How to connect with influential people | Verne Harnish

Now, in this segment, what I want to do is look at what are the top five influencers, relationships, brands that you need to bolt onto the business in order to scale. And here the key question is, who can you choose? And so I want to, I want to tell you a story. I want to go back to when I launched the association of Collegiate Entrepreneurs. And I had read that Steve Jobs, early on, way before they even had product, had brought in a consultant named Regis McKenna, now Regis. Regis became the marketing guru for Apple, Intel, Genentech. And I thought, look, if he could help Steve scale to 2 billion, maybe he could help a student at Wichita State University build the world's largest entrepreneurship organization. That was my big, hairy, audacious goal. So I literally cold called him and I said, regis, would you teach me what you taught Steve Jobs? And so he sends me out this big manual. I still wish I had it. It would be, I think, worth a fortune if I could find it. And he said, look, I'm gonna teach you two things, and these are two things that we've t every entrepreneur on the planet since. And that is, first he puts his finger up and I go, like your finger? He goes, you need to set aside one hour a week for marketing separate from sales. And look, it was just me back then and my number two starting this organization. And so we set the time aside, 10 o' clock on a Monday, and at least I didn't have to talk with myself. He assigned me a young man, Rich Moran, and he said, now what we're gonna work on is, number two, I want you to take out a piece of paper and this is what you're gonna be doing in your journal at the end. And, and I want you to make a list of now. His question was the top 25 influencers that you need to bolt on and connect with if you're going to scale. By the way, Bill Gates considered this the best question he had ever been asked in scaling Microsoft. And so look, I was young, dumb, and broke, as the song goes, a Wichita State student. And so if it's 1983, I said, I'm going to put on the list President Ronald Reagan. I'm going to have him be the first US President to utter the word entrepreneur. And sure enough, he did. And I got invited to the White House. And then I put down Steve Jobs and Michael Dell, and there were a couple important publications. And I know in your industry there's important publications, YouTubers, bloggers, others that really drive attention in your industry. And for me at the time, it was Inc. Magazine, still around today and important for many of us in the entrepreneurial world. And Venture magazine, those were my top five. And then what we did is we spent an hour every week figuring out how we were going to get to those people and convince them to sign on and support this movement. And you know what was crazy? 36 months later, we were global. As I mentioned in the introduction, in 86, I then had a chance to host Steve for his first public speech. And as I mentioned, I had Michael Dell and Mark Cuban and others sitting there and Inc. Magazine covered it with a six page article. And Venture Magazine today, Arthur Lipper, the. The founder, still a dear friend 40 years later. And that's the power of having these influencers. So let me share a few other stories that are related. And it was something that Steve used the whole time he scaled. When he decided he needed to launch itunes, he didn't know anything about the industry, as maybe some of you are, as you're coming into starting your business. And so he took a piece of paper out and said, who are the top 25 players in the industry? And like you, he didn't know anybody. And in fact, nobody would take his phone call. And so he knew Don Henley, the drummer of the Eagles. And so he invites Don over and they do a walk and a talk. And he said, hey, Don, teach me about the industry. And then he said, do you know anybody on the list? And he goes, yeah, I know that person. When my daughter Jay decided to launch her edible skin care line, first thing I did is I set her down. I said, all right, sweetheart, who are the top five YouTubers or bloggers or others that you need to get to if you're going to be able to scale this business? And she made the list and we began to work it. I think of the Andersons down in Australia. They really saw a huge trend in people wanting to eat not so much organic, but the importance of eating local, particularly local local honey. I don't know if you know, but yeah, I love that Hawaiian honey. But it's much more important that you eat honey that's made out of the flowers, comes from the flowers that are near you. But the problem is it's not easy to deal with bees or get it harvest. So this father son team came up with a device that they 3D printed called the Flow. It was $600 and they just needed to raise $70,000 to get it started. Now the old days, you go to friends, families or fools. In this case, they put up an indiegogo campaign and it was crazy. Within the first 15 minutes they sold a quarter million. They hit their million dollar mark within the next two hours and over the next 11 hours they doubled it to 2 million onto 12. Now what was the real key behind that? And it comes down to marketing. And what the son did is he took a piece of paper out and he said, all right, we don't have any money for marketing, but who are the top 25, particularly the top five again, bloggers, YouTubers, influencers that if we could let him know what we're doing, could really help get the word out. And his calculation was that those 25 could reach about 3 million pretty rabid folks who wanted to produce and eat locally. And so then he began to nurture those relationships and he'd reach out to him cold call them, hey, do we have something interesting here? And he then let them know that we got the campaign coming up next month, next week, tomorrow, the next hour. And they're the ones that did the heavy lifting for the Andersons, driving that revenue into the business. Once it started to hit the million dollar mark. Then they started through the relationships they'd nurtured with CNN and many of the others and at the end of the day they raised 12 million. They've done a second flow now at 13 and it's one of the most successful businesses in Australia started by a father son in their backyard. And by the way, it was interesting. In 2015 Elon Musk won the innovation award globally for the Tesla. In 2016, the Andersons, this family down in Australia won it for the flow. And so that's how powerful this technique is. So I want to go back to Dave Rogenmoser and I want to take you from a startup perspective and share what he did specifically. So as I mentioned, he had had a couple of companies before. He was frustrate, not been scaling as quickly as he wanted to. So now he's really ready to launch his third company. He felt like he'd learned a lot of lessons and he grabbed our tools over a weekend and the first thing he did is he made a list of the top 50 influencers in the digital marketing space. Now he created a company called Proof. Many of you might be aware of that company today. But he really wanted to help people with their website. Small business owners and others have social proof that there were really people hitting their site and they weren't fake. And so he launches this company. Now nobody knows what he's doing. He got the kind of beta up and running and he said, if I could get these 50. And as you know, every industry is small. If I can get these 50 to know about us, then we can create a buzz in the industry. You know, the problem was, again, he didn't know anybody on that list any more than Steve Jobs knew on his list for itunes. And so he identified two people that he could get to that knew most of the people on this list, and he invited them to participate in the company. He did share a little bit of equity, about a half a percent each. It was nominal, especially since the company was worth nothing at the time. And over the next four months, made introductions to about 30 of them and said, hey, these young guys have got this cool tool that I think you'd be interested in. And they started talking about it and blogging about it and writing about it. And when those 30 were talking about it, the other 18, he never got to all 50. He got to 48. They began talking about it. And Dave shared with me, he said it was crazy. Months later, his friends would message him and say, dave, everybody's talking about your business. And he's like, laughing because all he managed to do was to get to those 48. But they were the right. And so that's the power of having this list. Now, once you've got the list, and I know it's kind of a crazy example, but I don't know about you, but I've always been amazed how Tom Cruise has survived so long in such a cutthroat industry, especially with all the controversy that has surrounded him. And then I found the key. It is the Tom Cruise Bundt cake. Tom's the same way. Tom maintains a list of the people that are key in his industry, who he's going to get opportunities from and raise money and the others. And then once a year, he sends that list this famous, delicious, what's now named Tom Cruise Bundt cake. And whenever he's involved in any kind of new opportunity, he makes sure that they get a Bundt cake as well. My friend Greg Brennaman has a list of about 400. And that's what you want to begin eventually to scale this to where once a year, he has read a book that touched him particularly personally. And what he does then is he writes a letter to these people and he says, look, I wanna gift you this book. Here's how it touched me. It's a moment of vulnerability. And then he said, you know, I get to about 250 of the people on this list every single year. And that's what's continued to help him scale his ventures moving forward. And so you wanna start small. You wanna start with that original list of five, and then I wanna give you one, one of the most powerful tools you can use in order to both get to and stay in touch with these key influencers or brands in your marketplace. And that is Google Alerts. And if you don't know what Google Alerts are, then just Google Google Alerts. And then what you want to do is you want to put the key people that again, that are the YouTubers, the bloggers, maybe the reference clients that you need to get to, that if you they buy your product or service, it's going to get everybody else to do it. And then I want you to stay in touch. And what Google Alerts does is it monitors. And if their name or their company name shows up, then it gives you a reason to reach out. And so, kind of a final story. I was turning around my company and I knew I needed to get to this guy, Herman Simon. He's this German guru that's in pricing. And we knew we wanted to have our business work outside the United States. And he was like, really the thought leader in that space. But I didn't know him at all. And so I put his name in Google Alerts. And then what you want to do is you want to call in and you want to get to know whoever it is you want to get to their assistant. And then all of a sudden, something in the news popped about Herman, and that gave me an excuse to email him. And I got his, at least his assistant's email, and I began to nurture that relationship. Today, he's one of my closest friends in the world, and I still use Google Alerts to stay in touch.