MBA1023 Guest Teacher: David Burkus- How To Make The Connections You Need To Grow Your Business

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Hey, welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show Cooking up business goodness every single day with our daily 10 minute for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net and today's episode is a guest teacher episode. On our guest teacher episodes I bring on an expert to teach their area of expertise. They jump in, they give you a practical lesson on what you need to grow your business and I wrap it up with my own takeaways. Today we have David Berkus and he's going to teach you how to make the connections you need to to grow your business. Now what I love about today's lesson is that David's gonna give you some simple, dead easy practical strategies to do today. Things you can do on your phone right now to make the right connections to grow your business with people you already know. So much good stuff in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. David Berkus is a best selling author, speaker and an associate professor in leadership and innovation. So the guy knows how to teach, which is always one of our requirements when we bring on a guest teacher. His latest book, Friend of a Friend shows you how to make the connections you need to grow your business. The key connections in your own network. This is not run of the mill networking advice. This is based on the science of human behavior. And today David's going to offer some great strategies, some small things you can do to make the right connections, the key connections to grow your business. He's going to show you how to reach out to weak or dormant ties that you have, how to reach out to friends of friends and why it's so important to not ask what do you do when you speak to people, when you meet people? He's gonna show you how to ask more personal things to strengthen that connection. So without further ado, I'm gonna pass on to David. I'll be back with my own takeaways. But for now, take it away, David.

Hey, friends. David Berkus here, bestselling author of three books, including the new One, Friend of a Friend, and today, let's talk about how to make the connections you need to grow your business. If you're ready, let's go to work. So when most of us think of making the connections that we need to grow our business or growing and improving our network, I think a lot of us have two mental models in mind that make us feel awkward. The first is that we don't want to be that sleazy weirdo pushing business cards in everyone's hand. That one that's sort of working a whole room, not actually taking the time to get to know people, et cetera. We don't want to be that person. And truthfully, most of us don't want to be at that networking mixer at all. And the good news is that you really, you don't have to. If you want to grow the connections that you have that'll grow your business in turn. You really just need to know how to understand networks. And this leads us to the second sort of mental model or idea that a lot of people have, which is when I say the word network or when I say the word connections or contacts, most of us think of, like, the list of contacts that are in our phone or our email address book or something like that. And that's really the wrong approach. The better approach is to think about the entire network. So not just who you know, but also what I kind of call the hidden network. Sometimes the people who you are connected to, but you, they're not a strong enough connection to be in your phone to send text messages to, et cetera, More on them in a second. But also the people that are one or two degrees of separation out, that sort of know who you are, they've never been formally introduced, et cetera, or maybe you don't know who they are. These are the people that we want to think about. The best way to think about networks and connections is not that you have a network and it's a collection of contact information in your phone. It's that you exist inside of a network. And then the goal is to learn how that network operates and then respond accordingly. So today I want to give you four tips based on that. And all four of these tips are steeped in network science. The study of how humans connect and interact, how they form giant networks and also small scale networks. But it's based in about 50 years of empirical research into how networks work. And some of these aren't going to be all that surprising. They're going to be more like, oh, yeah, I know that's a good idea and I just forget to do it. But here's the science behind it. And others are going to be, wow, I thought it was totally different. And now I need to pivot and act accordingly. So we're going to have four tips on how to make the connections you need to grow your business. The first one is that the low hanging fruit in networking comes not from your close friends. You know, you start a business, you have an idea, you're looking for all for help. You're looking for new information, you're looking for people that can help you grow it. And the first people that we go to are usually our close friends, our close contacts. And there's an obvious reason for this. They're our friends, we like them, we connect with them, we feel more comfortable sharing what we're doing with them. But the truth is, when you look at network science, the low hanging fruit is actually the opposite. So your friends are great and they are a huge source of motivation and counsel and those sort of things, but they're not going to give you the new information that you need to really grow your business. Instead, what you want to be doing is reconnecting with what in sociology are referred to as what weak ties or dormant ties. And weak ties. And dormant ties is a little bit different. Weak ties are people that you know, but you just kind of know. You see them at the gym, you know each other's first name, maybe you know where they work, maybe they don't. But you don't know them really well the way you would your best friend that you hang out with, you know, every weekend. And dormant ties are people who were close friends, people who you do know fairly well, but for some reason or another, you haven't talked to them in a while. Maybe they moved, maybe they switched jobs. Right? It could be a bunch of different reasons. Now, obviously some of your dormant ties are people that you pushed out to dormancy and you don't want to interact with. But a lot of people life happens and we don't interact with them as much. And the reason that they are so effective and so easy to reconnect with is that because they are somewhere else in the network than you are, because they're weak ties or dormant ties they are running around in a different social circle, in a different geography with different friends, and they have access to information that, that you won't have access to. See your close friends all, a lot of times you all have access to the same information. You all think alike, you all act alike. In fact, in sociology and some researchers actually refer to this as a redundancy, sometimes your closest friends are actually kind of redundant. They're great for motivation and for counsel, but they're not really good at that new advice that you need, that new information that you need to grow your business. So making it a point to reach back out to your weak ties or your dormant ties. Now, we've probably all been in that situation where you reach back out to somebody and, or serendipitously you interact with somebody and it unlocks a huge amount of value because they have some referral or they have some piece of information that you have. The trick is to make a system of it. So one of the things I encourage people to do is every week pick somebody in that weak or dormant tie category and reach back out to them. And this is actually where a lot of times I like to use social media. There are more complicated software systems that can keep track of when you're talking to different people and send you reminders to Follow up after 60 days or 90 days or half a year or whatever. But the truth is, one of the things that I like to do is I like to use the news feeds in social media, whether That's Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Vero, whatever social media site you use. And look at those people who are not the ones you're interacting with all the time. See what they are broadcasting about, what just happened in their life. I just got a new promotion, we just had a baby, we're going on a vacation to Hawaii, whatever it is. And then, and this is the big thing, don't click, like, don't leave a comment, et cetera. It probably won't even be seen. I mean, if you have a Facebook account and you ever had one on your birthday, you know that you don't see everything that people like and comment. Take it to a different medium. Email them, text them, call them, whatever you can do, even, even just a private message inside of that social network, whatever you can do to make it a little bit more personal, to make sure that it gets seen, and you use that information as the jumping point off to reconnect. That way you don't feel like you have this weird agenda of, oh, I'm trying to grow my business, and I'm looking for new clients, and so I'm reaching back out to all of my weak ties. You're really just trying to reconnect, and you're trying to use something that you already know is important to them as a way to reconnect and offer them your congratulations or offer them tips on where to eat in Hawaii, whatever it is, and then let the conversation go where it goes. The trick is to not want to get something specific out of this. The trick is, is to just do this regularly so that eventually those serendipitous things happen and happen more often and they unlock a ton of value in your network and unlock a ton of value in your business as well. So that is tip one, reach back out to your weak or your dormant ties. The second tip is to reach out to your friends of friends, but not specifically. See, this is where a lot of people go wrong in networking and in making connections. And that is that they see that someone is connected to someone that they decide, oh, I want to be connected to, and they jump right to asking that person for an introduction. The reason this is wrong is for a couple different things. Number one is you don't actually know the strength of that relationship. You might see they're connected on LinkedIn, but I'm connected to a lot of people on LinkedIn that I don't know very well, and I bet you are, too. So it's not all that useful information. The other thing is that when you ask someone to introduce you to someone else, you are asking them to vouch for you. You are asking them to basically recommend you. And so in the moment of asking them for a recommendation, you're putting them in an uncomfortable spot. Because now they not only have to think, oh, what's the strength of my relationship to this person? That they want to be introduced to you. Also to think, am I willing to vouch for them to that person? And these can be a little awkward. But the third and the biggest reason why this is actually the wrong way to go about it is that you don't know what the rest of their network looks like. So what I tell people to do is ask a totally different question than looking for a specific introduction. I like to make it a practice regularly in conversation with people to ask them, hey, who do you know in blank? Who do you know in blank? With blank being whatever industry or sector or geography or whatever that you want to get to know more people in. And see, what this does is it brings not one specific person, but lots of different people to someone's mind and then allows them to choose which one they think would be the best fit for you. Now, oftentimes we approach people for an introduction and I've had this happen to me in my past career. This is how I learned this lesson the hard way. We go to someone for a specific introduction to someone else and they tell us, you know what, you don't actually need to meet that person. They're super busy, they probably can't help you, et cetera. But you really need to connect with this person if you're trying to build a business in that industry. We don't know what other people's networks look like, so it's far better to approach them with an open ended question, who do you know in blank? Than to say, can you introduce me to that specific person? Not only are you going to get a no more often when you ask for that specific, but even if you get a yes, you might get an introduction to the person that you don't need to know so much. So who do you know in blank allows the other person to think about the totality of their network and who would be the best fit for you and you're going to get better, stronger, more valuable introductions to other people for that. So that's the second tip. Reach out to your friends of friends, but don't ask for a specific introduction. Ask an open ended introduction. Now the third tip is something you probably already know because of the community that has built around this show, but in other spaces too. And that, and that is to find silos or groups or clusters. In sociology research, we often call these clusters. They are the people that are connected around a unified idea, that they work in a similar industry, that they have the same mission. There's some similarity there that allows them to connect with people. Now I know I just said in the very first tip that you don't want to spend too much time with those people because they think alike, they act alike, et cetera. But it turns out that a cluster is a lot like a harbor for a ship. Ship. They are really useful for advice and counsel, but you can't stay there. A ship wasn't meant to be in the harbor, it was meant to be out there. And your business and your network is the same way. They're very useful for motivation, for counsel, sometimes for trading ideas. But the trick is to go back and forth between checking in with them and then going out and being a part of your business. Now here is the tip that a lot of entrepreneurs face, which is often they don't know how to find one of those. So if you work in certain industries, there's always a trade association. If you have a certain job for a certain company, there's usually an association for people to have that job, whether it's sales or HR or legal or whatever. But when you're an entrepreneur, especially if you're trying to build a business online, you don't know where to go for that. And so one of the most useful things a lot of people do is start your own. Start your own. Whether that's a LinkedIn group or a Facebook group, or whether that's an actual sort of irregular meetup in your city of people who are trying to do that, you would be amazed at what can happen when you begin to start your own community. I mean, in truth, I'll be honest with you. One of the most useful things to me anymore for a social media site like Facebook is a group of people who write nonfiction business books that I check in with regularly, and a group of people who make most of their income in their business from speaking, that I check in with regularly. That and a couple pictures of my friends, you know, kids are really the only reasons I check into that, because I'm looking to go with that cluster. Both of those groups, though, were started by friends of mine who knew they needed a bit more community. So seek out those silos, those clusters. But if you cannot find one, don't be discouraged. Just start your own and be known as the person, the connector, the central node in this group of people. You'd be amazed at what that does for your business. So that's tip number three. Find silos or groups. And if you can't start your own and become known as a person who's creating that gathering place, that watering hole for people who are doing what you're doing. Now, the fourth tip, and this one might be the most important, is a little bit different than the other ones. You know, I told you earlier, you don't necessarily have to have this perfect elevator pitch. You don't even have to go to a networking mixer unless it's attached to one of those clusters or silos. You don't have to go to one of those ever again. And you can still build a huge network. But the truth is, most of us have been given really bad advice somewhere along the line and how to meet new people. And here's what I mean. The most common question that we ask in a work context, whether we're employees, whether we're starting a business, what have you. The Most common question that we're asked and that we ask is, so what do you do? Which is just a weird question. Admit it, you feel weird answering that, especially if you're starting your own business, because you have to figure out, how do I give that elevator pitch? How do I give that description to this person? Because I don't even know, are they a potential client? Are they a potential ally? What are they? So it's an awkward question, especially when you're trying to feel out and grow and start your business. But the truth is, it's an awkward question for a bunch of different reasons. In the research on network science, one of the most fascinating things is a phenomenon known as multiplexity. Multiplexity is really simple. You know, this, this is sort of one of those duh theories that we have a scientific basis for, but it's already kind of common sense. Multiplexity says that the more connections, the more context we have the for interacting with someone, the more we have in common with them, the deeper relationship we build faster. And if you're meeting someone in a work context, you already have that in common. It's probably the reason you got introduced. So try and pull the conversation away from so what do you do? So that they can give you their perfect introduction, elevator pitch, whatever. Try and pull it away to something a bit more personal or just something multidimensional about them. So I'll ask a variety of different questions. I'll ask, where did you grow up? And see if I can get their story. I'll ask, what excites you right now? Truthfully, my favorite question to ask is, who's your favorite superhero? Because you can learn a lot about people if you ask them who their favorite superhero is. I mean, you can learn that they're wrong if they say anything other than Batman. But that's not the point. You can get a story out of them of why they enjoy that person. And even if they don't, you can get a story about why they don't enjoy superheroes. You can learn new things about them. What's your favorite hobby? Right. Who's your favorite sports team? Whatever. It is just any question that pulls the conversation out of a work context. Trust that the situation that you're talking in will pull you back into a work context. But when you do that, you'll have found you probably have two or three non work things in common. You'll have a multiplex tie to that person now, and you'll build a deeper relationship with them faster because you've sought out More non work, non business ways to connect with them. You'll build a deeper relationship faster. So those were four quick tips all based in network science, all talked about briefly in my book Friend of a Friend and I'll give them to you again. Number one reach out to weak and dormant ties. Number two, reach out to friends of friends. But don't ask for a specific introduction to a specific person. Ask an open ended question who do you know in blank. Number three find silos, groups, clusters and if you can't find one, start your own and be known as the person that brought that community of people together. 4. When you are meeting people for the first time, trust that the work context will make sure that you talk about work and deliberately ask about some other context so that you can have more in common when you leave that conversation and build a deeper relationship faster. If you get going with these four tips and you start to make them a regular habit, I promise you you will make more of the connections you need to grow your business faster. Now if you listen to all of these four tips and you want more, I want to offer you one quick thing. I'm a huge fan of the $100 MBA show and I know you are too because you've listened to this whole thing. So we can go a bit further. I want to encourage you to grab I've created a free audio course on how to give and get introductions. I call it how to Connect. So sort of like how to make the connections that'll grow your business and you can download@davidburkus.com 100mba100, MBA davidburkus.com 100mba I won't put the dollar sign in there because it'll get a little bit confusing, but I encourage you to get that. It's my free gift to you. I obviously hope that we can make a connection by reaching out to me. Let me know what you thought of this episode and let me know what you thought of that audio course. Let's build a multiplex tie. Let me know if I can introduce you to any of my friends of friends. Let's keep this conversation growing so we can grow your business by making the connections that you need. Thank you all so much. We'll kick it back to Omar at Capella University.

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What a practical Lesson by David Berkus I especially love his strategies when it comes to reaching out to dormant contacts, people that you haven't spoken to in a while and it's kind of awkward. And the funny thing is I noticed that even if I do comment on a Facebook post or something like that, it's kind of nice, but it's easy to get ignored. If you really want to strengthen that tie again, that connection, you're gonna have to go beyond the comment or a like or a smiley face for that matter. And I love that strategy of just reaching out via email or with a private message on the social platform you're on. I know on the receiving end it's a real pleasant surprise to get a message from somebody I haven't heard in a while and they're just reaching out to say, hey, I haven't spoken in a while. I saw that you're doing this. I have some advice or I have some tips on where to eat in that city that you're going to. It's super helpful and it really makes me feel like this person is looking out for me. At the very least, I see this person in a positive light. Now when you do this, you're not looking to ask for favors. Of course, you're just trying to strengthen the tie. So if they have other recommendations, business recommendations or referrals, you'll be first to mind. Now if you're doing this on social, I feel like this is actually a good use of using social media. You're actually producing and not consuming content. So love that point. By David Berkus thanks for the great guest lesson. David Berkus has a special gift for you. His how to Connect audio course, how to Give and get introductions that will transform your life and your career. All you gotta do is go to davidburkus.com 100mba to grab that free course. And don't forget to check out David's latest book, Friend of a Friend. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show that wraps up today's lesson. Thanks for listening. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. When I'm interviewed on other podcasts as a guest, a common question I get asked is, if you had to start all over with no money, what would you do? How would you start a new business? And my first question to them, to that question, is, do I still have my contacts? Do I still have my network of people that I've built throughout the years? And often they say yes. And I'm like, well, then I'm good to go. Because that means I have not only my existing audience, but have the audience of other people. I have the resources of other people. There are so many times where I just asked a few friends, hey, we're looking to make a hire. We need somebody to do such and such of a job. And I got tons of great resumes and recommendations. I reach out to people when I'm launching a new product or service and they got my back by helping me promote. So if you have your network, it's actually more important than your actual net worth or your money because it doesn't come and go. It just gets stronger if you work on it. All right, thanks for listening to the $100 MBA show. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode where you'll learn how to handle and track your expenses and receipts in an easy, easy way. One that's not going to give you gray hairs. I recently learned some really great tools and I want to share them with you tomorrow, so hit subscribe so you don't miss it. I'll see you then. Take care.

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