Patrick Mosher built Wisdom for Humanity by mapping 850 contacts into concentric circles of relationships, then mining referrals from his inner rings before spending on ads. He pulled names from LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Outlook, grouped them by closeness, and argues most businesses exhaust their network too quickly.
Chapters
So, so relationships, but we'll start there because to me, the one of the cores of my business is authentic exchange. I've said this a few times with you all is that I think about my business as an intimacy business, not a mass model. When I did put an ad out there, you know, in, in Facebook and I saw the people responding to it and I looked up their profiles on Facebook, I was like, those are my people. And, and so I had to go like, you know, why am I doing this? And so, so we'll start with relationships and relationship pools. So you have a relationship pool, you have a relationship pool of old and new and possible customers. You have colleagues and coworkers, you have friends, recent and past. You've got acquaintances from seminars and hotel staff. You've got You know, food service people, you got your family. So when I, when I started this business, Wisdom for Humanity, one of the first things I asked my chief of staff was, I wanna build a spreadsheet. Of course. And I had my chief of staff pull all the names off of LinkedIn, Facebook friends, YouTube subscribers, my Outlook. I downloaded all my Outlook, you know, contacts, and I had that person put them all on a spreadsheet. And it started with 850. And I had 800. So that means I have 850. I looked at the list and realized because I just downloaded and gave it to them and then they created the spreadsheet on it, which was awesome. My ex-girlfriend from senior year in college was on the list because somehow she was on my Outlook. I had no idea where she was. She was probably married, different name. But those are all the names. They're on the list. And in some ways, I think about that as being a great exhaustive list. And when I look at that list, given my background and my experiences, that's a pretty robust list of people I know on the planet. So you've probably heard this before, the statement before, um, you have a million dollars in your network. Have you heard that, that quote before? You have a million dollars in your network. And honestly, I, I vote whenever I heard that, I'm like— and Nate, you know me the longest here— it's like, and knowing the people we know I probably have like 100 million in my network. And so please estimate the value of your network because it's probably bigger than you think. So that's the first thing I did. So then, uh, and this is, this is Kimberly, you're going to recognize this. I want you, if you're, when you're taking notes, I want you to draw a stick figure. You know where this is going, Kimberly. Draw a stick figure. Okay. Now I've got color pens here because I was ready for this. So I want you to draw a first circle around that, that stick figure. Now I used green. And so that's your 1 degree of separation. That's my 850 people. These are people who know, know me, probably care about me. Some of them even love me, which is great. So that's— and see, I left a little hole at the top of the, the egg there. It should be a circle, but you know what I'm saying. So that's one degree of separation. That's when they say you have a million dollars in that network. Cool. Now keep going. I'm going to use a red pen. Next one I'm going to do is draw another circle around it. And guess what? That's one degree of separation from you. Notice the circle got bigger because everybody in your network could probably refer. This is referral network. This referral network If each of those people in your network could refer 5 people to you— oh, this just got bigger. Okay, cool. Now keep going. I'm going to do one more on this, but you can see how this keeps going out. The next curve— uh-oh, I kind of closed the loop, but you know what I mean. The next curve goes around. That's 2 degrees of separation from you. Now for my business, that's getting too far out for me. For my, my, for my choice. I'm not saying that's right for everybody, but for my choice, it's too far out for me. This is why I don't do ads because I haven't worked these two rows on the inside and exhausted those to the point where I need to go to that third ring. Does that make sense? Okay, now you need to make your choices for yourself. If you're, if your inner ring isn't, doesn't have enough people in it, then you got to go to the second ring. If you go to the second ring, you don't think that's enough, you got to start doing the third ring. And that's where you start getting into more mass, you know, advertisement and stuff like that. I'm making sense to folks.
