent $10,000 to be here. And then you spent flights, and then you spent extra nights. Maybe you're kind of like a bit disturbed. Simple fact is, anywhere to 10, 20, $30,000 has cost you. Now, the simple fact is you don't care about the money. I know we all care about money, but the simple fact is the people that you're on the table with, the new relationship that you could make just in any one of these little networking bits or up at the bar, can make you 100,000. So $30,000 is not important to you because it's an investment in you. But for three days, you didn't put your kids to bed. Personally, I take that very seriously. I know when I leave my house, I look at her, I go, is this going to make my life better when I get back? I haven't had the chance to hug my wife for three days. I haven't been with my team. I've been here with you. I've sacrificed that because I think this is the value. So how do I tell people that I write them a note? I've already started doing it. I've written notes to my key staff saying, hey, thank you for allowing me the ability to. To be here. I've written a note to my wife. You know, I'll get home, I won't say anything. Five days time, she'll get a letter in the post. She'll be like, she'll open it up, there's A little note in there for me, just say, thanks for being you and allowing me to do this again. Doesn't have to be big, but I'm telling you, the impact is fantastic. Now we've got two days and we're nearing day two. So there's a lot of things going in your head. There's a lot of things you're going to want to action. There's a lot of things you're not going to action. Okay? So I decided to help you out. It took me three minutes to design this postcard. You can see it's brilliant. What I want you to do is there's people around here now and they're handing out these postcards. All I want you to do is try it. Send it to one of your key members of staff, send it to a loved one, send it to a vendor, just say, hey, I'm away for three days. Got some great ideas, I'll catch up with you. Trust me, when you send these out, you get these people contact you, they contact you first, going, I got your postcard, I got your stupid menu, I got your bar tab. I've sent people bar tabs before, saying, I had loads of drink, but I was thinking of you while I was doing it. Scribbled on the back bar tab in it. Have a bit of a giggle with it, but try be silly. Skymore. Fucking love SkyMall. Everyone needs a dolphin shaped post box. Rip that out, shove it in an envelope, send it to someone, they love it. Use humor, get your personality out. The point is, you're not connecting via email, so try this. And remember, if you don't, I know where you live. Thank. You.