SNM116: How to Build a Podcast Empire with Jordan Harbinger from Art of Charm

speaker 0: 0:00 on today's episode, I interviewed Jordan Harbinger, the man behind the art of charm podcast. Strap in your seatbelts and grab a notebook. You're going to want to take notes on this episode. Jordan breaks down how to launch a killer podcast and how networking helped him leave behind a big law firm in New York to build his own empire. Today's episode is brought to you by ECM Rush started in 2008 with one mission.

To make online competition fair and transparent, with equal opportunities for all. To find out how SCM Rush can help you compete with the big boys. Go to serve no master dot com Backslash ECM rush today. Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now Thank you've come to the right place.

Welcome to serve no master pod where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host, really excited to finally have you as a guest on my show since I've been on your show twice, many, many moons ago. And I can't wait. Thio, hear your side of things.

We met through networking, so I thought I'd be a great opportunity to bring on someone who's just a true master networker and built his entire business through social connections. And I'd love to hear a bit of your story, how you transitioned from your previous career, working in the corporate sector and taken over and being your own boss. Sure, yeah, I have a happy tune. I started as a Wall Street attorney, and I essentially got hired there through a friend of a friend.

I had good grades and I had greats notes in law school, and I basically had been going by this strategy of Fly by the seat of my pants because I was an irresponsible kid for the most part. And I showed up Thio basically what it was back in the day. This is like 5 4006 All of the companies that were hiring lawyers would recruit you. They'd set up shop in a hotel.

There'd be like four days of interviews that ar 15 20 minutes long, And then you get call backs from the firms that were interested in you. And you had to do this dumb thing because of course, this is the University of Michigan Go blue. But this place was hell bent on not just letting everybody go for the ones they wanted to. They had to make it quote unquote fair. So you have to prioritize which firms you wanted and then they would assign you these limited spaces.

So I showed up without having booked anything cause I was overseas working at the time, I literally just didn't book anything. I just decided I'm not I'm not doing this. I'm not going Thio play by this game. And naturally, I had just no interviews, no shot at anything. And I I started rolling around looking for openings and looking for who is who is a no show. And I got a couple interviews that way, and I ran into an old friend of mine.

He said, Oh, you know, my own roommates here, you should go say hi and I said, Great, what room? And he said, Oh, he's helping the partner recruit from our school in room. Whatever. 207 So I show up there. It's lunchtime and he says, Give me your resume, Jordan. I'll throw in the pile. Then I said, Ah, yeah, cool. I don't really have an interview lined up. He goes, Hold on. And he asked the partner if I could interview with him while he was eating lunch.

So I did my first job interview over a subway sandwich where I watched somebody else eat lunch. I should say, and I ended up getting this job and I thought, Wow, that's this really weird concept of Social capital action. And then when I worked at the law firm itself, the guy had hired me. Dave. He was never in the offices guy from Brooklyn with a tan, and I thought, This is strange, Like, what does he know that I don't know.

So I asked him one day and he said, Look, I bring in deal flow. I don't have to build ours as much because I'm bringing in deals and that's worth more than simply billing hours. And we did the math and I figured out that his time was actually more valuable outside the firm than it was inside the firm because if he brings in a $1,000,000 law deal, the math worked out to something ridiculous, like $1000 an hour or something for his time.

I mean, it was just ludicrous what this guy was worth when you broke it down in an hourly basis. And he wasn't. This wasn't $1000 an hour working behind a desk on a Sunday night with all the other partners. This was $1000 an hour on a golf course or at a charity dinner. So I had originally been accustomed outworking. Everyone had originally been accustomed to being one of the smarter guys in high school.

That's what got me through high school outworking Everybody got me through college and law school. And now here I am where everybody who's working on Wall Street has been filtered in for those qualities in the playing field is again even and David given me a heads up as to look, this is the secret. This is a secret path, right to get into the top. This is the game that everybody else at the top level is playing that you learn about basically wants its too late.

And this is the same for every industry. You learn about the network that you needed a tow, have after you got passed up for a promotion or something like that. And then you have a temper tantrum about how it's all about who you know. And it's not fair instead of doing what I started doing, which is realizing that I'm oblivious to the secret game being played around me, and I want to learn the rules and I want to make it happen.

And so I started dedicating just my entire life to figuring out How do I create social capital, make friends leverage relationships and keep those relationships fresh enough where if I need anything from these particular interactions with these relationships, I can get it because otherwise you end up being that bitter 40 something year old guy or girl who goes, Yeah, it's all about who you know, and you put stank on the end of it. You know, I want you to go all right.

I've got an advantage that most people aren't even paying attention to at all. I love that car. Your story you said one term in there that that's interesting social capital using a couple of times and maybe explain what that means. Sure. So what I mean by Social Capital is essentially I've got relationship referral currency.

I've got personal relationships and friendships, familial relationships, favors and trades, those all kind of lump into social capital because referral currency, where I say, Hey, Jonathan, I hooked you up with this business guy. I was hoping you could hook me up with this other business guy. Friends do that. You referring a connection. That's all fine and good.

But there's something to be said for Social Capital, which isn't a bigger circle on the Venn diagram, where his referral currency has to do with mutual introductions and is a part of social capital. Social capital is every relationship that you have personal or business, every everyone that owes you one everyone, that you owe one every speaking engagement that you can get.

Everybody who knows you is included in that the platform that you use, such as my show, the art of charm more by I use social capital to both get guests, and I use that platform to gain social capital or referral currency. So it's basically just any type of networking or relationship or inter workings of those things in between those things.

And, of course, it's just easier to say social capital than to, say, referral currency and dot, dot, dot, for other concepts that tend to be lumped together, especially when you're new to this. It just sounds.

And I don't like the word networking, because what that sounds like is a dirty word where you show up at some lame o networking event sponsored by Meet up or whatever, and you hand out as many business cards as you can and then go get a burger, which is a terrible way to dio try to build relationships. So I don't like using that word because it's been tainted.

It's been shat upon too many times, and so we don't use it, really, because it's it's got a negative stigma attached to it. I usually say juice instead of social currency. It's like, Oh, I've got some juice with those people. I've got some juice in that industry. So now you're working as a lawyer, and you found out that you could make more money as a lawyer, not loitering, but networking or social currency exchanges.

How did you again to move forward in your career from that point when you learn that critical lesson? What essentially happened here is I was working for the firm. I started creating relationships, dedicating my time to that. And this is 6 4007 Shortly thereafter, we hit just a crazy economic crisis is everyone is sure remembers.

And what happened from there is that instead of letting us go his first year associates, which would have been just a major black mark on the firm's reputation, they just decided to pay us for the next. I think 11 months and basically we're giving us less and less work and eventually said, Look, you don't even need to show up. You guys need to go start your career at another firm.

We're gonna help pay for job search service is and all this other stuff and I just went, Look, I'm already running the yard of charm. I've been doing it for a few years. It had been a side gig that was slowly scaling, and here is the perfect opportunity. A salary and full benefits from a Wall Street firm for the next 10 months. Talk about great Runway. And so I basically took my salary and invested in the company and never went back.

That sounds like a dream come true. It was like winning the lottery, except I want a smaller amount of money that kept us alive all the way through the very first beginning stage of the relationship. It's funny because people go, Oh, man, you wasted all that time in law school and I agree, Like I spent a lot of money in law school.

I spent a lot of time in law school, but at the end of the day, it was the runway that I needed to start the company. Because if you count law school in which is where we started art of charm, and then you go through that year that we left, that I've left law school and worked.

You're looking at a 3 to 4 year runway that was just paid for first in loan money that I paid off later, and and then in the salary that I was paid by the firm, I wouldn't have been able to start the company otherwise So getting laid off from my first job out of college was the best thing that ever happened to me. You started the art of charm. And then you launched your podcast.

I think around the same time, you know, I've been listening for almost 10 years to your show and watching it really grow. You get some really amazing guests. How did you start out? How did you grow to having one of the biggest, most successful podcast I know? For a while, you guys even had a radio show. Yeah, we were on satellite radio for a while. This month is the 10 year anniversary of the art of charm. So it took forever.

When we first started, nobody knew what a podcast was. So I got all kinds of nasty replies and also just got straight up, ignored by a lot of people, some mutual friends of yours in mind from back in the day, like some of the weirdo crew that you and I used to run with would say things like Lose my number. I'm out right now or something like that.

And it was kind of funny because of course, years later and not too many years later, those same people were like, What do I need to do to get on your show? And I just remember thinking, Maybe show a little bit of love and respect and it just took forever to get things off the ground. But yeah, now I had Tony Hawk the pro skater on I had General McChrystal. Come on the show.

Gary Vaynerchuk, Peter Diamandis There's a lot of people that don't even go on Small TV show's coming on the show now it's It's been it's been great, but yeah, it's been a 10 year slog. Do people often approached you and asked to be guests? Or is it more? Each guest is someone you seek out. Each guest is somebody that we seek out. We get pitched a lot, but now you can imagine there's this whole like influence or economy. There's all that.

There's some sort of pride attached to being a quote unquote thought leader and essentially a lot of the people that come and pitch our self published, but not that there's anything wrong with that. It just means that their audience is not going to be large enough to make this a really high value peace. And there's a lot of people who are offended right now, saying just cause I don't have a great audience doesn't mean I don't have great content.

You might have great content, but why should I gamble on it? Right? And this is exactly what I went through when I first started the show, So I try to be as kind about it. It's possible, but I also realized that if I continually give interviews or give a platform or give our platform to everybody that wants it, it's doing a disservice to the audience, which is much larger than the one person who wants to sell their latest thing.

So it's a fine balance, and you really do have to be very, very careful who you get and frankly, people who are super accessible and are on a PR terror going to be on every show. I'm sure that you've noticed there's a trend in these entrepreneur shows that it's like everybody has a show where they interview entrepreneurs and every single one of them asked the same set of pre scripted questions, and they turn their show, which is their platform, an integral part of social capital.

They turn it into a commodity where it's just like the other show that has the other person doing the exact same thing. You hit on something there that really connects with me, and I want to dial into that a little bit. There's nothing I hate more than an interview. That's a repeat of another person's interview, where you could almost cut and paste out anyone's questions. How do you design an interview that's unique? How do you come up with questions other people haven't asked?

And how do you make sure that it's got that Jordan art of charm flavor to it? The way that I prepped for shows is just super key. What I used to do and what a lot of show hosts do, especially when they're new, is they go cool and they google the person they find their bio, and that becomes the intro. And then they read the Wikipedia article. If that and that becomes the basis for the interview, I read the Wikipedia.

I read the negative reviews on Amazon. I read their yelp reviews for their business. I read articles that they've written on linked in. I read their entire book. I might read another book that they wrote earlier that they're not currently promoting. I will reach out to my network and ask for their friends, and I can get stories about them that aren't public yet that are maybe really funny. And I will throw that into a document, a Google doc, all those notes.

And then I will go through those notes with my producer a few days before the show, and I will write questions that I have about my own notes. So it takes like, 10 hours, and that goes back to the idea that I'm used to out working people because I've worked on a lot of the skills of presentation and hosting and all those things. But I will tell you that one of the best ways to get ahead is still just good old fashioned hustling out working people.

And it's great to be able to do that because I know that most people who are doing online business are looking for shortcuts or they're looking for ways to scale. And this is their nightmare. Taking a ton of time to prep a piece of content prep that they can't outsource. It's just one of my competitive advantages being able to do all that.

And then I throw, of course the knowledge and questions that I have into that document that I would have from the last 10 years of interviews that I've done in a similar space. That's why we don't have a variety show. It's like today fitness tomorrow. Financial management Now something else. We focus on psychology and human performance and relationships that that's such a narrow area that I can always call B s on somebody who's just blowing smoke.

Because I've read the studies, I've read the other books in their field. I've talked to their their colleagues, the author's Aiken fact check them, if necessary in real time on the show. And then, of course, afterwards, if they say something that doesn't sound right, I can email the world's foremost authority on that subject and get a response. Ah, lot of the time, so people bring their a game, which brings up the quality of the show outside of just my prep.

People know they're not gonna get away with anything, and so they come by without just being on autopilot and giving their spiel. Yeah, I think that's really good. A lot of what I teach my audience will know this. Is that my competitive advantages? Far as people ask, How do I write so many books hot. I create such solid products in areas I don't know, and I always say it's 90% research. I never get writer's block, and it's because I always have the deepest outline possible.

So I think it's the same technique for any type of content. Whoever research is the most creates the best content. Yeah, it can be that level. I mean, of course, the research has to be fit with the ability to present it in a compelling way. But yes, you can. You can do a lot by just putting in the hours, knowing what you're doing and outwork in the competition.

That's for absolutely sure now that you've been going your podcast for 10 years or watching you go from just interview like friends of Friends to now generals and really major celebrities, how has your networking in interactions changed now that you've gone from the guy asking to the guy saying I don't have enough time? One thing to remember is that everybody's always trying to reach up. So I make sure the network across and quote unquote down as well as up because it's very tempting to go.

Oh, I only want to talk to Richard Branson, and it's like, Well, yeah, you and everybody else, But where did you start? So it's very important for you when you get to the top, so to speak, or the middle where one thing most of us are to send the elevator back down for the next guy. And so that means being very giving and very generous.

So my generosity has actually gone up now that I know these principles, because I like to give very freely elected you very generously. I like to scale my networking efforts by introducing people inside my network to each other. So what that essentially means is that the bulk of my networking in relationships have to do with me introducing you to my c p. A. Introducing my lawyer to another potential client. I don't have to do most of the work myself, so that's allowed me to scale.

I'm merely introducing other elements of my network to each other, and that's great because that's infinitely scalable. While almost infinitely scalable. You could send 100 e mails a day introducing people to one another up in until you hire somebody for your company that does that full time if you really wanted to. That's very powerful. And doing so generously is extremely important because when you're at the bottom, you think I don't have enough to give.

You don't want to give a connection to somebody next to you because you're worried they'll get the jump on you at the top. You're not doing that at all. At the top, you're focused on giving much more than you take much, much more. Another thing that I've learned that I rely on heavily is I don't keep score. So if I help somebody with something, I don't think this is quid pro quo. I'm gonna ask them for something later or they owe me something for this.

And I encourage people not to do that either, because it creates weird situations where you're writing covert contracts. This means if I help you with something and I'm keeping score than the next time I help you and if I haven't asked you for anything or if I've asked you for something that you can't provide or you won't provide. For some reason that's valid. I might start to get really irritated.

And I might even say like Okay, well, I'm not helping Jonathan anymore because, you know, I introduced into my C P. A and my lawyer, and then I asked him to introduce me to so and so and he couldn't do it or it didn't work out. That's a bad and unhealthy mindset because it makes your networking and relationships transactional, and that's the opposite of what you want. You don't want to keep score. You want to give very freely.

You want to definitely give in a way that's scaleable for you, and that will help you just skyrocket your results and illustrate this with a little story. When I moved to Los Angeles, I had a toothache and I don't have a car.

I had just moved here and probably still stuff in boxes, and I got a toothache and I went to a bunch of dentists and called a bunch of dentists, and they all said, Look, we don't take new patients or your insurance sucks or go to the E. R. And I thought that this is gonna be a bad situation. So in desperation, I posted on Facebook and I said, Look, how do I How do I get a dentist on short notice? If anybody knows anyone, please help.

I'm dying over here, and this guy that I don't even know commented on my public posts inside. My answer. Dennis in Hollywood, I'm happy to call her and see if she can fit in. So he did that. I wouldn't get my tooth fixed. Of course, I thanked him and he ends up sending me his graphic design portfolio. Now I didn't need a graphic designer and I thought, Yeah, sure, I'll keep my ear to the ground for you and whatever.

But four days later, somebody e mailed me and their Web designer had crapped out and they needed more graphics, heavy, more sort of digital design. So I sent him the portfolio and said, Look, if if this helps, I know this guy. He just sent it to me. No judgments. I haven't worked with them And he said, Great, I'm desperate, Introduced me. That guy ended up getting a full time job for I don't know 70 80 k a year in the city of L.

A doing what he wanted to do. He was literally a barista before that, trying to find a job in his niche. And he got one because he helped me find a dentist on Facebook. So this encompasses the whole give freely and generously A B G is what we call it, always be giving instead of ABC always be closing.

The reason this is so important is because if he were looking for a job, he could have sent that portfolio to literally every person that he knew because we didn't know each other and he wouldn't have gotten that same job because you didn't have that connection. The reason he got that connection is because he helped me find a dentist on Facebook, something that in theory and at that point in time had no possibility of giving him any sort of reward whatsoever.

All he did was refer his aunt who didn't need the business, ended up having to open up early just to help me out with that because she was packed up with patients. They did me a favor and he ended up getting a job from me. The lesson here is that the opportunities are over the horizon. You can't see them until later on. So if he had been thinking what's in it for me instead of, I just want to help this guy?

He wouldn't have ended up with his career. He would have literally had to start his entire career later on, and he would have been stuck doing the barista thing and keeping his graphic design as a hobby instead of his occupation. And that, for me, was a super powerful lesson. That's amazing. I had a very similar story when I was in London and I got my tooth broken kickboxing and a friend of a friend was a dentist and fixed it.

And so I only looked like a monster for half a day. But I didn't have networking. I wouldn't have been able to get my toothpicks. It's amazing. We both have dental stories. You've been doing your show for 10 years now, and that means you've got hundreds and hundreds of episodes. Are there any people that when you first interviewed them, they were so small and now they've grown into something really, really big? Actually, Gary Vaynerchuk, we first eat. We first interviewed him.

I want to say, in 2007 or 2008 he's been going just absolutely bananas working, outworking everybody, working on everything. So, yeah, we were. We met him when he was in a shared office space, and his office was so small that his personal office that if you wanted to get in, you had to, like, move out of the way of the door to close it. You couldn't close the door while you were in it, unless you stepped overto where his desk was.

That's how now he's got his own Manhattan firm with a giant in vain or media. But behind the receptionist desk, it's just absolutely crazy. That's that's one that's become really, really big. Of course, we we interviewed Tim Farris and something like 8 4009 He's done nothing but grow since then as well. So, yeah, there's been a lot of people who we've had on the show that whose profile has since just exploded, and it was great to get in early.

I'll say that looking to the future, where you're gonna go over the next 10 years, what is your vision for art of charm. What's your vision for the podcast? What's your view of the growing landscape of entrepreneurship? Well, for me, I want to focus on growing the show. I love to see the show grow. I love doing the show I love talking about the show. I love teaching the audience on the show so I and focused on that. I really do enjoy it.

I think it's super fun, and I love growing the business that results from the show shooting for bigger and better guests doing bigger and better prep, making the production that much better inches at a time. It's all it's all just a labor of love, and it's just been a blessing to be able to do something like this as my occupation. It's what I wanted to do when I was eight.

Had I paid attention to what I wanted to do when I was eight years old, which is be a talk show host on the radio, I would have saved myself a lot of educational debt, that's for sure, but that's what we're focused on, and I'm very excited about that. Moving forward, We're pushing 2.5 1,000,000 downloads every month, and I'd like to double that.

I know you had that radio show for a while on satellite radio is that's something you want to go back into or doing television or is really podcasting, the medium that's your wave of the future? I really like podcasting because it's quickly eclipsing radio in terms of popularity. I know people go No, there's still 60 million radio listeners. That number is going down. And younger people who are in their millennial generation and generation, why they're not listening to the radio.

Digital media is absolutely the future anybody doesn't see that probably works in radio. I went to a radio conference Ah, few years ago. I gave a panel on podcasting and they let me pick. The panel was just like these random folks that had podcast that they had found and I moderated it. And then afterwards, this radio exact came up and was like podcasts. Those still exists in all of his friends, like chuckled and laughed and everything, and I thought, like whatever.

And I went back the next year to teach radio executives how to shift into the digital medium, and I remember seeing that guy. And I was like, fancy meeting you here. Looks like podcasts are back in force, huh? And he was just like, what? It he had no idea. He was 60 70 years old and just very cocky, like, Oh, people still listen to podcasts. And then he must have gone back.

And at some point in the next few months, somebody put a printed out memo on his desk or sentiment email that went, Here's our market share being eaten to death by free stuff that people are producing in their friend's basement. What do we do about it? And the answer was, try and play a harried game of catch up by hiring guys like me to come and talk to these digital media managers who have no idea how to save a radio brand.

It was kind of this bittersweet thing, cause I thought, Wow, there's a lot of people who are gonna lose their jobs because you thought this was a joke instead of going digital 10 years ago, and now they're paying the price. And so when I look at this, I don't even think about radio being anything even remotely remotely current I mean, satellite radio is great because they have great talent. Stern and all those folks are on there.

But the second those big dogs retire or even just shift into digital media because they can make more doing it there, depending on how much money serious is paying them, that whole service is going to fold. Or it's going to start bringing in podcast talent, which they're already doing in order to make up for the fact that they really can't compete and forget about FM and AM radio.

The only reason those even still exist is because there's a core Kadre of 40 and 50 something people who don't have digital in their car in our tech savvy. But his car manufacturers catch up to the fact that four g constrained things in the car and they put in digital radios and they put in Spotify. It's over. That will be one of the final nails in the radio coffin, and that's already happening.

So if you're running an F M or a M radio station right now, I think they probably already know it's time to look for a retirement plan and a nice place in Florida. a lot of my audience are people that are in phase two of their careers. They're people that are tired of this 9 to 5 grind, and they're looking to move in a new direction.

And a big part of that is breaking into networking and either breaking into new industry or finding people to work with or even using networking to jump to another company. What would you say to people that are not phase in life, how they can start to use networking with strategy to get to their financial or lifestyle goals? Yeah, look, creating and maintaining relationships is the single biggest are comedians lever that you can have. It's a single biggest lever that you can have leverage.

You can have etcetera. There's always the reason we have cliches like it's all about who you know is because we know that relationships dominate the day. This is tribalism. There's evolutionary psychology in here. Relationships are always going to be what differentiates you at the top in the middle. It will be work experience and talent and skill and things like that. But at the very top, it's about relationships and at the very bottom.

It's also about relationships, because when you first start your job, you're about as skilled as the guy or girl sitting next to you in the cubicle next to you. It's about the relationships that create the opportunity to get on the projects. You need to move forward the right teams that you need that you know, we're gonna be the winning teams to work with the right kind of talent that gets to pick their own team.

Those are the relationships that are going to set you apart and get you ahead further in the middle. People tend to work and focus on skills acquisition, and I think people should be doing that the entire time. I don't think you should let your skill set lag by the wayside, but I do think you need to not think, Oh well, in a few years, I should start networking or right after I get my website up, I should start networking for investors or we need a prototype.

You need to dig the well before you're thirsty, and a lot of people do not do that because they're afraid or they think it's gonna be awkward or they don't have a skill set in place or they feel like they're not able to follow up or they're too busy. There's a 1,000,000 excuses, but the problem is like I said in the beginning of the program, if you ignore this skill set for any reason, doesn't matter how valid the excuses in your mind.

You're just being willfully ignorant of the secret game being played around you, and you cannot make up for lost time easily because networking when you need something is not effective. If I start telling people that, Oh, you know, I I really need this opportunity. Who's gonna help me? Somebody I've known for months or years. I've helped them a bunch. I've created a bunch of opportunity for them and with them. We've watched football games on the weekend.

I hate football, but you get the point or we play racquetball or something like that. Is that person gonna help me? Or is it gonna be the person that I called email out of the blue? Because now I'm ready for them to do me a favor?

What's more effective and the answer is so obvious, and yet people will tell themselves excuses all day long about how they don't have time or they don't want to, where they don't want to seem schmoozy, which is a lack of skill and lack of strategy in this area. And it's always, always, always to their detriment. So I would say you need to learn these skills. You need to learn verbal and nonverbal communication.

You need to learn how to follow up with people and on what time scale. You need to learn how to scale your network by offering value and helping people connect with one another and facilitate create a platform where you are able to help other people connect, and if you don't put the work in, you will find out the hard way.

A lot of clients that come through AOC, of course, are young, and we get a lot of that and we get a lot of special forces and intelligence guys and stuff like that and sales people. But we also have our fair share of 30 and 40 something and even 50 something people that come in and go. I've been passed up for a management role three times or two times.

I need to figure out what's going on here because it's not their python skills of their JavaScript skills or their project management skills. There's something else going on here, and they finally realized, Oh, I've been neglecting this skill in favor of hard and technical skills. I've been neglecting these soft skills for a decade or two, and they have to make up for lost time, and there's not that many ways to do that. So dig that well before you're thirsty or you will regret it.

How consumption begin the process and actually discover value. They have to offer people and begin to have a little relationship capital. This is exactly why we say that people need to be introducing folks to other people in their network. So if I'm a graphic designer and you need graphics, I can help you.

But if I'm a graphic designer and you need a dentist, oh, now I can't really help you directly, and that's okay, because if I'm on Lee helping people that I can help directly, we run into a big problem because we've run out of scalability. As I mentioned before, I won't have time to help everybody like that, and I won't have the ability to help everybody like that either.

So you need to figure out how to keep people in your orbit and in your network that you can then introduced to others. So if I'm a graphic designer and you need graphics, great, I can help you. Or I can refer you to somebody who can. If I'm a graphic designer and you need a dentist, will. Now we're back to that origin story, and I need to be able to refer you to somebody or multiple people who might be able to help.

It's not just going to be graphics or a dentist. I mean, I'm looking at helping people who moved to new cities, find social circles and friends. They should meet people in my own town. I look for track. Oh, you're goingto Bermuda. My friend actually owns a place there. Why don't I get you in touch with him? You have to look for ways to connect other people as much as humanly possible.

And the more that you do that, I'd say try to make a couple of introductions every single week. The more that you do that, the more your social capital grows. So if you build that in is a habit, and you actually schedule time on your calendar for an hour a week or something like that to create those introductions.

That will be super helpful, because if you're relying on the fact that you'll remember in the moment or I'll do it when I get a minute, well, we all know what happens to tasks that are someday. Maybe it means never, and so you need to schedule it out and need to look for ways that you can help other people, even if they don't ask you. The way to do that is to anticipate people's needs.

We just hired a writer here, and I don't hire anybody who called pitches me, But this guy wrote in and said, Hi, I noticed the problem on your website. Here's how it would be fixed. I can fix it for you or you can just forward the following instructions. Thio. Whoever's managing your sight. I did that. It worked. That got my attention.

And then he said, Hey, if I wrote an article that you helped me design for your blawg with no links to my own content, just as a thank you for doing the show. Would that be helpful? And I said, Sure, send me a sample and he sent me a sample of his work and it was good. And then he goes, I'm thinking about writing an article about this. This this and this. I've already looked at your website.

You don't include a lot of info there, but it seems very much in line with the branding and the direction that the show's been going recently. And I said, Sure, send me a draft notice In each of these particular interactions, all I have to do is basically just say yes, I don't have to go through and do a bunch of work. I don't have to design something for him that he might screw up.

There's no real time investment, so there's very little space where I can fail. He sends me a draft. I approve it. It goes up on the site. He goes, This is great. I really hope you like it. Can I do a couple more? And I said sure, and he didn't ask for any money. This is still free, he writes. A couple more. They're great. And then he says, if there's anything I can ever do to help you. Please let me know.

I would love to write for you guys here in my rates. I'm also happy to do stuff for free, on and off as sort of one off stuff. If you need somebody else. Otherwise, have a great time here and I'll look for other stuff and I didn't hire him right away. He found another couple little errors on the site. He found a couple little user experience, bugs that we ended up fixing, and I said, All right, this guy's detail oriented.

He can create the product that he knows we need because he's evaluated our business and found that actual need not. Hey, you need this because that's what I'm selling. But I've looked at your site and this is what I can provide. And now he's one of our main writers because I can rely on him. He's very responsive. He gets the brand. He anticipates our needs before I do. That's the kind of person that you want working with you.

I wouldn't have hired him, of course, if his resume said, you can depend on me. Look at all this other stuff. I've done, I wouldn't have given to you know what's about that.

But the fact that he proved it to me was much more powerful than what most people do, which is send me their stinking resume along with a rate card and says, Hey, if you wantto if you wantto have me right for you, here's what I cost and you can go and click on these and read my work. Why would I do that? If you want a job with me, you've gotta figure out how to save me time. I don't have to evaluate you.

It's the other way around, and people who get that are worth their weight in gold. I think that's absolutely brilliant hearing from someone whose hiring it's so useful to hear that someone actually went to that process of starting with the cold email and worked his way up to getting the job you wanted, using the very techniques you're talking about.

Yes, and not only that, but this was somebody who frankly, would have been content enough just to help out the show and just to help out the brand. I realize that's not realistic for every single person, all the time because, frankly, you're trying to get jobs and things like that. But you have to be willing to put yourself out there first and invest first. And that's the thing. A lot of people who email me their stuff or here read this and here's what I cost.

If you want more, that's Onley useful. If I'm looking for commodity writers, if I'm looking for somebody who can string words together, I'm not. I'm not looking for just a writer. I'm looking for a mind reading writer who and what I mean by that is somebody who does all of the work and figures out exactly what I need. And then all I have to do is say yes and signed checks. That's the type of person you want on your team.

And people who understand that those of the signals that employers are looking for are so valuable. You don't have to be a writer. You can be an artist. You could be a virtual assistant. Things like that I get pitches all the time from people are like, Oh, I would love to be your assistant. I've been assistance for these other people. I don't care. I want somebody who's gonna go? Hey, what's your current email workflow? Or here's my email work floor.

Here's how I can make a typical email workflow that much faster. And here are the tools that I used to do it and hear some percentages of speed like measurable takeaway is not just I need a job, and I'm a virtual assistant or an assistant. That stuff doesn't work. It doesn't work to get jobs with high performers. It only works at the low end of the market, and I think everybody listening to your show is trying to get at the top end of the market.

They want to be on the high end of the market. They do not want to be trying to scramble to get gigs at the bottom, because that's where the resume senders are. And those are the people that have to compete on price. I will pay what you are worth, and if you can show me that you're worth a lot, that's what you get.

I get a lot of messages that just say, Hey, you got any work and it's usually one sentence and I'm like, I don't even remember what you do. I don't know if your graphic designer a programmer and you're exactly right. I think the critical component is offering valuer demonstrating that it's not a mass e mail. It doesn't feel very personal, like this person just copying pasting this message into every single sky contact because they're out of money this month. It doesn't feel like anything beyond that.

It's so it's always been a struggle for me to hire people, to find really good talent that can perform the things I want. So I don't want to hire people that I have to heavily manage. I don't have time for that. I don't have time to do my job and check in on someone every two hours.

It has to be somebody who can manage themselves, and I don't know exactly where your audience stands, But I want people who are so independent that they could do it on their own in the flag for that, The green flag I should say for that is somebody who takes the initiative does the work, shows me why I need what they have does the project on spec and proves that I needed that and everybody else is just playing second fiddle and they always will.

So you really have to figure out how to create those relationships and keep them going. And I would say I don't even get one lead like that every year. It's more like one every 2 to 3 years. Do I find somebody who's just awesome? And employers of all kinds will snap those people up as fast as humanly possible.

They will just get that as quickly as they possibly can, because it is such a rare set of qualities I can count on one hand the number of people I've met in the entire 10 years that I've been running, the art of charm that actually fit that that I've worked with. It's so rare. I want to thank you for spending so much time with us, and we've been friends for a long time. But I appreciate you fit me into your schedule.

Yeah, there any last thing you'd like to share with my audience, I know they're going to really excited. I very rarely do interviews out of 100 shows. This is the fourth or fifth interview, so it's to be something really special. Thank you so much, man. It's been awesome to give this rants on your program, and I hope I've helped some of your audience and probably scared a few as well. But them's the breaks. So thanks for the opportunity. Thank you so much.

The stuff you talk about really dovetails with a lot of what we've been sharing as a community the last few months. Now the best place to find you is art of charm dot com, and that's where they can find the podcast as well. That's right, the art of charm dot com slash podcast or, I mean, you're listening to a podcast. Now just go on iTunes or whatever after using and search for the art of charm. And there we are.

Thank you so much for being here, Jordan. It's on honor, as always, to talk with you. And I can't wait to share this amazing episode with my audience. I know they're gonna love it, and they'll send a lot of feedback about how smart and wonderful and eloquent you are. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode.

We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race, head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's best seller, serve no master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow. Thank you for Listen to this episode of the serve. No master podcast. Join me on my Facebook page at facebook dot com Backslash serve no master.