Friend of a Friend . . ._Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your Career

by David Burkus

  Then he started teaching what he knew. Along with a fellow graduate student from a different program, Harbinger started convening meetings and giving lessons to other people in how to build networks. In Ann Arbor, they had attracted a small but loyal following of people wanting to know more about how to succeed with relationships, both personal and professional. Eventually, they started looking for ways to scale. In 2006, Harbinger and his partner got an idea. “There was this new thing called podcasting, where you record a conversation and put it online and people can download it,” he said.23 With that, Harbinger started building an Internet radio show. They had to piece together equipment from music shops, as most microphones weren’t set up to be plugged into a computer, but they made it work and were online shortly thereafter.

  While they built a much larger audience just by taking their conversations online, the podcast also provided Harbinger with a new way to practice his skills in building and maintaining connections: he started looking for experts to come on the show as guests. In many cases, Harbinger simply had to reach out cold to individuals, build rapport quickly, and invite them on the show. But as the audience grew and his roster of past guests grew, he started to realize that making connections between people in his existing network was a much better way both to grow his contacts and to serve his community. “I was floating in these circles now, and yes, I would use the network to help me find the next guests,” he said. “But I also didn’t cut people off if they couldn’t help me. In fact, if they weren’t a good guest, my default strategy was to try and help them.”24 Whenever he met new people, he would map through his own network as he talked to them and try to find someone to connect them with who could help them.

  “Every single person you meet has tremendous potential value to everybody else that you know,” Harbinger said.25 It’s the secret he has been using for ten years to build a top-ranked podcast, The Art of Charm, which now has around 5 million monthly listeners. It’s also the secret he’s used to build his own network nearly as large.

  Harbinger focuses on making valuable connections in and among contacts in his network, and in turn the network feeds him connections that would be valuable guests on his show. When he says every single person has value to someone else, he is using the language of a super-connector. And his life and career testify to the fact that anyone can become one. From a shy kid skipping school because of social anxiety, he became a business owner who (when asked) couldn’t actually count the number of people in his network or his address book. Over ten years, Harbinger has risen to the top of the power law—and so have his show and the business he built around it.

  While we may think our networks are only as powerful as our connections are themselves—like cards in a hand of poker—the research from network sciences offers a different truth. Some people play their hands better because they are holding the entire deck. These super-connectors have developed powerful connections by developing a lot of connections. The ability to become a super-connector isn’t limited to a select few. With time and effort, anyone can become a super-connector, and as we’ll see in the next chapter, it might even get easier the more you work at it.

  From Science to Practice

  As Jordan Harbinger learned, and as Brian Grazer’s Hollywood career demonstrates, a big part of becoming a super-connector is serving the people in your network by connecting others. Being generous with introductions adds value to those around you, but it also makes it more likely that others will reciprocate and be generous in introducing you to their contacts. It’s best if you can make introductions part of your regular routine, aiming for a goal of about one introduction or more per week. If you have never felt comfortable making introductions, here is a helpful format you can utilize in almost any situation, using any medium:

  Start with a brief line introducing each person by name (“John, meet Jane; Jane, meet John”).

  Briefly cover the background of each person (“Jane is . . .”), with roughly a paragraph’s worth of information per person.

  Add a short comment about why you think these two people would benefit from connecting (“You both work in the same industry . . .”).

  End with a brief call to action, specifying what should happen next and who should initiate it (“John, would you be kind enough to jump on a phone call with Jane in the next week?”).

  Depending on the busyness of one party or the other, you can adapt this format to a “double opt-in” introduction. Here you reach out privately to each person first (using information from steps 2 and 3); once both people consent, your actual introduction will be even shorter (mostly just information from steps 1 and 4).

  In addition, once introductions become part of your routine, you will regularly start thinking about your existing network when you meet new people. When making introductions has become almost second nature, you will be acting like a super-connector in your current network and be well on your way to growing a super-connector’s network.

  Practicing Online

  While some social media services make introductions even easier, enabling you to link to people at the push of a button, it’s best to stay away from these options. If you are not comfortable sending each person an email introduction, then your relationship to one or both of them probably isn’t strong enough. If so, introducing them via social media is more likely to be seen as an annoyance than a benefit.

  For a downloadable template to use when completing this exercise, go to http://davidburkus.com/resources/ and look for networking resources.

  —7—

  Leverage Preferential Attachment

  Or

  Why the Most Connected People Tend to Stay That Way

  We tend to look at super-connectors, with their large-scale networks, and marvel at how much work it must take to build and maintain such a collection of contacts. But research reveals a surprising fact about connections: they get easier to make over time. The more connections you have, the more likely you are to make new connections. So building a valuable network might seem like a lot of work now, but eventually it will become effortless.

  WHEN THE BANK CALLED Jayson Gaignard about his business loan, he didn’t think much of it. They were calling in his loan and demanding that he pay in full immediately. It was a little bit of a problem, but not one he couldn’t overcome. He had built the company on a substantial cash flow, so paying the bank wasn’t much of a problem.

  But what happened after that was.

  Gaignard’s business, Tickets Canada, had started as a concierge service for wealthy customers in the Toronto, Ontario, area. “If it was legal, moral, and it would save you time, we’d take care of it,” Gaignard explained.1 The service fielded a variety of different requests—some of them right up against that legal/moral line—but over time the majority of his customers started asking for help buying concert tickets in particular. This was a reasonable request since dinner reservations and tickets were standard add-ons when booking the services of a hotel concierge. When demand for concert tickets grew so high that Gaignard’s company had become the second-largest ticket wholesaler in Canada, it rebranded itself as Tickets Canada.

  The business was going well, drawing in around $6 million per year in revenue, but Gaignard wasn’t happy. He didn’t feel like the business was making much of an impact on the world, and preparing the business for sale would take another year of work to install the systems needed for someone to run the business without him at the center. And the bank calling in the loan didn’t help that much either. But because of their cash flow, he was able to pay off the loan easily; they would just have to buy less inventory for a time and then work their way back.

  Then Gaignard got another phone call. This call was from his merchant services provider. Because the majority of the business ran on credit card transactions, there was always a risk of charge-backs and disputed charges. Gaignard’s company had historically low rates of charge-backs, especially for the tickets industry. Nonetheless, the merchant services
company had decided that ticket businesses were high-risk and announced that, effective immediately, it would be keeping 100 percent of credit card revenues in its escrow for a full six months in case of charge-backs. With one phone call, Gaignard’s cash flow had effectively slowed to a dribble. To stay in business, he started taking on debt once again. After taking on $250,000 in loans, and still waiting on their income to come out of escrow, his business was effectively done.

  Gaignard needed a new plan. He had bet his last chips and lost, and even those in his own network started looking at him as bad luck. Eventually, no one was returning his calls. He had, as he counted it, zero people in his network. “I got married in 2012,” Gaignard explained, “and the only two people who showed up at my bachelor party were my brother and my future brother-in-law.”2 Everyone had pretty much left him. He needed a way to start over, not just with a new business but with a new network.

  “I was sitting in a workshop with Seth Godin in New York,” Gaignard recalled. A friend had given him his spare ticket to the workshop. “And Godin told the story of a man named Thornton May. The gist of the story is that May was in business development for an IT firm and realized that CIOs were often disconnected from their peers. So Thornton started visiting different big cities and working to connect the CIOs via events, breakfasts, dinners, etc. Nothing in it for him at first, but as he became known as the host of these events, the CIOs started sending him business.”3 Gaignard wondered if a similar tactic might work for him—it might be a way to rebuild his network and to find his next business idea.

  So he started planning dinners. His idea was quite simple. Gaignard felt that entrepreneurs were some of the loneliest people in business. Not lonely because they had no one to interact with, but lonely because they rarely had the chance to interact with other entrepreneurs. He would start hosting dinners to change all of that. Of course, there was one problem. He didn’t really have much of a network with entrepreneurs. He had been so busy building his tickets business that he had let relationships fall by the wayside.

  Without a community of entrepreneurs already built, Gaignard had to find one. Fortunately, he had a pretty good list to pick from. Every year in Canada, Canadian Business magazine publishes its Profit 500 list—the top 500 fastest-growing companies in Canada. Gaignard simply cold-called the entrepreneurs on that list who lived near him and made his pitch. “I’m doing a dinner for the Profit list alumni. If you’re interested, let me know,” Gaignard would say. He lost count of how many cold calls he made, but he got eight commitments for his first dinner.

  As quickly as he had momentum, however, Gaignard almost lost it. His nerves started to get the better of him. “I almost canceled two hours prior. I was so worried that no one would see the value in it and would think I’d wasted their time,” he recalled. He worried about being twice labeled a failure. But just the opposite happened. The evening was a huge success. From the moment his guests arrived, the conversations didn’t skip a beat. Gaignard had created a cluster of entrepreneurs who immediately recognized the value of having a small insider group in which to share challenges and advice—even if they all came from different businesses in different industries. “We had people from tech, we had another who had a moving business, another guy in the office furniture business,” Gaignard said. “And I knew from this one dinner that connecting entrepreneurs—connecting people—was something that energized me and that I could spend my life doing.”4

  After a few more dinners and a few more successes, word about Gaignard’s “Mastermind Dinners” began to spread. Demand began to grow. And so did his network. Former guests would refer new guests, and Gaignard also kept cold-calling new potential guests. But he was looking for a way to scale it faster—not just his own network but the whole network of entrepreneurs he was building.

  Also, keeping everything together was getting costly. Gaignard was picking up the tab for these dinners, he was still carrying his debt from his last businesses, and new money wasn’t coming in. “My wife, my daughter, and I were basically living off of American Express gift cards,” Gaignard said. But to him it was worth it. “I kept thinking that the bank can take my car, they can take whatever assets I have, but they can’t take my relationships.”5 Eventually, Gaignard figured, those relationships would turn up a revenue opportunity. Little did he know that the relationships would turn into the revenue opportunity.

  After a successful run of Mastermind Dinners, Jayson stumbled upon a unique opportunity. A best-selling business author who rarely spoke in public was offering to speak at any event provided that the event planners purchased 4,000 copies of his newest book. The author was in a hurry, however, and wanted to do the deal right away; in effect, it was first-come-first-served. At first, Gaignard thought of a friend in his newly formed network of entrepreneurs who would be interested. However, he worried that by the time he got a hold of that friend someone else would have claimed the offer. So Gaignard emailed the author quickly and claimed the package for himself. Now he just needed to find $84,000 to purchase 4,000 books.

  Thinking through his network, he thought of three new connections who would be interested in helping him plan an event and make a return off of the book investment. The first turned Gaignard down after he couldn’t provide any estimates or projections (the business idea was only a few hours old). The second person was interested in the idea, but only as a first step in a larger business (but Gaignard didn’t know where any of this would lead). The third contact was the charm. He listened intently to Gaignard’s pitch, then responded, “Swing by my office tomorrow to pick up a check.” He would loan Gaignard the money, but with no contract, no repayment terms, just a handshake agreement.

  With the money, and eventually the books, Gaignard expanded on his Mastermind Dinners concept and created an event he labeled “Mastermind Talks.” The idea was simple. Just as the dinners brought together about a dozen entrepreneurs to make connections and talk shop, his event would bring together 100 entrepreneurs for the same level of connection-building and experience-sharing. And just like the dinners, the event was a huge success. Not only did it strengthen the network of entrepreneurs in the community, but planning and executing the event dramatically increased Gaignard’s network as well.

  Since that first day, Gaignard has made Mastermind Talks an annual event. The event is capped at 150 entrepreneurs, and from one year to the next, only around 75 to 80 people are allowed to return—the rest are encouraged to rotate off to allow new people to enter the community. That rotation accelerated the process of building Gaignard’s network even more. “The majority of our new attendees come from the referrals of previous attendees,” Gaignard said.6 So with each entrepreneur who attends, Gaignard’s network expands two- to threefold as attendees recommend new people.

  Jayson Gaignard wasn’t always a super-connector. In fact, he dislikes the term. But today he has a super-connector’s network. His contact list numbers in the tens of thousands—a significant increase from having only two people at his bachelor party. As Mastermind Talks continues, Gaignard’s network grows itself. Instead of actively seeking to add new connections, he now sees his role as pruning and strengthening to enhance the quality of his relationships inside of the Mastermind Talks community, not just adding to the quantity of it. “When I started out, the second time, it was me pushing hard for the first few years. I was joining other communities, going to networking events, doing everything I could to try and meet people,” Gaignard said. “Now we’re at the point where demand for Mastermind Talks, referrals of new attendees from previous guests, means my network grows exponentially and organically. So my focus now is more the pruning of it and going deep with certain individuals to build the best community around me.”7

  Gaignard became so focused on community and connections because his path to becoming super-connected taught him the importance of relationships. After the first event, Gaignard was quickly able to repay his $84,000 handshake loan. When he did, he asked his lend
er a question: “I was a quarter of a million dollars in debt. I was the worst investment you could ever make. Why’d you do it?” The entrepreneur’s reply was simple. He wasn’t investing in the business idea. He was investing in Gaignard. “At that point, two things became clear. One is that you never know the value of your network until you need it. And two is that when you hit rock bottom, you’ll be left with only two things: your word and your relationships.”8

  Beyond the importance of these two factors, Gaignard’s experience also outlines a surprising truth about connections and communities. While we might look at people with large-scale networks and marvel at how much work it must take to build and maintain such a large network, the truth is that it gets easier over time. As your network grows, as the number of your connections increases, the process of meeting new people becomes easier. Not because you get more practiced at making introductions, but because introductions are more likely to find you. It’s a phenomenon that network scientists call preferential attachment, and it explains why the most connected are most likely to stay that way, but also why building your network will take less and less work over time.

  The Rich Get Richer, and the Connected Get More Connected

  That there is a connection between how many contacts you have and how likely you are to meet new people shouldn’t surprise anyone. We have been using phrases like “the rich get richer” for some time now to discuss how initial advantages beget more advantages. In sociology, there is even a term for it: the Matthew effect. The term comes from a puzzling passage in the Bible, in the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus says: “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”9