The best networking hack for introverts

A lot of young people early in their career struggle to network. And by that I mean make good connections with like other people in their industry. They want to know folks, they want to get connected to the deal flow, and they want to use that as a way to potentially be more valuable to their employers. So there was a question that came up just to this level on Twitter. I ended up spending 15 minutes writing a reply to this young person that wanted to know this technique that I put forward. And so I'm gonna talk about that in this video. So my name's Michael. I make videos for people that own one or more businesses or aspire to own one or more businesses. And I do it all from this beautiful drainage ditch near my house because if I do it here, my neighbors can't see me recording and I don't feel self-conscious. So if you wanna learn more about the types of topics that apply to these types of people, or you're one of them yourself, give me a follow and subscribe to my newsletter here. I send a weekly newsletter out and, It's pretty darn good, even though I'm biased. So what I told this young person to do was a technique that I've seen done a lot, which is you go find a gap in your local community around your type of profession, and you go build an organization around it. And there's actually ways to do it these days, especially with the internet, that make it super easy. And maybe you even get paid to put together an organization like this. So I'll walk through and tell you how to do this because it's super powerful, right? If you are the guy that starts the, say, young professional, real estate folks of your town, uh, suddenly you'll be somebody that everybody knows, and they also know that you're somebody that does stuff. This technique also works for all kinds of professions. The person that actually asked me the question was a guy who was a local web developer in his particular town. He's like, well, how would I network with other people in the web development industry, um, and how would I get out there and kind of get in front of people? But this would also work for folks that are working in all kinds of jobs. Sales, commercial real estate, residential real estate. Like, you can go start an organization on your own. It doesn't take that much time and it'll create a network for you and put you in front of just tons of people in a way that they all get to see you're kind of a badass. Step 1 is you go see, is there like a Young Professionals, let's say, for real estate of wherever you live? I live in San Antonio. I don't even know if there's an organization like this, Young Professionals in Real Estate in San Antonio. If there's not one, well, you just go set one up. You're going to go create this organization and it's going to give you an entree to go basically reach out to everybody in your industry and get to know them potentially. So if there isn't an organization like this, you go set up a LinkedIn group, very straightforward. Everybody in real estate is on LinkedIn and you call it Young Real Estate Professionals of your town, Bumpkinville. Let's say it's your town's Bumpkinville, 'cause I just love saying Bumpkinville, it sounds awesome. Then the second step is you go find a local venue and a great candidate is something like a local bar, right? A local bar on a Tuesday at 5 o'clock, that's a nice bar. I don't care how nice that bar is, they are dying for customers. They would love for you to bring in 50 young professionals who are going to buy drinks and shop at their bar on a Tuesday night. So you call them and say, hey, I'd love to host an happy hour for this young professionals of Pumpkinville and we're going to do it. Would you like to host us? Ideally, they would maybe even throw in some perks for you because you're going to bring them a lot of business that they wouldn't otherwise get by inviting all these people to the bar on a Tuesday. Maybe they give you a room that you use. Maybe they throw in some food. Maybe you get some free drinks on your own. Maybe you get to use their AV system, which would help because you're going to talk in front of everybody when you have the meeting. It's good for you. Trust me. Got to learn how to talk if you want to network. After you line up the bar, you go to Canva, which is free, or you break out MS Paint. I don't really care. And you create a flyer. First quarterly meeting of the young real estate professionals of Bumpkinville. Show up at this time, blah, blah, blah. Right? Say exactly where it is in terms of date and time, but you don't tell the people where to go. You make them RSVP in order to get that information. You get their emails and all their contacts, and then you give them the information on where it's going to be. And remember, we're having it at a bar. We're trying not to come out of pocket to pay for this. So they need to be paying for their own drinks. So you make sure it's pretty clear there's no open bar. This isn't one of those kind of deals. Everybody needs to bring their credit card. And that's when you give them the information on where this thing is going to be so they can start to make it. And then you have this flyer and you go reach out to everybody in your industry, whether they're a young professional or they're somebody that owns the firm and say, hey, we're having a young real estate professionals mixer on this date. It's our inaugural meeting. If you would like to consider being part of our organization, come to this particular mixer. If you know somebody who should be going, send them this information. And on the flyer, you talk about the benefits of joining and being part of an organization like this. Increased deal flow, connections in the industry, yada yada yada, whatever it is, like the type of stuff people are going to get by coming and joining your happy hour. Happy hour happens. 30 minutes in, you stand up. Hopefully you have an AV system and you can get on the mic and you introduce yourself. You talk about what firm you're with, blah, blah, blah. Talk about how excited you are about the organization. You'd really love everybody to join. It's gonna be $100 a year. You're gonna do quarterly events. You're gonna have a private Facebook group or a private LinkedIn group, and it's gonna give people the opportunity to basically like get deal flow and connections that they wouldn't otherwise have. And the $100, well, early on, you don't need to go through the whole hassle of setting up a nonprofit or any of that kind of stuff. Like, you're just going to do this early on as a hustle just for yourself. So you put it all in your own bank account. It'll eventually flow through to your own tax return. You do it as a sole proprietorship, yada, yada, yada. And notice this whole thing is done just with elbow grease and a bit of hustle, with the idea being we're doing little bets here to see if anybody actually will show up, anybody actually cares, anybody actually will pay. And then the membership payments, you just do in a pretty straightforward manner. You can do it via PayPal if you want. I don't give a crap. Like, figure out one of the 85 different ways you can take credit cards. Stripe. Those are all there. And basically you build an email list, you have your roster, and then what you do is just every quarter you repeat that. Hey, we're going to go to this bar. This can be the happy hour. Maybe you're going to have a speaker. Eventually you can even get sponsors if you want. There are tons of title companies, bankers, all that kind of stuff that want to sponsor and get leads from like young real estate agents and associates and brokers and all that kind of stuff. They're going to be showing up to something like this. And look, there's people that have taken these kind of little membership organizations like this and turn them into pretty good little side hustles. You can imagine getting somebody that's a bank or whatever to sponsor you, or a mortgage broker to sponsor you for a few thousand dollars a year to have their name on your sign. You go buy a sign that you use every single time at each one of these mixers. And for you, it's a pretty awesome benefit. Like, you have all this set up for a few hours of work. You get to get in front of 100 or 200 people in your industry. You get to demonstrate that you're somebody to get something done. And if they potentially have a deal or a job or something that's going to be interesting for for you to be part of, well, like, they know your name and they see you talking every quarter because you're standing up there and they know what you're about. How do I know this works? It's because I've done it multiple times. I did it when I was a younger person. I formed organizations and groups and got people together. We did it around angel investing here in San Antonio. Where did I get paid for it? No. But did a lot of people know me? Yeah. Like, I got to know a lot of people and they got to see, well, like, this guy can't be all bad. He's able to reserve a restaurant, get a meeting set together, collect people's credit card numbers. He's at least marginally competent. In today's world, that actually goes a long way. I don't think this is just something that young people could do. Like, I think people in any kind of want to get to know you, want to build a network, want to build connections stuff could do. Look, frankly, at some point I'm going to be spending more time in someplace with great weather. San Antonio is not that way in the summer. And like, I'll do stuff like this as a way to get to know other people and I'll find shared interests. I'll find, you know, hopefully I'll still be working and all that kind of stuff. Like, it'll be a great way to do that. And look, it's just really easy. Like, you look at the amount of time to get higher ROI on this. Super high leverage. So that's it. It's getting dark, but this is one of the best ways I've seen to build a great network and a great personal brand locally. It's really awesome. Let me know what you think about this and tell me in the comments below if you've seen somebody do this as well. Share the story. I'd really appreciate hearing it. All right, catch you later.