Surefire Path to the Highest Impact Business Relationships

I first met Paul Willard at an Agile Marketing Meetup in San Francisco. He was talking about data-driven marketing, which immediately caught my attention. Wait, so we can follow the behavior of distinct groups of users based on when they signed up? It’s called cohorts? Tracking cohorts will better allow us to understand how product changes influence employer behavior? That sounds great. So we put that advice into practice. We started tracking cohorts and circling back over and over to discuss the results with Paul. He got increasingly excited about our business and the impact that his advice was having on our success. We ended up with huge inflections on key metrics, and ultimately Paul became an active advisor, investor, and board member through Subtraction Capital.

When you start off as an entrepreneur, you don’t have anything of value to offer people that can help you. You don’t have money, you don’t have experience, you don’t have anything obvious or tangible. But you need advice and help from the people who’ve been around the block, and who know more than you do. So how do you justify asking for help from these people when you feel like you have nothing to offer? When the people you want help from have hundreds of entrepreneurs vying for their attention?

A close friend of mine, Ben Wald, gave me the best advice I've heard on how to build relationships when you’re starting out. Ben has been my friend since childhood, and he was the first advisor to Looksharp. He’s currently a partner at Spartan Systems and an entrepreneur in his own right. His advice was simple.

When most people ask for help, they sit down at a meeting and they spend the whole time talking. It’s natural to try to validate yourself—“what we’re doing is so amazing, this is why you should be here and not regret talking to me.” But if you spend the whole meeting talking, you can’t derive any value from what the other person has to say. The whole reason you’re meeting with this person is because they know things that you don’t know.

So listen carefully instead. That's what we did at Paul's meetup and in every conversation with him thereafter.

By listening, you’re immediately putting yourself at the top of the list of people they’ll find interesting. Listening empowers a two-way dialogue, it gives you the space to hear what they have to say and react to it. And you’ll actually get some advice—which was the purpose of the meeting to begin with.

A lot of people will ignore that advice, and then the whole thing is moot. Sure, you can’t do everything you’re recommended, and you shouldn’t. That being said, if the person you’re talking to is someone you want to work with, you should listen when they give you advice, and take it to heart.

Some people will take that advice, and benefit and learn from it. But very few will go back to the person and present them with the results of their advice along with follow up questions to drive the conversation forward. This is the most important part: by going back, you demonstrate that you listened.

Not only that, you also show that person that their advice was valuable. That is the key to a good relationship—with mentors, advisors, investors, etc. That’s the value you give back to them. They receive positive feedback and feel good about the advice they’ve given. They also get additional pattern recognition for what works and what doesn’t, which is often valuable for their own projects.

This is how you start a feedback loop, of questions and advice, action and results, and more questions and more advice. That’s how you get people deeply invested in your startup.

It’s how we built our relationships with our earliest advisors and Paul. It’s how I gained most of my mentors over time. I owe so much to them—people like Ben Elowitz, Dave Schappell, Danielle Morrill, Colin Barceloux, Rob Dumas, Jason Portnoy—and whenever I mention repaying them, they encourage me to do the same thing for other entrepreneurs.

“Some day, you’re going to be in my shoes with people knocking on your door. Just pay it forward.” -- Dave Schappell

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