Cultivating Relationships

This is the written script of Halftime, episode 63 of the Makers of Sport® podcast. Halftime was a short show on the off weeks between interviews where I wrote and read on topics in professionalism, entrepreneurship and business for creatives in sport. The episode aired January 18, 2016; the audio is on SoundCloud and the show notes live at makersofsport.com. The show's opening and closing announcements are trimmed here.

As human beings, relationships are vital to our well-being. Even our physical health. It has been proven, that a baby that is never held ends up having serious health issues.

We have relationships with our families, with our friends, with our work colleagues, our clients. We even have relationships with brands and products. Think about your relationship with your iPhone or your favorite sneaker brand.

In today’s Halftime, we’re focusing on human-to-human relationships, how to grow and cultivate them.

Have you ever been to a used car lot and been hounded by some salesman? Even the you’re just trying to look around? How about getting a call from a telemarketer? Has that method of selling ever actually worked? Maybe to someone who is afraid to say no. I feel like many times those are the people telemarketing vipers are targeting.

What about those door-to-door vacuum or alarm sales people? Oftentimes trained to not take no for answer, to be as persistent as possible until they can annoy someone into a “yes”.

The same goes for gym membership sales people. No I don’t want to sign up today, I just want to take a tour of your facilities, see your equipment and maybe get one quick work out in to see how I feel in this place.

How do those types of sales strategies make you feel? Very annoyed, right? But why do people in the creative industry, specifically in sports use these same methods to try and sell themselves or their work?

I can’t tell you how many times I have been tagged in some Instagram post or tweet from a kid editing sports photos in hopes of getting me to retweet their work or to even hire them. How many of you have reached out to guests on this show immediately after their interview when they give our their contact info and tried to pitch your portfolio and get freelance work from them? Has it ever actually worked? My bet is no.

These types of sales strategies are the equivalent of meeting a girl or guy and asking them to become your significant other on the same day. We don’t know each other. Why would we go into business together when I have no clue who you are? I’m speaking theoretically here but you get the point.

Sociological studies have shown that we work around 90,000 hours in our lifetimes. We also spend roughly 40% of our waking hours at work. If that is the case, what makes anyone think that a cold, selfish email or twitter pitch would work?

Every week I get an email from someone telling me they’d “be glad to come on podcast”. The problem is, I didn’t ask them. They just want to use the platform I spend so many hours working on to self-promote.

There is nothing wrong with self-promotion. You should just consider how you go about doing it.

In my 15 years since high school graduation, I’ve discovered that I am not the type of person that is comfortable with the hard sell. Or the whole used car salesman sell. Maybe it’s the ENFP in me, but I would much rather take as much time as it takes getting know someone, and having that person hire me based on their discovery of my intelligence, my personality, our ability to connect to one another and lastly my work, rather than their inability to say no to my persistence.

Through 60 episodes of this podcast, one theme has been consistent and it rings true for my own personal story as well, our careers are about connections and relationships. Each person interviewed on this show got where they are because they met someone, developed a relationship and remained patient rather than annoying their way into a gig.

This is why we must take time to get to know people we want to develop relationships with and eventually work for or with. Social media has definitely opened up new avenues for this, but oftentimes we can become to hasty and make a move too quick. This can make things awkward when you are cultivating a relationship, and not super close yet, but make a move on getting work. It can make the other person feel they are being used and that you don’t actually value them as a person — that they are just a meaningless rung on your ladder of success.

You should take time to network and head to professional events, and strike up conversations with people that you're interested in. Even if you're ultimately interested in where they work and possibly getting some freelance from them or a job at their place of employment, you should never jump the gun resulting in a false start to use a track and field analogy. Many times, developing these relationships are beneficial even if work from that particular person or company never pans out. Your cultivating a long-standing reputation with that person gaining the respect, their trust, and potentially a very valuable recommendation for something else that may come up.

Cultivating relationships like this can take years. When you were younger, fresh out of college or high school, you tend to see life in short increments. More like sprints. But you must learn to realize that our careers are typically very long. An average person works 40 years of their life in their career. People that love what they do will most likely work much longer.

When I first started freelancing full-time back into thousand six, I met a gentleman in my city that ran a web design agency. At the time I had done very little web work. But the guy and myself went to lunch because it was in early Twitter days and it was an opportunity to meet more people doing interesting things in my city in the tech space. One lunch turned into two lunches which turned into dinners which turned into drinks which turned into families meeting one another which turned into a friendship. Eventually this gentleman had grown his company to the point where he needed to hire a creative director as his current creative director (his partner and co-founder) was moving more into a COO role. He didn't even post a job online. He met with me, we had dinner together as usual, and he offered me a position with his company as their creative director at the end of dinner. He had been watching. He had been observing my career and my growth in the interactive space. He had grown to trust me into value my opinion. This led to a very well-paying job as creative director of a web design agency and a steak and some of the design profits of the company. If I had jumped in and tried to get work from this person immediately, it may have turned them off. But instead, I became genuinely interested in this individual as a person. That led to work in the end. I work for this guy's company for around 15 months before deciding but I wanted to jump back out and become an entrepreneur again. Instead of burning a bridge as I would most likely never work at this individual's company again, we mutually discussed an exit strategy for me to leave. This person completely understood my need to scratch the entrepreneurial itch as they were in entrepreneur themselves. This is a classic example of cultivating a relationship overtime and not pulling the trigger too fast.

The majority of the people that I interviewed for this podcast or people that I am genuinely interested in developing a professional relationship with. Some of those have even turned into personal friendships. Of course as a business minded individual, I am always thinking about how to make revenue and if it is possible to do work for one of these individuals. But it is not why I bring them on the show. I bring them on the show because I find something but they have done, but they have written, or have struck up an interesting discussion with them through social media, so that we can go even more in depth and I can learn about their personal methodologies and philosophies for doing creative work in this niche of business.

I have i've been fortunate to be able to work with some of my guests. Some of that might be from the initial podcast interview, but most of it is for continuing a relationship after that initial discussion. This podcast is one big relationship building project.

Even as we approach two years of the show, if I had yet to work with anyone that is been a guest, it would not bother me. Simply because I know that I am in this for the long-haul. I am in this to build long-standing relationships in a niche of business I love. I am in it to connect people.

Virgin and founder Richard Branson, are at the top of the world when it come to building relationships. Both from a business associate and a brand perspective. In one of their articles titled “8 tips for relationship building in business”, writer Neil Fogarty offers many insights, but one in particular stands out to me as metaphor for this podcast. “Before asking for something, offer something”. It’s a very simple concept but one often overlooked by people trying to network in this noisy world. The gentleman writing the article mentions that he gets emailed daily by strangers and within the first sentence they ask him to introduce them to Richard Branson. How completely arrogant for someone to expect another to introduce them while asking for it that sort of manner?

“Before asking for something, offer something.”

Being from the state of Kentucky, I live in an agrarian region. An old farmers mantra is that when you plant a seed you never know which ones are going to rise up and which ones aren't. But you plant them anyway. Because if you don't, none will rise up.

This is actually a great metaphor for building and cultivating relationships. Continue planting seeds, continue investing in and genuinely being interested in people. You never know which relationship will help you in the long run. Do not connect to people selfishly or use people. Invest in people. And it will all pay off in one way or another in this long marathon of our professional lives. And once those relationship doorways are opened, be sure to stay in touch. Write in every once in a while to see how things are going. Take them to coffee. Meet them for a drink. Invite them to your private Slack channel. You have to continue to feed the relationships you build or they will disappear in the very busy lives we all lead. Don’t expect someone else to be the person to stay in touch. It may not be their personality and they may be extremely busy with their day-to-day and their families. As as professional who wants to grow in their career, you should should be that leader.