MBA2046 How I’m Outsourcing My Networking

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Hey oh. Welcome to the Hundred Doll powerful business lessons you can count on every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zedhome. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And in today's lesson you'll learn how I'm outsourcing my networking. I'm the first to say that building a network, getting to know people in your industry, growing relationships and partnerships, it's time consuming, it's tiring and most of us just want to focus on working on our product, on our content, on the thing we love. But we know we need to market. We've heard it a million times. Our net worth is our network. And I am a big believer in this because a lot of the success I've had in business is due to the fact that I've focused on building my network and making relationships and I've leaned on those relationships to be able to grow my business. In a lot of ways it's about who you know and not what you know. But there's only 24 hours in the day. So today I want to share with you the hacks I do to continue to maintain and grow my network without spending hours every single day. A lot of the things I do, I just outsource. I outsource to other people on my team. I outsource to technology or automation or I outsource to a resource. A lot of us neglect to systems. Building a system for yourself so that it's easy and it doesn't take too much of your time. I'm going to share with you everything I do to take the networking load off my plate. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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It feels good to save big. It feels good to geico. Listen, the people that I've gotten to know over the years in business, I would say in the last decade where I've really dedicated the time to build my network has been invaluable. These people in my network have helped me grow my business, have helped me, introduce me to the right people, find great talent for my team, get me out of jams where I had an issue and they knew the right people to fix it. My network has given me speaking opportunities, has even just let me know about events that I would be interested in attending. So I'm a big believer that you need to spend the time to build your network, but I want to spend as little time as possible. I want to get all the benefits, but at the same time, I want to make sure that I'm not spending too much time all over social attending countless events. I only want to go to the things that really will make an impact. Basically, I want to do the activities that will give me the maximum amount of results to grow and maintain my network. So I want to share with you some of those things that I do and how I use automation and how I pass it on to other people to do things for me as well as build systems to make sure my networking is easy, it's not time consuming, and it's not a burden. My first tip I want to give you is probably the one thing, if you just did this, you would be miles ahead of most people and it will help you tremendously build an incredible network. This is a strategy I learned from Jordan Harbinger, who is the host of the Jordan Harbinger show, an incredible podcast. A highly successful podcaster, I'm lucky to call him a close friend but he taught me this, and basically, he got me to write down a list of 90 people in a spreadsheet. Who are these 90 people? Well, these are 90 people that I find interesting, people that I want to maintain a relationship with, people that I find that I admire. And these could be people that, you know, have their contact in some way, whether you follow them on social or you have their phone number or their email. But basically, they're people that you want in your network, people that you really want to build a relationship with and maybe close friends one day if you're not already. And basically, when you sit down and write down all the names, they start coming in, they start pouring in. You start thinking about all the people that you'd love to get to know a little bit better. And the point here is that you're getting a little systematical about it. Now you have a list of names. Now, what I do is every day, I take three names from that list and I contact them. I stay in touch with them. I do something just to know how they're doing every day. Day. So three people every day. And it's literally like a WhatsApp message saying, hey, what's up, man? Did you catch that game last night? It was crazy. Hope you're well. Reach out if you need anything. Or it could be a DM on Twitter. Hey, Kate, I just heard about your new book. Congrats. Let me know if I could support you in any way. These are really, like, two sentences that I write for each person. This takes me less than five minutes. But what this does is that at the end of 30 days, I have stayed in touch or built a relationship or did something to build a relationship with 90 really cool people I want to get to know or get to know better. And these are genuine messages. I don't script these. I don't have somebody else write them. I just write them off the cuff based on that day or what's going on with them. Now, what this does is that by the end of the year, you have contacted them and reached out and checked up on them 12 times. That's more than the average person, and that's somebody who's a real friend. And what I found is that you'll go back and forth during the month with a few people or maybe a handful of people, and those people you start to become closer and closer to. Now, over the years, I refined my 90 people list, and one of the things I picked up on is that it's actually quite helpful when you're choosing your 90 people is to choose people that you're actually interested in knowing, people that actually you connect with or nice personalities, people that you'd be friends with and go out for dinner with. The other thing is that amongst those 90 people, they're gonna be people that are actually pretty well networked. They know a lot of people. These are like your super friends, right? Because they will ask you, hey, do you know this person? I had that conversation yesterday. That's what they said to me. Like, oh, I don't know them. Oh, they might introduce you to you. They might tell you something about them. You might learn something new and follow somebody new on social media. The point here is that this system is incredible. So implement it today. The next thing is gift giving. I outsource all my gift giving to my ea, Romina. She's fantastic. Basically, if I ever want to give a gift to somebody or send something to somebody, I just tell Romina, hey, here's this person's email or their EA's email, and work it out. I often do this to celebrate somebody's birthday or to say thank you about something that they did or they helped me out with, or maybe they introduced me to somebody and I want to just send them a small gift to. Or it's to celebrate maybe something that they did that's pretty cool, like they launched a new product or hit a milestone or even something personal like they had a baby. These don't need to be super extravagant gifts. They could be a box of chocolates. It could be flowers. They could be quirky gifts, fun gifts. The point here is that people will remember you if you give them a gift. It's just human nature. And the cost of this gift is going to be so insignificant compared to the impact it's going to make on that relationship. Now, sometimes I want to go to a physical event so I can meet interesting people and add to my list of people that I want to get to know. But not all events are created equal. And one of the things that I'm planning to do now is I'm going to follow all the groups on Facebook that run events. Basically, you just search for the type of event you're looking for or type of group, and they may run a meetup, they may run an annual event. The point is that they will run an event and they'll post it on their events page on Facebook. Then you can tell your executive assistant or your virtual assistant, hey, go to all these pages, see which events I can actually make on my calendar and give me a rundown on maybe just say Google Doc or something like that with a description of each event, who's attending, who's speaking, and the next time your EA is meeting with you, they can go ahead and give you all that information. You can then make the choice. Hey, this event looks like it's going to be pretty good. A lot of interesting people will be there, great speakers. I should go to that event. The other thing is that you want to make sure you're going to events regularly so they can get popped into your calendar. This is what I found. A lot of the events that are actually worth going to are paid events. They have a ticket price even sometimes they're an insignificant amount, like five or ten bucks. But I found that nine times out of ten when I pay for an event, the people that are there are high quality. And when I don't pay for an event, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Sometimes it's okay, but a lot of times it's not. Another little strategy that works for a lot of people is whenever they see somebody follow them on Twitter or Instagram, they follow back immediately. Why? If they're interested in me, there's a good chance I'll be interested in them. We might be like minded. They might be producing similar content or content that I want to champion. Listen, you can always unfollow people, but give yourself a chance to get to know people and see what they have, see their content, see what they're all about in your newsfeed. A lot of people try to be too cool for school and only follow like a handful people and have hundreds of thousands of followers. In my opinion, this is somebody who's using Twitter as a vanity metric. It's not really a networking tool or Instagram for that matter. The point here is that you should be using social media to network, get to know people, to engage, to communicate, to share, to help. And in order to do that, you got to follow some people. So a follow back can sometimes open up a lot of doors and expose you to some interesting people. What I find interesting is when I follow somebody like on Twitter, Twitter will automatically suggest to me immediately, you should follow these other people, seven or eight people. And basically they're the people that that person follows. And there's a lot of gold there, a lot of great people that are publishing great things that you've never heard of before. So use this feature. I got more on today's topic, but before that, let me give love to today's sponsor.

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To wrap up today's lesson, there's no doubt that networking is important and building relationships is essential. But it also can be fun. Try to enjoy yourself as you're getting to know people, as you're sharing a little bit about yourself, but also learning about other people that are in your industry, in your marketplace. And I'm a believer that you should network and get to know people not only that are ahead of you, but people that maybe are a few steps behind you. You can help them out, you can champion them, you can encourage them. I can't tell you how many people that I did that with where I just really saw a lot of promise in somebody in their work and maybe saw a little bit of myself in there. And today they're more successful than I am and are absolutely crushing it. I'm proud of that. I'm proud that I was able to be a part of their journey. I see networking as a way to improve the quality of your experience of building a business and the quality of your life. Because at the end of the day, how you spend your time, who you spend your time with, will really impact how happy you are in your business. Thanks so much for listening to the dollar MBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe so you don't miss an episode. By hitting subscribe, you get access to over 2,000 episodes in our archives. Go ahead and do that right now on your favorite podcast app. Thank you in advance for being a subscriber. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. If there's one piece of advice I can give you when it comes to building your network and trying to build those relationships is have the mindset of being helpful. How can I be as helpful as possible? No one wants to be nagged and be asked to do things or asked, you know, to pick their brain constantly. No, they would love a friend. They would love somebody who actually gives and takes a little bit. You know, So I like to just give, give, give as much as I can and be a supporter because history has told me that there are going to be times where the right person can help me out with the right situation. And it's best to, as Jordan Harbinger says, dig your well before you're thirsty. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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