How To Build A World-Class Network By Leading With Generosity With Ronen Olshansky

And then when I really jumped into the founder experience, I started a company called cross campus based here in Los Angeles, and we built the largest tech startup community in LA through a shared office space concept, ran that business for about eight years. Unfortunately the pandemic came and completely crushed the office market. Uh, and then that was an opportunity actually to join with an old and dear friend, guy named Keith Farazi.

Who is a wonderful man, an author, the author of a great book called Never Eat Alone, an executive coach to some of the biggest companies in the world. And so I've been coaching teams, coaching leadership teams with Keith for the last three years. And only in the last year did we spin off a new business called Connected Success, which is my primary focus now. And with Connected Success, we essentially train people to be more strategic about their networking. And better at relationship building.

a function of the quality of the relationships than the skillset of anyone in a particular person. So in coaching, Keith and I are always focused on how do you elevate the quality of relationships? How do you create higher trust through vulnerability generosity, accountability. So relationships are certainly at the heart. Of teams.

But the aha moment was more about thinking, we sat back and we thought to ourselves 20 years have passed since never eat alone was written and has become this networking classic. And we thought about it today. You can literally teleport into any zoom around the world with anyone. You can meet anyone in the world today. In theory, that's possible.

And with the A. I. Tools that are coming out and with how powerful social media is, there's really no better time to invest in how you network than today. books are great for that. But when we thought about it, we were like, this needs to be a cohort experience. This needs to be somewhere where you practice with another group of committed individuals. So that was more of the motivation.

you're right, leveraging AI, but some people depend On AI to write everything from the sequences to the emails, to the outreach. And then when you show up, it's okay, when am I going to build a real relationship? So talk me through your intent behind relationship building. Cause in my opinion, it might start even before you have that initial phone call.

It feels icky, to people in the program that we're running. A lot of it initially is just getting them into a new mindset. Where, they're getting past that limiting belief, for so long. And I think a lot of us have experienced this networking is this hunter and hunted mentality. Like you go to a conference and it's everyone's hunting the investors at the conference and they're protecting themselves. A lot of people have had experiences.

I know I have, I remember years ago, I went to a conference, I was talking to someone and as soon as they found out that I wasn't a buyer for their product, like I wasn't never going to be a an SQL. The person just literally without saying goodbye, just turned and walked away. So,

that's when you have trust. And that's when you can start to, Help with your product. Um, but there are a lot of mindsets, a lot of myths about networking that, we just wanted to bust right off the bat when we brought people in and develop that mindset. Myths, like you have to be charismatic to be a great networker. Absolutely not. You have to be focused and present to the person you're talking to. That's the thing that people respond to.

When you look at people like my business partner, Keith Ferrazzi or even politicians like Bill Clinton who are famous for this. They just zoned in on you when they were with you. And you. feel like you're the only person in the room. So the shift is from charisma to focus. Extroverts, introverts. There's this myth that you've got to be an extrovert. And in fact, introverts actually have a lot of advantages. They're actually, the data shows more thoughtful.

Often, the fact that they're more introspective makes them better listeners, better in conversation. But of course, they don't have the same appetite to meet with people all day long. They need to recharge and recover. Another myth is, I met someone. I made a strong impression. We had a great experience. I'll be on their radar screen. That's wrong. You've got relationship decay that happens after about two or three months. You're no longer top of mind. You fade in their memory.

And so that really systematic follow up schedule and having a system for your follow up keeps you top of mind. Super important. And then finally, the biggest one I think is the myth of small talk. The myth of small talk this idea that don't go deep too quickly. People want to start slow and there's some fascinating research that essentially and I'll skip through all the details of it.

We could certainly nerd out on this, but the gist is that people actually love talking to strangers and love opening up much more than they thought that they would. And so if if you know how to create that space of opening up and vulnerability, and it's really a dance, a conversational dance. That could be really powerful. That's fascinating. I like those mindset shifts when you define, how do you define strategic networking?

So this is more like the mindset's belief so that I can show up to the situation or to the room or the virtual room, but what does it actually look like? what's the process feel like? Or how do we execute that? So that's a great question. So I'll point to a few things. One is intentionality and purposeful approach. So in your podcast description, I was reading,

I actually love this. You put the effort, discipline and focus. That goes unnoticed. And when you look at the people who are masters at this, they do make it look easy. But behind the scenes, there's a system, there's intention to doing things intentionally. Now, intentional doesn't necessarily mean inauthentic, so you can decide very intentionally. Hey, I want to invest energy and I want to lead in with generosity to role because I think is a good guy.

I think we have things we can do in the future. I don't know what those things are, but I want to invest in the relationship. That's intentional and purposeful. But it's also authentic. There's nothing inauthentic about that as approached as opposed to what a lot of people do, which is, hey, I meet people and we connect and we like each other. Let's follow up. And then more often than not, as they don't follow up and they lose touch and they get frustrated. Boy, why did I lose that momentum?

It's because you didn't start from a foundation of what are my goals? Where am I going? What do I want my network to look like? And who am I going to decide to invest my energy into because our energy and our time is limited. So that intentionality is key. The other component, the other really important thing next to it is a system. And that's what, when Keith and I sat down to design this, the real North Star hero was we wanted to build a playbook.

We wanted to build something that showed you exactly what you needed to do when you needed to do it, how you needed to do it, because so many people lack that organizational structure. And when we now we're doing a lot of our feedback and surveys from this first run of the program, a lot of what people are saying they got was that system that they can now use and tailor to their own life.

If it's visiting their LinkedIn, if it's leaving a comment, there could be a way for that to be there, but it does take energy. That's the one thing that I also, you nailed it on the head, limited energy and time. How do you work with, you work with the cohorts, but what are the things that you, maybe the question is, how do we in intentionally focus our energy in knowing who to reach out to? Is it based on just your goals? Is it based on potential future business, future opportunities?

'cause the thing that's the one, the number one key thing that I hear a lot is, Hey, I just don't have the time. Or I'm just super slammed and busy, especially with business owners.

to follow up. And we think about the concept of packets of generosity, not necessarily Up, but just throwing out little bits of generosity to the people you care about. Right. So first focus less is more, right? Less is more. a really interesting in the fifties who is a primate specialist. And he theorized his name is Robin Dunbar, and he theorized that there's a limit to how many people, how many meaningful connections we can hold in our brain as humans.

And that number, it's often called the Dunbar number is 150 meaningful connections. Now the science behind it is dodgy at best, right? He compared the brain size of monkeys to the brain size of humans, looked at the social group size of monkeys and extrapolated from there. But it is interesting, right? 150. There's a limit to how many meaningful connections we can hold.

Oftentimes people don't realize it's more valuable to go deeper with a smaller group of people, develop the intimacy, develop the rapport, become one another's champions, coelevate together than it is to spread yourself wide and focus on a lot of loose connections. And if you want to go deeper and you do the math on how much followup you need to do, right? If you're going to do a bit of followup every two months, right?

On 30 people versus 200 people, you realize very quickly that above 40 people, it's impractical. So the first key is have a dashboard, have the 30 to 50 people that you want to focus on. And we can put aside the why them, that's a whole other conversation, but have a dashboard and focus on those people. Have something that you can look at all the time and come back to your CRM is great, but there's a lot of noise in it. There's thousands of people in it.

All sorts of data don't get lost in that, right? So that's one. The other piece here is this isn't just going to happen. A lot of people think about networking as okay, when I have some free time, I'll send some emails or I'll comment in social media. The mindset shift here is to realize this is a core activity for so many of us in the professional world. This is a core activity that will drive your success treated as such. Calendar. Protect that time.

There was a fascinating piece of research published last year in the Harvard Business Review, and they tracked 2300 professional services partners at firms throughout. I think it was New York City or throughout the Northeast, and they wanted to look at what made the Rainmakers so good at what they did. And so they found that there are five general personas for how people did biz dev. They were like the experts.

These are people who spend their time writing articles in the market and pointing to that and saying, you should work with me because I'm an expert. There are the debaters who are like, I'll give you my honest opinion. I'm super smart, right? So there's these five personas. It turns out the persona that absolutely crushed all of them was a persona known as the activators. And all the activators They had a few hours in their week devoted to nurturing their network. That's it.

They spent hours in the week, that was time they protected, making introductions, commenting in social media, sending out interesting articles, thinking about how they could be of service to the people who they're focused on and the difference in revenue generation between them and the worst performer, which funny enough the experts, 50 percent higher revenue between the activators and the experts, not like a rounding error. This is significant.

So that's the second thing rule is like change the mindset. Don't look at this as Oh, I'll get to Put it in the calendar and do it right because there's got, there's an ROI to it. And then the final thing is we always hear about generosity and how powerful it is. It really is the only way to get there. You cannot be transactional. You can't be keeping score. That just doesn't work. You have to identify people who are special.

You have to focus on them and then you have to just, the mindset is I want to see how I can help Raul with whatever he's struggling with, whatever he's interested in, whatever is top of mind for him. And the packets of generosity I mentioned earlier, this was a concept Keith came up with in the book. This could be as small as like a, Hey, just thinking about you in that awesome podcast conversation we had. Thank you for having me on. Like just something that puts you top of mind.

And there's got to be a regular stream of these things. Think of yourself as a line in someone's perspective, in their mind, not a dot that falls away. Just like a line that's ideally an upward sloping line. As you get to know the person, hopefully you meet in person, you understand their personal life, you get that vulnerability going where you, where they open up to you. You're finding out more about their struggles, their dreams, their desires, and you're there to support them.

You're not asking for what you can get back. Now now at some point you've built up enough social capital with the person, And if you need something, they care about your success. You've been there now you can make the ask, but often people think about making the ask too early And they think transactional. Again, the mindset shift here is play the long game and lead with generosity. And here's why I'll tell you something really interesting and very fundamental.

If you meet someone and you look at them and you're like, should I invest in this person? Oftentimes, it's not the people in our network that potentially unlock value. It's the people in our network. It's the people that they know. constellation of people in our network. So when I met you, let's say I meet you at an event.

I have no idea who you know, I have no idea what you've done, but what I can do is I can quickly determine if there's likability, I can quickly step into a place where we're opening up and getting past the bullshit, the small talk, and then I can put myself in this frame of mind where I'm like, what does Raul need? How can I be of service? How can I support him? I'm my text as a second brain in real time.

I'm getting that in my CRM and then I'm focused on at least every month, I got a ping rule with something that's the secret formula

but I still need to ask the questions. what do you actually say? Okay, let's give it to send out gift packages or care packages or whatever. If it's an email, a post a comment, a message. But people get tripped up on what to say. Do you see that a lot in your cohorts?

It could be as simple as let's say you know what someone's doing and it lights you up and it's an awesome project and you want to support it. It could be like, Hey rule, I love what you do with this podcast. How can I help? I don't know how, but how can I help? that question, how can I help is what I call it. One of the golden questions. Let people tell you, you're already expressing generosity, creating the instinct for reciprocation. And oftentimes they'll be like, yeah, that's awesome.

Let's, we'd love to enlist your help. Here's another great question. When you are speaking to someone, let's say you're on, you have some mission you need to Make a contact. You need to learn something to find a higher. You want to start a business. You want to leave your current job. You want to find a new job and someone introduces you to someone. You're talking to them. You're getting that advice. One of the great things you end the conversation with is, Hey, this was really awesome.

Who else should I be speaking to? Is there someone, either specifically or even what types of people should I be speaking to? Should I speak to a different type of person? So you create this sort of chain, often a chain of introductions that gets you to the right people, right? Yeah.

Hey, so are you in a relationship? What are you gonna Yes. Oh, cool. With who? Tell me about It asking these close ended yes or no questions create a choppy conversation, right? Versus are you in a relationship? Yeah, awesome. Tell me like, what's your dream weekend with your partner. Right away with question two. Now Keep in mind that you didn't just meet this person.

You've got a little bit of background with them, but right away you're going into this like aspirational open ended question where you're asking about someone's dreams, right? if I'm at a conference, a great question, is tell me about your work. What do you do for work? And someone says, they'll give you the answer and a great follow up question is wow, that's awesome. Is that your dream job? Do you love doing that?

And now you're getting them to talk about what they love and their dreams and values and judgments and beliefs, and that's what creates depth in conversation. So there's an art to asking depth, provoking open ended questions versus close ended questions.

It makes you feel helpful, generous, relevant even, and there's an interesting nuance here rather than asking for feedback from someone, ask for advice. There's a subtle sort of psychological shift, Hey, how can I do this better? But asking someone for advice is a great way to engage them and then see where the conversation goes.

number one prevalent aha moment for most participants that they get out of the experience.

Uh, you've helped me understand that I don't care if I get a no, I'm less concerned if someone says no to me. So we call it, the zone of indifference. You make the ask, you set it up, separate your action from the result and be indifferent to that. So we've seen some real personal shifts. I heard one guy said, you've allowed me to be me.

So we've Taken off these layers that have held people back these limiting beliefs from a more tactical standpoint A big thing is the system like now I know when I sit down what I need to do and how to do it. And then finally, this mindset of leading with generosity, like people really that opened people up when we shifted from this idea of transactional to leading with generosity, which also again, let's be honest, right? Generosity has to be a two way street.

So it's not like you have to be a martyr constantly helping So there were some fascinating discussions in our mastermind groups about what to do when you've helped someone a bunch, but then when you ask them for something, they're not there for you. Or how do you say no to people when they ask you for something?

So there's a real sort of delicate balance there, but generally speaking, the way to view the relationship from a strategic standpoint is I've decided I want to invest in this relationship. I am going to see how I can be of service to this person as much as possible. That's it.

They will help figure out what you're struggling with. They'll give you some tips and advice and ultimately help you figure out whether The program is impactful for you. One thing I'll say also is that it goes beyond just a training program. What we're building here is a community. So the folks that we brought together actually tomorrow night, 40 out of 65, are flying in to Keith's home for a graduation dinner which is more than I would have expected going into it. These people are flying from.

India from Singapore from London, and the reason they're flying in is because over the last eight weeks, we've watched them build these really deep connections with one another online, and now meeting in person is very rewarding.