Owen: Hi my name is Owen McGab Enaohwo and welcome to HireYourVirtualAssistant.com; where we specialize in providing small business owners with exceptional virtual assistants and on our blog I bring on small business experts to provide you guys with insights and value that you can take and immediately implement in your business. Well, today’s topic is about networking.
A lot of people just say networking is going out to events, and passing out flyers and cards, and you know that’s really… that’s what not networking is about. The saying in business “It’s not what you know but who you know is really, really very important and the more people that you genuinely know and can provide impact to your business via you going out there to network with people is very essential.
So today I got Jordan Harbinger from The Art of Charm today on the call because I wanted to make sure that you guys really get to know what networking for your business is really about and I want you to hear from the expert and I look forward to meeting with you after the interview ‘cause I want to really know what you have learned from the interview.
Owen: Today I have Jordan Harbinger on the line and I want him to talk specifically about his business, what he does and how small business owners can take his ideas and apply to their business in regards to networking. So go ahead and introduce yourself and your company, and we carry on from there.
Jordan: Sure, My name is Jordan Harbinger and I run a company called The Art of Charm and our website of course is www.TheArtofCharm.com and what we do is we teach men charisma. We teach guys the skills that they need to network with people to create business relationships but also we focus on dating and connection with the opposite sex. So a lot of guys will come to us thinking “all right, I need to learn how to meet and attract women”, but we also teach guys how to get and keep the girl and all of our knowledge, all of our skills that can be parlayed into business as well.
So we teach a lot of entrepreneurs, businessmen and even large Fortune 500 companies and executives how to really turn on the charms so to speak and make their networking less of a time filler and more productive. So guys will come in and they’ll wonder how do I meet the right people and to help move my business forward and that’s exactly what we teach here at The Art of Charm is how to find the right people, create a genuine connection to those people and exchange value with those people and so that both of you end up in a win-win situation were both of your businesses move forward. And this can be the small entrepreneur working out of his bedroom…
Owen: Yeah.
Jordan: or large Fortune 500 companies where they want to train their entire sales team to really be able to make deals on a larger scale and close.
Owen: Oh Yeah! And then when someone hear in the intro saying that you guys help guys be more charming for ladies they start to think “is this a dating show?” But the reality is that when dating and trying to talk to girls or even in business you really need to know how to come across confidently to people, communicate your ideas and make them feel comfortable around you.
Jordan: Absolutely! Confidence or charm or Savoir Faire; even in sales there’s literally almost no difference between those things and business or sales in general or meeting and attracting an opposite sex. These are all really the same thing so, if you can a charm a woman you can sell a product or service.
Owen: Yeah!
Jordan: If you can sell a product or service a lot of guys are like whatever I have lots of money I’ll make millions of dollars in sales but I can’t handle my relationships.
Jordan: If you come to The Art of Charm, we examine your skill set. Somewhere along the line you’re breaking down, you’re not doing what you normally do in a sales situation. You are not doing that in your own relationships and a lot of guys just need us to help illustrate that but there’s really a lot of overlapping commonality between business and sales, and meeting and attracting a quality woman into your life.
Owen: So walk me through the process say, a small business owner comes to you now trying to figure out how you can educate them on what you guys do and how can they incorporate it into their business. Starting out, what’s the process with you guys? What would the Entrepreneur have to go through?
Jordan: Can you repeat the question? Sorry the Skye broke up a little bit.
Owen: Oh yes, I was trying to find out if a small business owner comes to you guys now specifically trying to find out how he can use your skills and what you guys have to show them on how to network in their business. What would be the process they would have to go through because I’m trying to walk the listeners through the steps that they have to go through so that they can incorporate some of your ideas into their businesses.
Jordan: Well a lot of guys make this mistake and first I’ll go through a little bit of what people normally do and why this skill set fails them. A lot of guys will go to a convention thinking alright well this is for other sales people in the automotive supplier industry or maybe I should go to this 1:40 conference for Twitter because a lot of the most popular social networking people are gonna be there. That’s great! Because your gonna be around a lot of people speaking about something that you’re interested in some way that you maybe you’d make money in social networking.
But the problem is a lot of people who go to those, they go to all the talks, they take notes, they maybe have a chat with some of the people during the breaks. Its all small talk, “Oh yeah you know I’m from Boise. Oh really my grandmother grew up there”. Big deal! This is fluff. This isn’t substantive. There is no connection being made. There is no value being exchanged.
There is no plan for future contact, nothing. Or there’s those person who thinks that okay I’m just gonna get all the list of everybody’s email address or their phone number. And I have this roller deck full of people and I know who does x, and who does y, and who does z so if I need that I can call to those people I’m gonna have access to those products and services. That’s alright. What we wanna do is we want to go to these conferences and these exchanges of information with the idea that were gonna help as many people as possible. And guys will think “well wait a minute, I don’t want to help as many people as possible I want the people to help me!”
But if everybody goes in there with the same mindset which is take value then everybody’s gonna walk away with nothing. So you wanna be the guy who goes in there, or gal, who goes into these conferences and works the room. And by this I mean, go to the chats, go to the conference, learn the content, but really I’m gonna say something that’s gonna really shock the conscience of a lot of conference goers but.
Owen: Go ahead, let’s shock them.
Jordan: Those speeches, those presentations that are going on, 90% of the stuff you hear in the conference are fluff, its stuff you already heard. Most of the time no one learns anything, those are an excuse to get together and network. There’s really almost no other reason to go to these. Maybe you’re gonna hear some famous social networker or somebody really very brilliant give a speech. But to be honest that’s probably gonna be available on YouTube and the knowledge probably available on that person’s blog anyway. They’re not going to give you something extra special and if they do its fine then go see them speak. But the goal for those conferences for those events is always in the networking. I repeat that, the goal and the gold for any conference, any get-together is always in the networking.
Owen: Yeah! Go ahead. Go ahead.
Jordan: You want to make sure that you’re not letting that go because you’re tired ‘cause you went to 20 speeches or 20 talks during the past two days. You don’t want to be too tired to go out at night. What you want to do is to meet everybody there. Even if you think, ah well this person I don’t really need to speak with her because she does exclusively sales on Twitter and I don’t sell anything on Twitter. I’m more of an internet marketer; I’m a direct mailer or something like that.
Don’t think like that, she has value maybe it’s not for you. Maybe it’s somebody that you meet in five minutes. So if I’m talking to you Owen and I say, “Oh! You teach a lot about virtual assistants. Well I don’t really need that right now ‘cause I already have my virtual assistants and they’re in the Philippines already. I’m all set. I don’t really need that”. But if I meet someone else who is saying “Man you know my payroll is killing my margins every month. I’ve got three administrative staff and they each make $35,000 a year and they get benefits and they’re really eating into my margins”. I might say “You know what, you should meet Owen because Owen’s gonna tell you that you can hire 10 people for $35,000 per year.
It’s that much and none of them are gonna need benefits and they’re only gonna work on the stuff that your telling them to work on and only get paid for this jobs that they do. They don’t get paid to sit around in the office and you know have water cooler chats when you don’t need their services. You need virtual assistants and Owen’s that guy to hook that up. Now, your thankful because I just sent you someone whose gonna give you business and she’s thankful because I just gave her somebody whose gonna solve one of her largest problems and make her a bunch more of money.
Now you guys have one thing in common during that introduction, and that’s me, because I made the intro. And of course whenever I need anything from either of you guys, you already know hey Jordan gave me business I’m gonna make this happen for him or hey Jordan introduced me to that guy and who gave me all those virtual assistants. That’s great for me. I made a ton of extra money so Jordan needs something from me, or even If I’m gonna just need an introduction to somebody else, I know I can count on you guys.
You guys are now part of my networking circle. Even though I didn’t need anything from you guys I just hooked you guys up with each other. Now that’s very important and most people don’t think that way because they are not thinking 1, 2, 3, 4 steps ahead. They are only thinking what are my immediate needs and how do I meet these at this conference. Or they’re just trying to kill time because they wanna fill their roller decks and that’s one of the biggest mistakes that people make especially entrepreneurs because we’re so focus as a group about getting our own businesses off the ground that we often don’t think about how can we help other people get there businesses off the ground.
And what we realized here at the Art of Charm is when you give people value over and over and over it always comes back to you in abundance because people now are looking for, hey Jordan hooked me up with this person who gave me business, Jordan hooked me up with this guy who gave me virtual assistants and a bunch of expertise. I wonder how I can help him. And they are going at things thinking how can I repay Jordan’s kindness? When they meet somebody who might need my services or can help me with something, I’m the first guy on their mind because I continually network people with one another and there’s a lot of, there’s a fine process to this and I’m gonna break it down for you, if you guys are interested.
Owen: Go ahead. Go ahead
Jordan: Sure. So, when I go to a conference, I just went to a conference last week and it was amazing. It was absolutely incredible and it was in Washington DC. And there were a lot of non-profits there. There were a lot of marketing experts there. Bill Clinton and Russell Simmons were there. It was really exciting. It was! There were a lot of people there that were amazing and a lot of them I’d say even most were really outside of the circle of people that could help me and my company with our immediate needs. Now me and my business partner AJ were working the whole room. We met hundreds of people throughout the course of the week long conference. We attended a lot of the talks.
But what we also did was we set up private bar nights were we might grab a couple of guys that we’ve just met and go out for drinks somewhere else. We might grab dinner with a few people that we have met and go separately from the main dinner or even before or after the main dinner and hang out and get to know each other. And we weren’t thinking about, okay how can these people help me, how can we help them. We were just trying to become friends with one another and thinking about how we can keep there needs in mind because when we need the other people through out the course of the conference we’re gonna be able to connect them.
So now we have people all over the United States, well actually all over the world just from the past week alone who are looking at us thinking, these guys knows everyone. If I need anything I go to Jordan, and I go to AJ. And this has been great because now we’ve got people who wanna promote our iPhone application. We’ve got people who wanna help us market our website. We’ve got people who wanted to help us rewrite our sales copy and they want to do it for free or for low cost because I’ve sent them so much business over the past couple of days alone by connecting them with others that I’ve done and met the exact same way, that they’re very thankful for what we have done for them.
Jordan: Now, giving value is a great way for you to help other people and for you to create what we call Social Capital.
Owen: Okay.
Jordan: Now a lot of people especially entrepreneurs are thinking, well I don’t have a lot of money. I’m bootstrapping man! I can’t pay for a sales copy to be written. I can’t pay to review my website. I can’t pay to use teaching facilities or office facilities outside my home market. Right now I’m in New York City and we’re base out of LA normally during the rest of the year. So where am I teaching? Well we’re teaching at a teaching facility that’s being supplied by somebody that we met and they’re giving it to us at a great deal, a great discount. Why are they doing this? Well because we offered to get rid of some of their other properties during down time by connecting them with other people that we know needed them.
How do we know those people? Well we have huge roller decks, a huge network of people. Not that just we can call out of the blue, “Hey man, remember me last year? I met you at this conference and we were in the elevator.” No. It’s, “Oh yeah, sure Jordan I remember you. We went paint balling, or we went for a walk in DC during the break on this conference when everybody else’s brains were burnt.” You know, we needed to relax, we needed a beer.
These people know about my company. They know my target audience. They know my target market. They know how I market and I know exactly the same things about all of them and I keep them in my Salesforce database along all with my others sales leads and all my other customers. So they’re all well organized and whenever I need anything I can type in keywords. If I need sales copy, I type in sales copy and I’ve got a bunch of all star copywriters that I could probably never afford on my own who are willing to bend over backwards and help me out because they know that I hooked them up with so many other people and so much other business in the recent past that they can’t wait to make it happen.
So a lot of people need a lot of money to make those kinds of connections to get those connections with people, to get that kind of social capital. But we’re actually printing that money by creating what we call social capital. We have the connections. We don’t need the money to make the connections. We make the connections which eventually have led to the money afterwards. Everybody else seems to be doing this backwards. I need money to pay for the website. I need money for sales copy. I need money to travel for business. I need money to run my marketing overseas. It’s actually the other way around.
You need to know people first. And once that happens, once you know people then they’ll help you make more money and they’ll come much more easily than it would be if you tried to buy those types of connections. People, at the end of the day they just want to do business with their friends. They do business with people that you like. People buy you. They don’t buy your product, they don’t buy your service. They buy you.
Owen: You’re right! I totally enjoyed those points, you just made a lot of points and one other thing that stood up to me was the fact that when you go this networking meetings your trying to figure out not only how you just introduce yourself to them but how can you generally deliver value to them not only that what you guys do. You find a way to make sure that you give value to them so that makes them remember you. You have to figure out a way in which they’ll remember you, like how you said you take them out somewhere else and genuinely try to get to know them. I like those points.
Jordan: It’s really important that you’re genuinely trying to get to know people because say you meet somebody who’s at the top of your industry, maybe you’ll meet the guy who runs freelancer.com who’s actually somebody that I met at the conference in DC. He runs the largest outsourcing website in the entire world as far as I know. But I still don’t know how to use that website very well so I would come to you Owen for some expertise on finding virtual assistants that are trustworthy and are not gonna run off with my intellectual property or a myriad of other problems that come along with hiring a VA without expertise from someone like you.
Now, if I’m also in the same sort of outsourcing market space, he would be a valuable connection. But if I just chase after him and try to figure out how he can help me, he’s gonna smell that because successful entrepreneurs, we can sense a Value Leech. We can smell a value leech a mile away. We can sense that from a mile away. If somebody’s coming up and says, “Hey listen man, I don’t want coaching from you guys, or I don’t need to take your class. But I do just want to get to know all the stuff that you guys teach and then just spend some time with you but I don’t want to pay for it.” All I’m thinking is this guy’s just trying to get, he’s just trying to get into our business model, just trying to get value from us and make it happen without actually paying.
Owen: Can you hold on for a minute? Because I have the alarm ringing, so I’m gonna hold it for now. Okay! Go ahead. You said something about the “Value Leech”, explain that.
Jordan: Sure! Successful entrepreneurs can smell a value leech a mile away and so, when you make contact with someone who is at the top of your industry, or someone who’s doing well in your industry, or even in another market space, those people are approached all day everyday by people who are trying to sell them something. Whether it’s a service or a product, or whether they just want to get in to their market or even their company. Everyday people say “Hey Jordan do you have internships at The Art of Charm?” Sure we do. But we only hire people who have come to our programs because then I can make sure that they believe in what we do.
They don’t just want free coaching in exchange for sending email or filing papers. So, what you need to do, or what we all need to do as entrepreneurs is figure it out how we can get on the radar of the people who are most successful in our space and the way to do that, getting in the radar in a good way as opposed to get into the radar as somebody to avoid because we just want something form them.
Owen: I totally understand.
Jordan: Exactly. So, what we want to make sure we do is give them value. So if I meet somebody who’s on the top of the market space that I want to get into, I think immediately to myself how can we help this person with their goals? I want to find out who they sell to. I want to find out who is also in the market space, so their competitors. What their competitors have that they don’t have and what they have that their competitors don’t have and what that they could actually use that I could possibly supply. And a lot of times this is the challenge.
A lot of times they don’t know they think,” oh you know what man I’m fine. I got a lot of business. There’s tons of people buying from my website. I don’t really need anything, unless you have skills in marketing which I don’t really personally have.” But what if I know somebody who writes a great sales copy or who runs an advertising network and I can say, “Hey man, you know what, if you’re looking at buying some CPC or CPN advertising this guy over here actually buys wholesale CPN or CPC.
So you don’t have to go and buy them through your normal advertising channels. This guy might save you a hundred thousand dollars a year out of your million dollar advertising budget by lowering the price by 1 cent. And that guy’s gonna remember that I’m the guy who hooked that up for him. So when I want a discount, or when I need anything or even again another introduction from him, he’s gonna be more than happy to supply that to me. And the reason is, because I thought of how I can give him value first rather that how I can convince him to give value to me. That’s the key distinction.
Owen: Totally understand. And you know how sometimes as small businesses we have consumers as our clients or businesses as or clients (business-to-business or B2B), I’m sure there’s difference in the way which an entrepreneur actually provides value to both the consumer type client and the business type client. What’s the difference in that? In terms of the value it represents.
Jordan: That’s an interesting question. When we’re talking about marketing and or presenting ourselves to other entrepreneurs we’re thinking how we give value to that person first. How we can make sure that we’re helping them first. That’s the same for customers. And here’s a great analogy, or here’s my analogy. You decide whether or not it’s good! If you tell your customers, “Listen man, if you give me five thousand bucks, I will change your life!” All they’re thinking about is what? Whoo, five thousand bucks is a lot of money. But what If I say I can teach you these skills that are gonna change your entire life. They’re gonna make your business successful. They’re gonna make you successful. Then they’re thinking, that sounds great! I really need that. How much is it?
Now they’re already thinking about that they need it and then price is another factor. Whereas opposed to you presenting the price first and then you’re venturing to overcome the objection that you’ve just programmed into your potential customer. Now business and marketing, business to business is exactly the same as working with a potential customer. The only difference that would most likely be present is that, business to business, barter is a much better option if you can do it than with a customer of course you would need to make revenue somehow so a customer is somebody who is going to pay for your services. But occasionally a customer turns into a business to business contact. For example we wanted an iPhone application. So I emailed a couple of iPhone developers and I said, “Hey, take a look at my website. See if you can develop an application based on what we do. I’m tuning into your ideas. I pitched that to about five or six iPhone developing companies.
All of them had pretty good ideas about how we could do that. But one of them came back and said, “This sounds so interesting and me and my programmers need your services so much. We’ll develop your iPhone application for free.”
Owen: Yeah.
Jordan: “In exchange for you guys letting us come and take your programs for free and we need four seats at your program and we’ll give you twenty eight thousand dollar iPhone development for free.” And so now we have an iPhone application that we never really could have budgeted for originally. Now we are getting that, in exchange for our own services. So we’re basically providing services at cost. They’re providing services at cost.
So rather than trying to sell a bunch of programs to make up the cost of an iPhone development and then paying that to that company, we’re exchanging on a much more efficient level. Because, and not taking it too philosophical out here but money was invented specifically for the purposes of replacing barter because trade often couldn’t involve barter back at the day when you imported goods and things like that to and you couldn’t load all of that in the ship. You need gold to trade because you couldn’t barter. The guy in Portugal couldn’t barter services with the people in South America directly because it was too far away. People invented money as a surrogate, essentially. Now we don’t have to do that anymore. We have the internet.
Owen: Yes.
Jordan: We can supply services. Business to business, or person to person immediately. There is no border that’s gonna be too much, depending on the service and we have some virtual assistants who are doing project work for us for free because they’re getting certain help from my business team that they couldn’t afford all the way over there in the Philippines and we just needed manual labor or design help or whatever.
So, take money out of the equation and everything becomes much more efficient and much fairer. That iPhone developer could never have sold us that application for less than twenty five thousand dollars because, then his other customers would have been complaining or his coders would have been complaining not being paid enough. But now we are giving them a service that’s valued to them more highly than it is to us and they are providing us a service and a product that is valued to us more highly than it is to them. If you did have to measure it in my trade terms.
So when we take money out of the equation and you go back to barter, you end up being much more efficient in your transactions and a lot of entrepreneurs don’t realize this especially when you’re bootstrapping and your income level essentially fluctuates and you might have to eat ramen noodles for a month if you want to get an iPhone application. You don’t have to do that anymore. There’s going to be something that you can supply to that vendor that there going to find it valuable. And if you can’t do it, the best thing you can do is supply the social capital or the networking connections, the referrals that they need to make there business better and then they can repay you with that service that you need. So social capital is just like printing money but nobody does it.
Owen: Okay. That’s been very very wonderful in terms of what you’ve said. I mean, I’m very sure that my audience will actually want to get a hold of you. I really enjoyed the interview. So, tell us how exactly can they get hold on you?
Jordan: I am at TheArtOfCharm.com and people can actually email me on Jordan@theartofcharm.com I ‘m very reachable. That’s another thing I was gonna talk about but we ran out of time. I’m very accessible. I engage on
Facebook. I engage on twitter. The office actually has a phone that people answer. I answer all my emails so Jordan@theartofcharm.com is the best way to reach me and don’t forget theartofcharm.com Not just artofcharm.com.
So Jordan@theartofcharm.com. Happy to answer questions. Happy to do business to business type stuff as well. And of course if you’re dating or relationship life could use a tune up or you’re looking for specific trainable skill set to how to network in business, we’re available in New York and Los Angeles to teach seminars on this and I’m more than happy to spread the love. For sure to the audience as well.
Owen: Jordan I totally enjoyed this interview and I’m very sure that my audience will have questions for you.
Jordan: Absolutely. Thank you very much Owen. I appreciate it.
Owen: Thank you very much. I’m gonna end the call and…
We’ll I hope you enjoyed the interview with Jordan Harbinger on networking. I want to know, what did you learn? Did you learn something new? ‘Cause when I did this interview I learned a lot, because networking itself involves you actually finding ways to show genuine interest in the other person’s ideas, in the other person’s what the other person is doing.
When you’re networking it’s really not about you. I want you to leave your comments and suggestions. ‘Cause I want to know what you learned from this interview. And before you go, I want you to do this. I actually have a free e-book, an e-book that’s based on outsourcing and how to hire virtual assistants for your business. It’s titled “The Entrepreneurs guide to running a business in a cloud”. You can get there by going on my blog and clicking on this very link right here, picture of the e-book and when you do click on the link it’s gonna take you to another page where you can go scroll down and enter in your name and your email right here. So I hope you enjoyed the interview and again leave your comments and your suggestions.
Thank you for the show. Thank you.
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