MBA1032 How to Get the Most Out of a Meetup + Free Ride Friday!

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Edu hey, today is Free Ride Friday so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. This month we're giving away easy course. This is our 30 day course on how to build your own online course in 30 days. We sell it for $500 over at EasyCourse Co, but somebody will win it for free today on Freeride Friday. You have a chance to win every Friday. Just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. And once you leave us a review, you enter the draw every week until you win. All right, let's jump into today's episod. Hey O welcome to the $100 MBA show delivering business lessons to you every single day because hey, business is full of surprises. So tune into our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the hundred dollar MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100 MBA net and in today's episode you will learn how to get the most out of a meetup. I highly recommend that you attend meetups in your area. These could be seminars, workshops or just get togethers in your area of expertise in your local area. As entrepreneurs, things can get lonely so you need to get out there and meet people that are doing interesting things just like you. We talk a ton on the show how your network is so important so you got to make an effort to get out there and meet new people in your space. But how do you make sure you make the most out of your meetup experiences? If you sign up to meetups and go and just are a passive attendee, you're missing out big time and to be quite honest, you're wasting your time and money. Meetups are great to Build great relationships because they're small, they're intimate, they're not loud, they're not crowded, and there's context. So in today's lesson, I'm going to give you four powerful tips to prepare you for your next meetup. In fact, I'm going to a meetup this week, so I'll be using these exact tips when I get there. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. You might be surprised how many meetups are happening in your city any given day. If you're in a major city, there are too many for you to attend. But even if you're not in a major city, you might be surprised how many meetups happen all within driving distance. There's great sites like Meetup.com, like Eventbrite, that have tons of tons of meetup listings. You can sign up to their newsletter so you get updates. They'll also tell you about some great workshops that you can attend. And those are my favorite kind of meetups where you're actually going to get some great content. You're going to learn from an expert, and at the same time, you're going to meet some great people that are doing similar things to you. People that attend a workshop are winners. They're people that want to get better, people that are positive, have a good attitude. So already off the bat, you're in good company, but you don't want to just show up and just wing it. You want to make sure you're prepared so you make the most out of your time and money at that meetup. Now, I keep saying time and money meetups are quite inexpensive and they're a great alternative if you can't attend major conferences that happen annually across your country or the world. So I'm gonna give you four powerful strategies that I like to utilize before I attend a meetup. Tip number one is do your research. In most of these websites that run meetups, like meetups.com or eventbrite, they have an attendee list so you can have an idea of who is coming. Sometimes these names are attached to Twitter profiles so you can check out what other people are doing and you can have some context before you actually meet them in person. People will be quite impressed that you actually know a bit about them before you meet them. I can't tell you how many times people were surprised when I say, yeah, I know who you are. You run that company that does this and they're like, oh, wow, yeah, that's me. People love being recognized and it's a good way to get on their good side. If you're going to a workshop, research the expert, research the teacher, the organizer. Find out what they do, find out what they are into, learn a little bit more. It's good to have context before you go into a group, before you go into any kind of gathering. That way you're not wasting time asking questions that you can just find out yourself through a bit of research. This doesn't take too long. This takes about 10, 15 minutes. If there's an organization that's running this meetup, learn more about that organization. And just a side note, you don't have to go to a meetup just purely to learn or because you're part of that group. I'll often look for meetups that are about skills that I'm looking to hire for, like an Angular 2 developer meetup. I'm not an Angular 2 developer, but if I'm looking to hire one, I can find a ton of them if I go to one of their meetups. So doing a bit of research and thinking outside the box and coming prepared so you have something to talk about. Knowing your crowd, knowing the people that are gonna be there, knowing the organizers a little bit before you go in so you don't go in cold. This is at the very least gonna give you some confidence when you're at that part of the meetup where you're chit chatting, small talking and getting to know the crowd. Strategy Number two Perfect your elevator pitch before you go to the meetup, your elevator pitch is basically a short group of sentences to describe what you do. You should know this like you know your own name. You get asked this question probably more than any other question. It's going to be the second question after hey, what's your name? And you want to be able to succinctly tell people what you do. If you want to learn how to craft a great elevator pitch, check out episode 81 of this podcast. We had a dedicated episode on just that. If you hit subscribe, you'll be able to see it in the feedback. So you can scroll all the way Back to episode 81 and listen to that. In that episode I explain exactly step by step how to create a great elevator pitch, how to have a conversation while telling people what you do, a couple things about that. When you're talking about what you do, have some energy, be positive. And number two, and this is a little sneak peek of that episode, don't give cut and dry shut down answers or shut down pitch like hey what do you do? And I answer, I run a software company. That doesn't really leave a lot of room for discussion. It's kind of like, okay, what you're going to do is craft a way to give that information that's more inclusive as well as pique their interest about what your company does or what you do for a living. So check out that episode, episode 81. Okay, strategy number three, and this is a biggie. And I learned this one. All right, strategy number three. And this one's a huge, huge one. And this works in any social setting. And that's ask questions. You want to be asking as many questions as you can. Interesting questions about the people you're meeting. When you're talking to people one on one, you want to learn more about them. And hey, people love talking about themselves. So you want to be a listener. You want to be somebody who is really interested in learning their story and what they're all about. So have some questions prepared so you're not stumped when you get to the meetup. A good question to ask after you ask them what they do is, how did you get into that? How did you start that business? Or how did you get started with that career? When you're asking questions, what you're trying to do is learn more about them and you're not really trying to challenge them. Don't ask challenging questions like, what's something exciting you're working on today? A lot of people don't know how to answer that question. Maybe they're in a rut right now. Maybe they're not working on something exciting, or maybe they're struggling with their business or their career. And people don't like answering questions they don't have an answer to. So always use the information they give you to ask follow up questions. Just like, what do you do? Oh, how did you get started with that? How'd you get into that? Even if it's just personal talk, like, are you from this city? Oh, no, I grew up in Idaho. Oh, how was it growing up in Idaho? These are answers they can give. They have experiences with growing up in that area because they grew up there and it shows genuine interest. You want to get to know them now. One strategy I like to use when it comes to asking questions is instead of asking one question after another, like I'm interviewing them is I kind of like to embed it in the conversation. So I might be finishing up my elevator speech and I ask them, hey, what do you do? They tell me what they do and then I can ask a follow up question and then I can comment on it and be like, wow, that's really interesting. You must have had a great childhood in Idaho. I grew up in New York. Have you ever been to New York? You see how I'm asking questions at the end of every time I talk? It creates a sense of conversation. At the same time, I keep passing the ball back to them. Asking questions and learning more about the people in front of you is a technique I learned from Dale Carnegie from his world famous best selling book, how to Win Friends and Influence People. People will enjoy the conversation if they feel like they're being heard, if they get to say what they want to say, and again, they get to talk about themselves a little bit. And what will happen is that they'll remember the conversation as a good conversation. They'll remember that you are a good conversationalist and they're going to want to continue the relationship with you. After the meetup, they're going to be like, hey, I want to stay in touch with this person. Now, how do you exchange contact? Do you use business cards? Do you just tell them your email? Hopefully they'll remember it. This is a question I get asked a lot and that's my fourth strategy. Getting their contact. When you have a conversation with somebody and you really think that they're interesting and you'd like to know them a little bit more where you can collaborate in the future, you're going to want to get their contact.

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All right, we're in strategy number four, getting their contact in a meetup. Now, I like this setup where you are getting the contact instead of you giving them your contact. What this does is that this empowers you to stay in touch or want to stay in touch with the people you want to stay in touch with. If somebody's a snooze fest or is a negative Nelly, you don't want to have to exchange any kind of information because, hey, you have no intention of following up with them. So what you're doing here is you're asking for people's contact that you want to continue to have a relationship with. Now, the best strategy I found that works way better than exchanging business cards or talking about or sharing each other's websites or email addresses is simply pulling out your phone, adding a new contact and then handing your phone to them. I just pulled my phone and say, hey, I'd love to stay in touch. And while I'm saying that, I'm just opening up my contacts in my iPhone, I add contact and I hand them my phone and say I'd love to grab your contact or explicitly say I'd love to grab your email. And as I'm giving their phone, they can't help but take the phone from you to put their name, add their email address, and some people put their phone number and that's it, it's saved, you got it on your phone, you have their contact and that's something you don't have to worry about. When somebody asks for somebody's business card, that business card can get lost, it can get thrown out. You still have to transfer that to your phone or to your contact list. The fastest way I found doing this is just giving them your phone. Everybody knows how to use a smartphone now and most of the time they're very flattered. Oh sure, here's my name and email address. And they only need to provide the information that they want to provide. That way you have their contact and you can tell them after they hand you your phone back, I'll email you. So you have my contact as well. So you make it super easy for them. They don't have to save your business card, they don't have to, you know, jot anything down. When you get home after the meetup, you can just easily send an email to those who you grabbed their contact and it could just be a one liner. Hey, it was great to meet you at the meetup. Here's my email address. Let's stay in touch. Done deal. You fulfilled your promise already. You've made a great impression because, hey, you actually said you're going to email them and you email them. You delivered on your promise and you're staying in touch with the people you actually want to stay in touch with. All right, so wrap up. Here are the four strategies to get the most out of your meetup experience. Number one, do your research before you get there. Number two, perfect your elevator pitch. Check out episode 81 in the archives. Hit subscribe to grab that strategy. Number three, ask questions. Get to know the people in front of you. Follow up every statement you make or comment you make with a question to them. And number four, get their contact and use the phone technique. Alright, that wraps up today's lesson. I hope you found it useful. Use these strategies. Go check out the next meetup that's happening around you and make it happen. Today's lesson might be over, but today's episode is not. Because it's Free Ride Friday. We got to give away a lifetime membership to EZ course. Every Friday, we give away a lifetime membership to one of our courses to somebody who's left us an itunes rating in review. Just leave us an itunes rating and review and you can win. We do a weekly random draw every Friday, just like right now or about to do. Let's see who won this week's Free ride. And the winner is. Bain Kamira from South Africa. Bain says best podcast ever. Five stars. I recently discovered Omar on the $100 NBA podcast, and I'm grateful to him and his team. They break down great topics in the short and satisfying podcast. I love listening when I'm traveling. I've learned a great deal and I'm so excited because I have a whole lot more to listen to in the archives. That's right, when you hit subscribe, you have access to over a thousand episodes in the archives. Thanks, Bain, for that great review. You are a winner. Your mission is to email me@omar.net so I can host you up with the free ride. We do this every Friday. If you want to win, just leave us an itunes rating and review and you too can win a free ride to one of our programs. All right, that's it for me today. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. I understand that not everybody is an extrovert. Some people find it hard going to meetups, meeting new people. They just want to stay home and work on their business or work on what they work on. But you can't grow and be successful alone. That's one thing I learned from reading so many biographies, learning from other mentors, building businesses myself. You can't do it alone. You got to build a network around you. Things are not always going to be great for you, and you're going to have to lean on people that can help you out. Whether it's a recommendation for a hire, help with partnering with you and marketing your next product, or just somebody who can listen and give you feedback. Jim Rohn was right when he says your network is your net worth. So if it's not natural for you to go out and meet people, force yourself. You gotta make it happen. It'll get easier over time. All right, I'll check you in Monday's episode, a very special guest teacher episode with my main man, Justin Jackson. He will be teaching you how to use podcasting as a marketing tool. Can't wait for that. He's a great teacher. Hit subscribe so you don't miss it. And I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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