How You Can Find Resources for Exponential Opportunity Featuring Mark Monchek

We believe you should be able to do what you love and get paid what you're worth, consistently. I'm your host, David Shriner-Cahn. Today on Smashing the Plateau., I'm speaking with the Founder and Chief Opportunity Officer of Opportunity Lab, Mark Monchek. In today's episode, you'll learn how you can find the resources for exponential opportunity. Stay with us to hear all the details. How do you feel about where your business is today?

Most of us do our best work in collaborative, supportive environments. Come explore ours. The Smashing the Plateau Community can help you build your business through live events, a private communication platform, accountability partners, and lots more resources. Speak to me or one of our community members to learn more. You can schedule a quick conversation at smashingtheplateau.com/15. That's smashingtheplateau.com/15, or go to our website smashingtheplateau.com.

Now let's welcome back Mark Monchek. Mark is the Founder and Chief Opportunity Officer of Opportunity Lab, a strategy and facilitation consultancy, helping mission driven organizations grow, thriving, resilient businesses that create abundance for everyone they touch. He's the author of the Amazon non-fiction Bestseller Culture

So to me, David, I'm thinking about what is the actual reality of the people that listen to your podcast. You know, the coaches, the consultants, the entrepreneurs, small businesses, And I love at our episode today to talk about what is the way we think about our business may be so different than what we thought about it before Covid happened, in the early March. 2020, there were certain things we held sacred. People go to work every day or almost every day in a building, in a physical building.

And the social contract between the employer and the employee has very definitive things that the employee must do to get a paycheck. A lot of those things have dramatically changed since we talked even last year. David Shriner-Cahn: So one of the ways I look at it is I think employees are, in the past, have been compensated in large part based on input.

You get paid, like you said, you show up in a physical space for a certain number of hours per day or per week, and that is often a lot of the basis of, compensation. Yes, there are performance guidelines and you're expected to be able to create certain outputs and outcomes for the employer, but it is, it's very input based. Whereas for consultants, you get paid primarily based on the outcomes that you produce for your clients.

And I think the line between the two has been blurred somewhat over the last two and a half years. Oh, absolutely been blurred and I think now employees who I think of as free agents, I think every employee in a knowledge worker, sphere is much more like a free agent than, somebody who's an employee who clocks in and clocks out and gets paid for their time.

I think, coaches and consultants, while theoretically they get paid for their results, they actually do often build time and they actually somehow think that they have to work a certain amount of time to get paid for that result. So I think even for coaches and consultants, which I think is your audience, it also requires us to rethink the idea of what we're actually offering to our clients.

David Shriner-Cahn: Yeah, very much and one of the things that I talk about to coaches and consultants is how important it is to focus your pricing and your agreements with your clients based on the value that you create ,rather than based on your input. Because I've yet to meet a client that's really concerned about a consultant or coach's input into the relationship. Yeah, exactly, and also David, with the community that you've created at Smashing the Plateau, you have access.

You as one of your members have access to dozens and dozens of people. And if you think about the networks of all your members, literally millions of people. Just three degrees of separation from your direct members. So as a coach and consultant, you're thinking about, I'm not just offering what I can do, I actually have a network of people who I know directly, or I know indirectly that can offer a whole nother level of value to clients.

David Shriner-Cahn: So let's talk a little bit about that value, because I know that is an area of your specialty. First of all, how do you recommend consultants and coaches think about the resources that they can tap into through their networks and how they can leverage those resources in the value that they provide through their work? David, this goes back to this whole concept of the growth mindset, versus the fixed mindset.

And I know we all like to think that, we have a growth mindset and we probably do to a certain extent. However, I think when we think about the resources we have, we start to think about the people we know directly or the things that we have ourselves have done directly. But if you really think about how many people are in our extended network, three degrees of separation from us, it is quite vast.

And in order to actually do that, you have to go from this scarcity mindset to this abundance mindset, which is way more difficult to do than we think because from the time that we are taught in school that everything is a zero sum game. So if you get an A, somebody else gets a B, somebody else gets a C, and there's a very limited number of spots at a university or in a sports team, or in whatever these external results that are children are taught to be, right?

But in the abundance mindset, there literally is an unlimited amount of resources. Once you are aware that they actually exist and that you can access. David Shriner-Cahn: So the mindset comes first. Mindset comes first. Yes. David Shriner-Cahn: And if you are able to create this abundant mindset, what do you need to do next if you're going to be able to understand what those resources are, where they are, and how you might tap into the value of those resources for your business?

Let me just give everybody a little bit of a mind exercise to help actually us concretize the fact that we have these vast and abundant resources. Becuase it, it sounds great, but how do you actually think about it? In LinkedIn, I think probably most of your audience and most of your members use LinkedIn pretty significantly as a major tool and platform to access resources.

So if you have, let's say hypothetically you have 3000 direct connections on LinkedIn, which is not unusual for people who've been in business for 20, 25 years. How many people could you access three degrees of separation from you? So let's say you sent out an email to your 3000 connections and said, I am looking for a specific kind of person in a specific kind of industry, in a specific kind of place. Would you help me do that?

So theoretically, of course not all of your 3000 will link to their networks and their networks, but theoretically, if they all did that, if they all took up your request, how many people would you be able to reach? Just take a guess. David Shriner-Cahn: It's, three thou, if each person has 3000, 3000 times. 3000 times, 3000. So yeah. Everybody doesn't have 3000, people who have 3000, like myself, have connections who have a fair amount of connections.

So it's somewhere in the vicinity of about 15 million people. And there is an algorithm of LinkedIn, which LinkedIn used to make very easy to find. It's now not so easy to find. I don't know why, but you can actually find it. So this is something that blew my mind when I actually realized how many people are just three degrees of separation from you. And you begin to realize this when you're active in groups like yours. You go to conferences, you're around like-minded people.

You start to find out how many people that somebody that you didn't even know you knew, that you run into know. So that's the ground that you live in to get to that, growth mindset when it comes to, relationships. The second part of it is the whole generosity mindset, which really is critical to actually having an abundance mindset.

So when you know, when I'm in business and I'm meeting people, the first thing I ask them, which I know I've asked you many times, and you've asked me many times, because I think both of us share that generosity mindset is what can I do to support your business? And it's often a question people like, wow, you just met me. You spent an hour with me. You want to help my business? And why do I want to do that?

Because if you're going to help me, I want us to be able to be in some sort of a generosity relationship, not just asking for something and then never giving it back. Once people get a sense that you actually care about them and want to help them, that triggers off their wish to want to help you. David Shriner-Cahn: There's a great saying, I know. the common saying is "people do business with people they know, and trust."

. And there's an added component to this, which ties into what you just described, which is "people do business with people they know, like trust and who care about them". Yeah, and typically that's people we meet in a setting where we get to talk to them.

Maybe people who I would might meet on your podcast, and if you introduced me to many podcasts hosts that I've had great relationships with, but it could even happen in the spur of the moment where you meet somebody you think it's a random connection. I'll give you an example. Last Friday I was in Brooklyn to buy a used bike. I was riding. going over the Manhattan Bridge, I'm stopped at a light and a woman on a bike next to me says, your backpack is open. And I said, Oh, I didn't know that.

She says, Would you like me to close it? I said, Sure. So she closes the backpack. I was so thankful, first of all, that I didn't, something didn't fall out, that she was so nice to recognize it and then to close it, we ended up having a discussion. So it turns out that she is a professor of social work at Medgar Evers College, which is part of the city University of New York system. I used to be a social work for 20 years. I used a lot of my social work education in, how I operate in business.

So this is a conversation, David, that we're having at a stop sign before we enter the Manhattan Bridge. So at the end of it, I gave her my business card and I said, look, I'd be happy to, do some guest lecturing, I do a lot of guest lectures. Oh, we have an internship program where some of the interns might be loving to work at your business.

So as a possibility, we could end up with some interns and I could end up doing some guest teaching just from that split second, her asking me if I wanted some help. David Shriner-Cahn: Yeah, that's a a great example and a great story. So what can, what con consultants and coaches do to help them get into the framework of a generosity mindset?

When you think about, and this is something you could do really as a kind of visualization exercise, if you close your eyes and you imagine and think about the biggest successes that you've had in your life, the situations where you absolutely needed help from somebody, and think about the people who helped you. The fact that some of those people you didn't even know before they helped you.

Once you start doing that, and these people come to the screen of your mind, there is a chemical reaction in the brain, that gives off oxytocin, which is that we call that the, the love hormone. Serotonin, which is a neurotransmitter. All this chemical activity happens when we actually have this sense of gratitude. And so when you see how many people have helped you, that makes you want to then help them, and you probably could do the same thing for all the people that you have helped.

So it's a constant sense of gratitude. And that gratitude really is what drives this ability to want to give back. And then of course, you want to be open because you're in that virtuous circle, not the vicious cycle of I don't have enough. David Shriner-Cahn: Yeah. are there exercises like that you do? Regularly that help you with your mindset. Yeah, absolutely.

We have a program which is in my book, Culture of Opportunity: How to Grow Your Business in an Age of Disruption, which is called "Unlock Your Network" and within Unlock Your Network, we have a resource map, which is actually a digital map of the different resources that you have. So in the exercise we ask somebody to focus on what is the goal that you want to build this resource ecosystem around.

Get them very clear on the goal, very clear on the result and then we ask them in this exercise, which we do virtually, we do it in person we also can do it via that we So, Audience close your eyes right now, who are the people, three categories, experts, connectors and accelerators, who you most need to help you with that particular goal. Think about the organizations.

which could be corporations, universities, foundations, community organizations, professional associations, who you need to help. Think about the sources of capital you need. Think about the knowledge that you need, and think about the communication that you need. Those areas are part of the ecosystem of resources, and when you start getting to that habit of doing that, and we'd be happy to, you know, contact us.

We can give you some suggestions, specifically some tools, you start to see your resources as an ecosystem, as a network. There's often very connected. David Shriner-Cahn: Are there examples of consultants, coaches, and small businesses that you can share of how they've leveraged their resources this way? Oh yeah, absolutely. I'm going to give you the one that really rang the bell for me, David. This was about, about 11 years ago.

We were working with a nonprofit whose mission was to help people who did not know how to read who were not functionally literate, whether it be in reading or in math. And they wanted to put on a national summit about adult illiteracy to help them get their brand out there and help establish an actual certification for educators of adults. So teachers, right, all have certifications. It's required by the state that you teach in, adult educators do not.

And there's a huge opportunity for that, which we help this client with, right? We asked them to put together, we developed a resource map for them to help put together this national summit. So in this resource map, they had 17 people, 26 organizations, 5 markets that they operated in, 3 resources of capital, abundant knowledge, abundant communication, but only 3 sources of capital. So we did this small exercise with a handful of people, couple of board members, couple staff members.

Then we said, All right, this is not enough to do what you want to do. Let's open it up. Let's bring in all the board members, all the staff members, and let's put a burning platform question to help really stimulate people's imaginations. What would you do? Who would you contact if you had three months to raise 3 million dollars? And if you couldn't do what you're out of business. So obviously this was a provocative, burning platform question.

Suddenly, David, we had 26 new sources of capital come on the resource map. Three of them with the last name of Soros, as in George Soros and his two children, all who have very well to do foundations. People started screaming. Who knows George Soros? Who knows all these people? How come nobody said anything? You could hear a pin drop, David. The woman in the back who was very quiet said, I know George Soros and I know some of these people. Why didn't you say anything? Nobody ever asked me.

This is a company, this is a nonprofit organization with 15 people. This woman sat literally 20-feet from the Director of Development, but there was never any mechanism to actually share these resources. So what happened? We did launch the first ever National Summit for adult illiteracy. We had resources from Harvard. We had a filmmaker from CNN who made a film about this.

We had some entrepreneurs and they raised money and they actually did this event and they built a brand around it and they got to the next level of their development as a result of a tool that we developed. And that was the moment when I realized, there are unlimited resources we're not tapping into because of the mindset. And also there isn't a mechanism to do it. David Shriner-Cahn: So can you go a little deeper in, in, your own realization of the potential from this exercise?

So it made me understand that every organization, no matter how small, no matter how seemingly under resourced, has the resources they need to get to where they want to go. And you have to shift the mindset, Number one. You have to have a mechanism, which is what we do, and unlock your, network.

Now we call it unaccurate resources, and you have to have the ability to then follow up on the resources that start coming to you, which is that generosity, mindset where you're actually supporting the people who are helping you and people who are helping you, you're able to actually do something with it, and you're actually following up on those things that they are giving you help with.

David Shriner-Cahn: Mark, this may be somewhat of a loaded question, but in your work, since you have the tools to be able to unlock these resources and see enormous potential and see great abundance. Given the own size and scope of your business, where do you see your potential in being able to leverage these tools, and what are your thoughts about where you can go with this in the future? That's a great question and loaded question, difficult question, yeah.

So we have been developing some digital online tools to teach this methodology and this mindset, which does not require me personally to be involved in every time we offer something. And that was a big mindset shift for me because I always thought, it's got to be me. I've got to be there and I've got to be there in a particular point in time. We then leveraged our staff, and so I would say our staff, we have five people in our organization.

A lot of them do things that I never thought somebody else could do, but they do it not only well, but in some cases better than me. In some cases, we've actually gotten our clients to do things that we were doing for them. Which also creates a higher level of value for them, and of course, more time for us. So our next path is really designing this resource map, so it is more functional, more accessible, bring in more resources.

We're developing a new program called Embrace the Future That's Already Here, which is really around the whole idea of processing, that there's a future that you can actually co-create once you have that higher level of mindset and consciousness, which we've talked a little bit about David Shriner-Cahn: today. Are there any resource that you're looking for that you might like to share that maybe somebody's listen who's listening has access to them?

Yeah, so we are looking for relationships with people who have online networks that offer courses, digital courses live or recorded courses or communities like yours who want this kind of content, want this kind of program, that we think we can offer a great partnership with some of the things that we have developed over the years and our knowledge of the coaches and consultants community, which is your community, but also, we work with a lot of entrepreneurs

and, privately, small and mid-market companies, which is our kind of sweet spot in the, in the consulting realm. David Shriner-Cahn: Sounds great, I'm glad that we shared that. Is there anything I haven't asked you, Mark, that you want to share before we close out? Yeah, so I'll ask the question of myself and I'll try to answer it. Maybe you can also answer it too.

What is the most important shift that coaches and consultants and entrepreneurs have to make, and that is the shift of consciousness. This next decade going forward is really not about profits. It's not about material impact. It's around shifting your consciousness so you can actually have profits with purpose. You can actually have profits that are sustainable, yet can actually have an impact that truly makes the world a better place. Bruce Springsteen had a very simple quote, which I love.

"Nobody wins until everybody wins", and that is the world that I want to help create where there is abundance for everybody and not just a zero sum game where some people win and other people are pained losers. David Shriner-Cahn: Love it. If somebody wants to go deeper with anything we've discussed today, access some of these resources that you've talked about or get in touch with you, where would be the best place to go?

If you go to a website, opplab.com, that's O P P L A B .com, you can sign up for our newsletter. We have a, monthly community group, which we call Opportunity Community. You could sign it for that. That's also free. A lot of the podcasts, including my previous appearances on yours are on there. And you can contact us directly through an email, Discover@opplab.com.

David Shriner-Cahn: Mark. I want to thank you so much for coming back and sharing what you've been up to and some great insights on Smashing the Plateau today, my guest has been the Founder and Chief Opportunity Officer of Opportunity Lab, Mark Monchek. Thank you again, Mark, for joining us. David. Thank you. David Shriner-Cahn: When you visit the Smashing of the Plateau website at smashingtheplateau.com, you'll find a summary of each episode along with the links we mentioned on the show.

On today's episode with Mark Monchek, we learned how you can find the resources for exponential opportunity. Are you building a community? Check out Circle, the all in one community platform for creators and brands. Bring together engaging discussions, members, live streams, chat, events, and memberships all in one place, all under your own brand. Circle is the platform we use in the Smashing the Plateau community. I love the way Circle puts your people, discussions and content all in one place.

Get a free 14-day trial of Circle at smashingtheplateau.com/circle. That's smashingtheplateau.com/circle. I'm David Shriner-Cahn. Thank you for taking the time to listen to our show. I'll see you on our next episode.