014: Jordan Harbinger On Building The Right Social Skills To Elevate Your Business And Relationships

Steve: You are listening to The My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, where I bring in successful boost strapped business owners to teach us what strategies are working and what strategies are not. Now this isn’t one of those podcasts where we bring on famous entrepreneurs simply to celebrate their success. Instead I have them take us back to the beginning and delve deeply into the exact strategies they used early on to gain traction for their businesses. If you enjoy this podcast please leave me a review on iTunes and enter my podcast contest where I’m giving away free one on one business consultations every single month. For more information go to www.mywifequitherjob.com/contest. And if you are interested in starting your own online business be sure to sign up for my free six day mini course where I show you how my wife and I managed to make over 100k in profit in our first year of business. Go to www.mywifequitherjob.com for more information. Now onto the show.

Welcome to The My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suites your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to The My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today I’m really happy to have Jordan Harbinger on the show. Now Jordan together with his partner AJ run The Art of Charm Podcast, where they provide relationship advice unto men and women but mostly guys. Now I’ve actually listened to a couple of episodes and they are all really interesting because the study of human relationships has always intrigued me and it’s really fascinating to see everything spelt out for me in a podcast, that I can listen to on the way to work. But what’s even more interesting to me, is that they turn this podcast into a very profitable business. Now today The Art of Charm Podcast is one of the most popular podcast over all in iTunes. And they also have their own show on XM satellite radio. Now I for one since I just started this podcast relatively recently, I’m very interested in understanding how they monetize their podcast, and exactly how they make money. So welcome to show Jordan.

Jordan: Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity.

Steve: Yeah so give us the quick background story and tell us exactly how the podcast comes into play and what you actually sell.

Jordan: Sure. So essentially when I was in law school, I was mentored/ un-mentored by a lawyer who hired me and he was never in the office. Rumor had it he made more money than everybody else. And one day he sat me down for coffee and he’s like, “I didn’t care about the job at all because I didn’t really want to be a lawyer.” And he was like, “Ask me anything.” He probably figured I was going to be like, “So how do you, you know develop your career?” And he was going to give me some crap cookie kind of answer and I was like, “How come everyone says you make more money and you are never here.” And he was like, “Oh well actually all the smacks that are in the office on Sunday night at one O’clock in the morning are pretty much replaceable, like they have a lot of technical knowledge and they might be really good at structuring certain kinds of deals and knowing what to look for and that’s valuable but they are not as valuable as people who go out and get business for the firm which is me.”

And I was like, “Okay we have a really nice 10 what’s the deal?” And he says, “Well I was on a charity cruise for the last you know two weeks and I did jujutsu and I played golf and I go to these events and all those other stuff and what I’m doing is, I am making friends with people who make decisions at companies that hire the firm.” And I thought, okay wait a minute, let me get this straight. So you hung out all day and network with the right people and get people to like and trust you and give us business. And then you control the deal and take the line share of the income and these other guys work on Sunday night at one O’clock in the morning probably never see their family and they check for you know the right types of fillings and they do research all day? And he’s like, “Pretty much.” And he’s like, “There is a place for everybody but the more rare skill is the networking in business thriving slash rain making part.” Which is rain making is a Deutschbag word that us Wall street lawyers like to use, right?

So and that was a really big eye opener for me because I thought wait a minute, I like people sort of, maybe, sometimes, but I really hate checking for companies and documents. So if I want to be a successful lawyer, worry less about becoming the best lawyer, and the hardest working lawyer and worry more about making friends with people that can generate business for the company. And on top of that you can, if you had to fire one person and one of them was a work horse worked all day and night and had a great technical masonry, and the other person didn’t work that much but was responsible for the revenue generated by the company, you don’t actually have a choice.

Steve: Absolutely, you know in fact you know that’s how business works in China. It’s all about the relationships and less so about dollar and that sort of thing because for our business we sell linens. So one of the first things that we did is we hoped on a plane over to China and we started drinking with these guys. And after we met them face to face, they actually gave us much better deals on the products. I suspect that being a lawyer and that sort of a thing is all in the same lines, right?

Jordan: Yeah, I mean essentially if an investment bank can chose whoever they want to do business with and they want to make sure you are going to be responsive, responsible and capable, you can tell them and sell them all you want but at the end of the day if they are like, “This guy is cool, he’s not usually late for golf and when he is, he says he’s sorry and I know his home phone number and I met his wife, she’s a gem.” They are going to hire you because people buy you, they always buy you. And business is just people doing monetary transactions with their friends most of the time. And it’s funny because people will screw somebody over in business and be like, “Hey men it’s business.” And it’s like, “No, you are just screwing people over,”

Maybe that’s a business thing that you do but at the end of the day, you don’t really do business with people because they are giving you the best deals. If we did, we would only buy the cheapest food, we would only go to the movie theater that was close to our house, we would only eat at restaurants that were close to our house or that had cheap food. We don’t do any of those things as a consumer. You never do anything like that. Even the most hardcore like, I’m dating an Asian girl, right so her parents have like, you know they are very Asian which you know you understand as well, they don’t go, “Oh this place has the freshest sea food.” They go, “This is the place that your friend’s uncles, friend’s cousins who graduated from high school they own it, so we are probably going to get a deal.” You walk in there they are just like, “Here is the part of the fish that we just got that’s yummier.” And then it’s like, “Oh thanks.” And it’s probably all service, none of it is probably real, everyone in that restaurant probably knows somebody, that knows somebody that knows somebody that works there but it’s the perception of getting a better value. That is what matters and people do business all the time like that.

The Government does business like that as much as there is rules and regulations not to do that. Every company, every big company large or small does that, small businesses do that. Everybody does that. The people who don’t understand that or deny that or want to argue with that, more importantly are the people who don’t understand the game been played around them and they are therefore losing.

Steve: Okay, so that’s kind of what you teach in your podcast, right? You teach people how to actually become friends in order to improve their sales or different portions of their lives, right?

Jordan: Absolutely, so it can be related to business, dating, relationships, networking, anything like that can happen and that’s what we talk about in the show. You know we’ve interviewed everybody from Daymond John of Shark Tank to people who teach networking skills John Crockery. We’ve not interviewed guys like Noah Kagan of whom you had on the show to talk about all kinds of new on stuff and of course dating and relationship coaches because again people buy you. So you got to be the best.

Steve: So you mentioned that your podcast is a large part of your business. So I’ve listened to a couple of episodes and you do a great job but how does that actually lead to the money that you make?

Jordan: Well essentially the show started as a hobby and it’s still largely is. I mean I love it, but what happened was, in the beginning we were doing the show and we were interviewing people and enjoying our time, doing what we were doing and people started writing in and saying, “Hey, you know what, I’ve got a lot of value from your show, I would like to learn from you directly.” And so I said, “Well we don’t really offer anything.” And they said, “I will give you $150 dollars to talk to you on the phone for an hour, does that sound fair, it’s cheaper than your legal rates but you know wherever.” And I said, “Yeah sure.”

So I spent a whole lot of time when I was in law school sitting on a hammock in AJ’s backyard. AJ is my business partner, in his backyard on the phone and on Skype with guys in Denmark, Norway, New Zealand, Australia, California, New York, Canada and the UK and just really enjoying the time and thinking okay I guess I’m coaching now and I feel like a little bit of a sherlock in here. But this is like 10 years ago, because I don’t really have any formal training but I guess I counsel people at my law job so I understand how that process works. And they kept coming back, and coming back, and coming back, and coming back, and we would just have them on retainer like crazy. And there were like there is so much value here.

Steve: What were they asking you, what were some of the questions?

Jordan: I had so many different kinds. I had a mortgage banker who was making tons of millions of dollars per year. And he was working on getting people to like and trust him because that’s how he generated the business. So we were working on those skills set and then I jump off the phone with him and jump on a call with somebody in Denmark who is an Ethiopian immigrant who now lived in Denmark and he was like, “I don’t know how to meet people because I look different, I talk different, I act different and my whole upbringing was entirely different, where do I start?”

And we started giving him draws and exercises and he was with us for a long time and I actually heard from him about a year ago, you know granted this is five, six years after I coached him, he’s like, “I can’t even begin to thank you, you know I’ve got a girlfriend, a job, I’ve totally assimilated and I know it wouldn’t have happened this quickly without your coaching.” So of course we spent the next half decade and more learning everything we could about teaching this subject, working with people on this subject. Teaching other subjects to get better at this one, and now we have the premier program for this anywhere. In fact premiers maybe a strong word because it’s the only program for this anywhere.

Steve: Okay so this program is it live, like does someone has to fly and is it all in person or…?

Jordan: Yes, our, well, we have the free podcast of course on The Art Of Charm, we have a electronic contest that’s free, but our live training programs are in Los Angeles and I know people are like, “Where, it’s too far.” But we have clients; I’m looking in the office right now and I’m looking at the classroom and there is a guy from Australia, a guy from the UK, a guy from Canada, one guy from the United States not from California and a guy from New Zealand that just left. And we have a guy from Denmark who is not in the room right now but flew out for this.

So I’m looking around and I’m thinking there is one American guy in this program and I’ve got you know, you probably get somebody listening to the show right now on Arizona and they are going, “its five hours drive, I’m not going to do that, that’s ridiculous.” But it just shows you one the pole from the show and essentially the values that’s given there. And two the fact that if you are committed you just suck it up and you do it and stop whining about why you can’t. And that’s what I think differentiates a lot of entrepreneurs and wantentrepreneurs because guys who are doing stuff, they overcame crazy obstacles all of us have with a successful business. But the people who talk about why they can’t, why some things are going to be hard for them etcetera, etcetera, they are always lacking and it’s mostly an attitude thing. It’s always a mindset thing.

Steve: So I’m just curious then, so if you are giving these courses in person that kind of limits the number of people that you can teach in a given time, right?

Jordan: Correct.

Steve: Okay, so how, so how many people have enrolled in your course and how often do you give it every year?

Jordan: We have it every single week.

Steve: Every single week, okay.

Jordan: Every single week and we are sold out three to four months in advance.

Steve: Wow, okay so how large is the class?

Jordan: Seven guys is the cap.

Steve: Okay, oh okay, wow it’s a really almost like private instructions and all?

Jordan: It has to be. We have to tailor the coaching to the students because everybody is got– Basically what we teach at The Art of Charm is that your beliefs influence your actions, which influence your results and you can’t just change your actions and try to get different results, because the mindsets are always what guides our actions. So we have to dig in to everybody’s physic pretty deep. We have therapists on staff there is a reason why we do all the things the way we do them and so yeah. You couldn’t have more than seven or eight guys because it will just become a complete mess. And not only do we have seven or eight guys, but we have five plus instructors for those seven or eight guys.

Steve: Okay.

Jordan: So it’s pretty much individualized instruction, and there is no other way to do it effectively.

Steve: Okay and so if I understand correctly your podcast is kind of like your legion where you then talk about this class and then people go on to your website and sign up, is that correct?

Jordan: They can’t sign up online actually. We don’t allow that because like I don’t want ex-murderers or weirders in my programs, because it only takes one guy to screw it up for everyone else. So I don’t, I don’t even allow that. And people there is all these folks that are in my entrepreneurs group and stuff like that and they are like, “You need to automate it.” And I’m like, “No.” That’s exactly what we don’t want to do, because when you automate it you get the dregs. And you get the gems as well as the dregs but the problem is the gems don’t want to be in the same class as the dregs. And so it’s exclusive and we keep it that way. Not to mention I actually, we do some work with some Governmental organizations and they purposely require certain types of people either on outcome or be reported and without getting too specific, basically I think they just want to make sure that Chinese spies don’t take our classes.

Steve: Chinese spies, yeah okay right.

Jordan: I specifically chose that.

Steve: I know you did. So how do you screen these people out?

Jordan: Well, since I read people for a living, I essentially do phone calls with them that are an hour, hour and a half long. And I judge their, gauge their responses, goals, what they want to get out of the program, make sure it’s a good fit for them and also that they are going to be a good fit for us. Because at this point you know ask me six years ago, I probably would have just been stroke that somebody wanted a program, but now we are looking at waiting lists and things like that, that are so long that I can afford to be selective with everybody that comes in.

It’s not like, “Oh you are not cool, you can’t join our program or oh men you are going to be a lot of work, you can’t join.” I mean we have everybody from college students to military Special Forces but I just want to make sure there are here for the right reason. Somebody who says, “You know I’m a computer coder. I don’t have a lot of people around me all day. I would love to be able to find a great girl, settle down and get married.” Or Special Forces guy that says, “Listen there is lives depending on my ability to lead etcetera.” Those are great reasons but even a college student that says, “I don’t know it seems like fun.” Totally legit reason. A guy who says, “Women are only after money and I want to learn how to beat them at their own game.” Not welcome here, you know.

Steve: Got it, okay. This kind of reminds me of the movie hitch actually a little.

Jordan: You know its funny my business partner’s friend wrote that movie, it’s largely about what we do.

Steve: Okay, so given that the podcast is one of the legions for your business, can you just take us back to the very beginning and how you actually got your first clients through your podcast and how it all worked from the very beginning?

Jordan: Yeah, it’s a really interesting question because it was demand driven business from the beginning. We never went onto the show and went, “We are offering this now for money.” It was like guys were saying things like well you know, “I really like what you have on offer.” And we said, “Oh there is other people out there that can teach you these skills.” And it’s like, some of these clients were like, “We’ve hired all of them, we don’t like them, I want to learn from you, I relate to you.” And I thought okay fine. You know, so we offered a pretty good deal in the beginning and you know we just thought all right if you want talk to us then we can make it happen. And we will answer all your questions, and we will figure out you know how to translate our personal curriculum, and the things that we are doing into a format that you can copy even though we can’t see you. And that worked really well, we had a lot of clients who really loved it.

And then we had some guy say, “Hey, I just want meet and see you in person.” And we said, “Well we are in Michigan right now we are in Francisco and before that we were in Manhattan but we started off in Michigan when we were in glad school. And they said, “That’s okay, I will fly to Michigan, I don’t care.” And we thought, “Wow, okay, well I guess we will see you in Michigan.” So we would meet people for a day and we would say, “All right, you know it’s going to be 800 bucks or wherever.” And they go, “Okay, fine.” And they would give us a 1000 and then they would say, “What are you guys doing tomorrow?” And we would say, “Okay, we can do it again tomorrow.”

And then eventually when I moved to New York to work on Wall Street, I was still doing phone coaching but we had so many live coaching clients at that point, that I had to hire coaches to deal with the demand. And from there, we literally had people saying, “I want, I will sleep on your couch for a week and give you 5000 bucks, I just want to see it in person.” And so that’s what we did for the next you know several years. Just work on a really amazing science based curriculum and hire the best experts that we could find and then have them co-create and train the out of town clients. So now we have world class program but back then we were amazed that people wanted what we had to offer but it was demand driven. They wanted what we were selling, what we weren’t selling.

Steve: So did you do anything special with your podcast or it just grew organically?

Jordan: In the beginning essentially it grew organically. We didn’t know anything. This is 2006. There were about 800 podcasts in the iTunes store. They were not that many at all. We listed ourselves, there was you know browser, there was no cover art, nothing like that, you didn’t have anything like that in your podcast really. So we put it up there and we kept producing regularly and that set us aside from 90 percent of the other people who were uploading one or two and then quitting. And we kept going, we kept going, we kept going and we found that word of mouth had spread.

We printed out some business cards and any time people would ask us, “What are you guys doing, I always see you out with different people, how come you never wait in line or how come you never pay for drinks or how come you are at this party and you are 20 years younger than everybody else?” You know, “What’s the deal?” We would hand them the card and they would start listening and tell their friends about it. And eventually we started getting things like featured in iTunes and we started getting a lot of word of mouth and the show really took off. And then when I moved to New York we landed a guest spot on series XM satellite radio and the station manager came down. He had just randomly been air checking the show that we were on and he said, “You guys are, definitely you guys need your own show.” And so he gave us a trial period and we knocked it down the pack and we ended up with the show during the evening drive on Fridays on series XM for three and a half years.

Steve: That’s awesome so did you have a website or anything or was it just podcast in the beginning?

Jordan: We had a chrome word, I don’t even know if it was a word press or it was probably blogger actually back then. And in fact I’m almost sure it was blogger.com. And it just, every time we had a new show we would say like, “Episode number 003, Jordan and AJ talk about body language.” I mean that was just the script that we got back then and that was kind of how we worked it. People were finding that and they were laughing and we of course you know like every other amateur back then, we were like chucking our cover out from askmen.com and stuff about because there were the only ones who had a high quality photos of anything and nobody wanted to invest any money in it because I think our budget was 90 bucks or something like that.

Steve: To start that was great.

Jordan: And the show just kept growing kept growing. And I don’t know where people were finding us back then because we weren’t smart enough to do market research really and the show kept growing. And I largely ignored it for a really long time, and I didn’t even try to consciously work on any aspect of the podcast, it just sort of seemed to be automatically operating. But once I started to focus on growing that and we started to focus on growing our client based that’s when everything really took off because we realized that we had accidentally built a marketing juggle not in the form of a value giving show that we’ve being running for years.

Steve: So let’s talk about that. What were some of the things that you did?

Jordan: Well, we have been creating the show every week for years and years. And you don’t really have to do that for that long. People found us out after the first few episodes and they were like this is amazing, I can’t believe this is free. What we were doing was giving away things that other people in our industry had essentially decided that, that should cost money. So I think marketer’s now call it pushing the free line or some crap like that.

Steve: Yeah, premium or wherever.

Jordan: Yes premium, and what that meant to us was wait a minute why should somebody give you 40 bucks for an E-book where you give advice that doesn’t cost you, didn’t cost you anything theoretically to get. And so we started giving away all of our information for free and that’s why we still do that. We give away a ton of information for free but I think intelligent people realize that’s its not, “Oh I have all this information, I don’t need to go to the workshop now.” People know that if they are not implementing information that they get and they realize that if it’s a complex skill set, they need to go and get the program because the training is where the money is, that’s where the juice is. I don’t mean the money is in like the profit; I mean that’s where the juice is. If I can’t do public speaking, I’m reading books on public speaking but I can’t give a speech, all those books are a huge waste of time or maybe they weren’t a waste time, I’ve great technical knowledge and academic knowledge about how that works but I can’t actually perform the skill.

And any really complex skill requires coaching period I don’t care what it is, and anybody is good at anything knows that. I don’t think Tiger Woods is like, “I don’t need no stinking coach.” You know he’s got three or four different coaches for different things and that doesn’t include his fitness and yoga and all that other stuff that he’s got to do to stay in shape. Any athlete, any professional, any sealable executive they have coaches left and right. And so it’s really our egos are the only things keeping us from that. So we thought, “Hey listen if our clients are really these guys who are really understanding what they want and they are willing to go for it, that’s a great client base to have because having a bunch of smart driven people, getting into your stuff is the optimal place.” That’s really where you want to be.

Steve: You know that’s actually very interesting. So I actually run a training course on the side for E-commerce. And what I found was that when I started publishing some of the core materials on the class on my blog, I ended up getting more customers who were willing to sign up and actually have access to me personally. So it sounds like the same effect that happened with your podcast as well in your business.

Jordan: Yeah, absolutely. I mean what it’s done by accident is branded us as; well I guess I’m the face of the company really and that’s fun. I love it, I love The Art of Charm and I love what we do. So I love it but it was definitely strange at first because it was like, “No wait we are not experts, we are just doing this.” And what we found is that our clients were like, “Listen the other guys that say they are experts are internet marketers that live in their parents basement. So the fact that you are actually out trying stuff and doing stuff and teaching people is actually pretty amazing.” And so they wanted to learn from people who actually are experienced and that was crucial in my understanding because I didn’t think, “I’m going to brand myself as an expert.”

Steve: Yeah, I was going to say something. Based on what you are telling me, it sounds like you kind of just grew your podcast organically based on the power of your content alone.

Jordan: Yes and I know that, that’s not the best. A lot of people are like, “Where, I hate this guy, I was looking for shortcuts.” And here is the thing, there are shortcuts go lower for people who don’t want to build something great. And I don’t really know what to say to those people, sure go look for shortcuts and follow in line with everybody else who doesn’t really do much, I mean.

Steve: Okay, yeah that’s really good advice. I mean ultimately the tricks will kind of maybe get you in the door, but then you ultimately have to put out the good stuff to kind of maintain that level of your audience.

Jordan: Yeah and I mean, don’t get me wrong there are tons of internet marketers that are all tricks and they making a lot of money but at the end of the day you can really deliver value in both ways, so you don’t need to only rely on tricks. You might as well develop something real that you offer people, rather than relying on the numbers game of seeing how many stupid people you can fool into buying your crap.

Steve: Absolutely, that’s great advice. So you know Jordan I’m actually really curious about what you teach and I was actually hoping that you would be able to give us some sort of quick lesson about some of the material that you actually coach in your course.

Jordan: Yeah, I mean most of what we do unfortunately for the podcast format, a lot of communication and I mean like 90 plus percent is non-verbal. So it’s really difficult to coach somebody that you have no previous relationship with in podcast format. But what we can talk about, I mean there is a million different things. I mean for example if you are looking at the fact that most communication is non-verbal then you know you need great body language to make a good first impression.

And so one of the quick tips that anybody in podcast learned, I hate that word, can pick up is that, is that you need to create a great first impression. And most people think their first impression is when they decide to make it. For example I use a dating analogy here. What we are looking at, a bunch of guys go out and they are like, “We are going to meet girls.” So they get up and they haul themselves off to the bar or whatever and they are thinking all right we are going to have a couple of drinks, we are going to chill, we are going to pretend to watch the basketball game and you know hung out and talk and then you know once that kicks in we are going to start talking to the girls. So guys go in there, they are sharking around in circles looking for where the cute girls are, they go and fix their hair, they grab a couple of shots, they grab a couple of drinks. They pretend to watch the basketball game; they sit in the corner staring at the girls. And then one of them goes, “All right, I’m doing it man, I’m going to go up and do this.” And so he walks up there in his broad voice. He walks up there and he’s like, “Hey what are you guys drinking?” And the girls are like, “No thanks.” And he goes, “Whatever, girls only want guys who have money, it’s because I don’t have a Rolex, that’s why they rejected me or whatever.” Meanwhile that has nothing to do with it.

The reason is because his first impression wasn’t, “Hey ladies what are you drinking?” His first impression was soaking around, walking around the bar, looking for the girls, pretending to watch the basketball game, building up courage, liquid courage at that. And the girls notice this, they are not dumb. They see this; women are about 20 times better than men at looking at non verbal communication. And so their first impression was when he became the blink on their radar which was probably right when he walked in the door. And since he blew that for 20 minutes waiting for the scotch to kick in, his first impression was made so long ago. By the time he had you know scraped together the gone ends to go up and say, “Hey what are you guys up to?” They were like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah we got it, you’re partially drunk and now you are ready to chat, see you later.” And…

Steve: So it’s all about body language. It’s basically what you are telling me?

Jordan: It’s all about non verbal communication which is not just body language. It’s vocal tonality, eye contact, the way you sit down and walk and talk. How committed you are and how strong you show and there is a lot of different things and that’s not physical strength, that’s like charisma, personal magnetism. How other people relate to you. I mean these are all crucial factors that people use to create a subconscious first impression of you. And the reason that’s important is because if you don’t have that in place, it doesn’t matter what you say. That’s why when guys are like, “I still don’t know what to say, what should I do to start the conversation?” It doesn’t matter.

In fact we’ve actually tested this, years ago. Me, and AJ would walk up to people and we would challenge each other. What’s the dumbest thing we can possibly say and it was like, “I like salad.” And we literally started conversations like that with the girls that we ended up dating because I remember walking up to one girl and saying, “I like salad.” And she goes that’s nice wierdo and then we started talking and laughing because it was clearly so random, but it didn’t matter at all. And so you can have un-conversely the most brilliant thing or like, “Hey blah, blah, blah” convenient really cool, clever sounding thing and the girls not going, “Wow that took a lot of effort and it was really creative.” She is thinking whatever you read that on the internet, like this is so stupid why am I even here? And so it really has nothing to do with it, because you don’t demonstrate any of the qualities that she finds desirable through things that you say. She is looking for confidence, charisma, signs of leadership, the ability to provide and protect, personal magnetism, the way you make her feel. None of that has to do with this stuff that you say in the first two minutes of a conversation, none of it, zero percent.

Steve: So let’s change the context a little bit. Let’s say I wanted to approach someone really famous in the world of business, and I wanted to get business advice from that person. How would you go about approaching someone like that? Let’s say I was trying to approach Bill Gates for example.

Jordan: Sure and I mean the metaphorical approach here is what we are going for. Because obviously even if you found yourself at a party with Bill Gates, walking up there and be like, “Hey Bill, I want some business advice.” It’s pretty much like the worst thing you could possibly say to somebody in that position because you are just, basically you are like the [hormones??] guy is like, “ Hey men, hey you got a dollar.” That’s all you are doing when you bringing that guy to party. And that actually goes for talking with women; it goes for talking with anybody in a higher value position wherever you might put them in a higher value position.

For example if you had a party and you wanted business advice from Bill Gates, you are putting him in that position as higher value because of where he is, but if you are mount biking and he’s falling and looking really tentative in your bad ass mountain biker, guess who’s in the higher value position? Right, it all has to do with situational context.

So what’s you would want to do in that case is and this is how I network with people at different levels as well. I will, one first of all you got to find out what the value add is for them. And the best way to do that is to network with people that know them already. And so you might have to work up the chain. You might have to contact somebody in your network that knows somebody in their network, that knows somebody closer to that person and their network. And you need to find out how you can give value because people are wasting those people’s time all day. And I know this for a fact because they are wasting my time all day. So if they are wasting my time all day, then they are definitely wasting more Cuban and Bill Gates time all day or trying to.

Steve: Interesting.

Jordan: And at that point where you are a billionaire or whatever or even a millionaire for that matter your biggest defense that you have, you are not trying to keep your money, you’re not trying to keep your– the only thing you are trying to protect is your time because that’s the only thing you can’t purchase more of at that point. And so what you do to protect your time, you hire a secretary who has an assistant, who has a secretary who has an assistant to make sure that nobody gets to you that isn’t supposed to. Not one second of your time should be wasted by spam email, phone calls. I mean there is just no chance in hell that, that should happen. And so you’ve got to protect your time like crazy and so the way that you do that, the way that you get through that is not by saying, “Wait, I’ve got an offer you can’t refuse and it’s going to make you double your revenue overnight.” Because they’ve heard it all before and there’s nothing you are actually going to do that can provides that. So you’re only going to establish a relationship with them on a bunch of BS.

So the way that you would have to do that, you have to work up the chain. You have to network and you have to put that into play. But mostly the way that you do that in the beginning is you have to find somebody to use Bill Gates technology. You have to find somebody that knows somebody that knows somebody, and is close to those degrees as you can that needs value from something that you can provide. And you provide that and then later on you might get them to provide return value in the form of hooking you up with somebody who might be able to get you closer to them. The idea of walking up to somebody like that, and asking for business advice even if you did have the opportunity, what’s he going to do. I mean he has no choice but to say no.

Steve: Or give you some very vague answer and then just kind of walk off.

Jordan: Sure, because you are essentially asking Bill Gates for consulting. Like how, why would you, why would he do that?

Steve: Absolutely, you know actually one thing I do when I approach. So I didn’t actually think about it until now after talking to you. One thing I do is– I don’t even, if I wanted business advice, I don’t even talk about business at all in the beginning. I try to kind of establish a rapport about other things whether it will be family, kids is actually something really easy to talk about. Every parent has stories about their kids, and then once you establish a rapport then kind of steer the conversation very casually over to business.

Jordan: Yeah I mean I hate to brush about all that but that’s probably work really well on people that are Bill Gates or even higher level. But I really don’t know because whenever, for example if I meet a mixer and somebody is like, “Hey Jordan, how have you been doing, what’s going on men?” And we are having small talk, I’m literally sitting there going, “When are you are going to ask me for want you want.” Sometimes I don’t even interrupt them, or I’ll even interrupt them. Bear in mind, I read people for a living so I know if you are just making small talk because you are going to break something at down later and I just go, “Hey cut the chase, what can I do for you.” I don’t say it like that but I will give you a more AOC branded charming way of saying, “Hey I’ve got to run, so what can I do for you?” Something like that because I know that what’s coming is, “So I know you got the show and I was wondering if you could advertize my supplement pill on it or wherever.” It happens every single day everywhere that I go. Anything that has to do with business and that’s why I don’t go to networking events that are not exclusive anymore. I used to, I can’t do it anymore.

The other thing honestly that will, that will blow up on your face is if you feel like, “Hey kids rapport blah, blah, blah and then he goes, “So I have a question for you,” What they are doing even if they didn’t see it coming is they are going, “Okay so you are just talking to me about that other stuff, because you wanted something from me, go it.”

Steve: Right.

Jordan: So you are not giving any value and that’s a great way to ensure that those people just avoid you next time.

Steve: Yeah, actually so this actually completely applies to everything related to the internet, right. So I run a blog and people approach me and if they burst that question right away, then I tend to get turned off by that. One thing I do and you can tell me if this is the right way, the wrong way. I establish a relationship early on and then I wait like three to six months and then I just kind of check in from time to time. And then it might be a year before I ask to see if you want to do something together or work together.

Jordan: It’s great and the reason, I do want better, give them value from time to time instead of just checking in because yes it might seem like, “Hey you know this guy hasn’t asked me for anything and I’ve known him for a while, so we have that sort of time invested in so I sort of trust him not to be a total freak because I sort of known him on the periphery but imagine if it were that plus, “Well men Jordan has sent me articles and he’s introduced me to people for like the last 12 months and now all he wants to do is do a cross promotion interview?” Sure, I mean why would I not do that. If anything I owe him one.

And here is the catch. A lot of people are going, “Tick, tick, tick, you are only helping people because you want something in return.” Not true, I help everybody and the thing is I don’t necessarily ever need anything in return. For most people who are asking me for help even small things like, “Hey I’ve got a question about this; can you point me to some resources?” I will point them up to somebody in my company whose job it is to point them to those resources. Because I don’t have time to personally help everyone but I won’t ignore someone just because I can’t, just because they can’t do anything for me but I will always give value. And that’s the reason when I do need something I can post it on freaking Facebook, and I have 100 responses in my inbox.

And I just did this recently. So perfect example I could not find a good graphic designer. So I just kept going through them. All these people were so freaky or they had no talent. And so I posted on facebook, “Hey guys anybody got a graphic designer?” Within 20 minutes I had 18 graphic designers in my inbox and it wasn’t the designers. They weren’t pitching themselves, it was people saying, “I’ve used this guy before, he’s excellent, his rates are great. Or this person did this project see here, link here, tell me what you think, if you are interested I will make the introduction for you.” I had 18 of those and so I reached out to everybody who showed me quality work and I found a graphic designer in two hours that I had hired already. And that wasn’t because people are like, “Oh I really like your podcast.” Some of it was but most of it was because somebody had, of those people I can probably go tick, tick, tick down the list and find somebody who would slept on my couch, you know borrowed 10 bucks when they needed it, asked me for a podcast that helped save their relationship or helped them get out of a bad one. Somebody who I had helped get a job. Somebody who I had helped get rid of somebody that they didn’t end and that sounds like a mafia thing.

Get rid of somebody in their company that they didn’t want and they didn’t know how to do it tactfully. Somebody who needed a legal, a little bit of a legal advice and these are, you know this is the value that you give in and each and every day and you don’t expect anything in return because one day you will, and when you do, that will already be there. You dig your well before you are thirsty.

Steve: That is a very good analogy. So I’m just trying to put all these together in the context of running a business now. Let’s say I wanted to start a business selling something. How important is the social aspect versus the actual nuts and bolts and behind the scene stuff? And what I’m trying to ask here and trying to formulate the question properly. How much, how important is it to dedicate to just networking versus the core foundations for your business if you are just starting out?

Jordan: I would say there are equally there because what a lot of people would do, again dig your well before you’re thirsty, right. So what people do is they go, “Well you know, I’m not in a place where I can/ need a network right now.” And I go again dig your well before you are thirsty. Because what happens with those people is they go, “Well you know I still don’t have an App, so I don’t need a network to promote it. Or you know I still don’t have a product so I don’t need to start talking with people about it.” So what happens is when the– when it’s time to start promoting their new venture, they are in a place where they need that return on that networking because they are going, “oh, oh we are sitting here with this product and we need to get people, we need to get the word out fast.” And so there are you know meetings here, meetings there and all they are doing is asking for value from people that they probably haven’t hung out with or given any of the value to previously. And so they’ll have to hire somebody called growth hacker or whatever. It’s best where somebody has a network and when you hire a PR firm, you are getting a 22 year old girl who has access to a database started by a guy who has great people skills. You are not buying anything other than press release writing, which your monkey can do. And so you are buying, people buy networks all the time. I promise it’s never as effective as the one you can make yourself, ever.

Steve: So what advice would you give on how to establish a network, if you’re just starting from the very beginning?

Jordan: If you are starting from the very beginning what you need to do, is go back to what we had discussed previously which is always give value first. If you haven’t even the faintest idea of what you might need later on, you need to start giving value to people that can either introduce you to people that can help you or people that can help you directly. So if you have an App and you are on Silicon Valley, you need to start going to– Don’t go to meets up with other start up people, maybe once in a while but usually that’s just a bunch of value lichens there anyway. Go to a place where, get to the highest level of networking that you can. And you might have to call in a favor.

For example, I will tell you what. There is a guy who came to The Art of Charm and I always use him as an example so he’s had to prey again pretty big by now, but he’s phenomenal. He’s 20 years old, others still think, he’s 20 years old and he patented a medical device, okay. So he’s a smart kid but he came to us because he knew he would need the people’s skills later on. So what he’s done, is he came to the boot camp and he’s really be killing it and he goes. I can’t, I honestly not a day goes by where I don’t get, I should say prior a week goes by where I don’t get an email from him that says, “Hey Jordan this guy would be a good fit for your show or have you read this book, I will save you the trouble, here is the summary that I wrote after I read it.” And he does this all of the time. So when I’m looking for new guests, he’s already made intro to three different people who he thinks are fit based on him listening to the show for years. That’s value that I can’t buy. And its value that I can’t get anywhere else and I didn’t have to ask for it.

So when he says something like, “Hey I was wondering if I can get XYZ.” I can’t be like, “Sorry bro.” I can’t, I literally can’t even do it, I have to say yes. There is no other choice because he’s given me so much value that I have to reciprocate it as best as I can. So I’m literally trying to find ways to almost like pay this kid back. And I have tons; I’m actually taking him with me to North Korea. He wanted to go on a trip. So there is tons of people that do that for us here at the Art of Charm and it’s one of the reasons our business has grown.

Now when he needs an introduction to somebody that I have in my network, it’s as good as done. I don’t even care if it’s Damon John or Mike Cuban I have to make that intro, because one he’s not going to let me down and make me look bad but he’s certainly done enough to deserve it. And there are other people who probably patented medical devices at age 20 that live in their you know some basement somewhere, and there are going to have a really tough time because they don’t have the skills and again people buy you. They buy you. There might be somebody who has patented that exact same, medical device and they are just waiting for someone to realize they are genius, and they are not going to get the job oh my boy. They are not; it’s not going to be possible.

Steve: Wow, so how did you guys hook up? He took your class then?

Jordan: He cold emailed me. He did take my class but before that, he cold emailed me, and he was like. Instead of going, “Hey I really need XY and Z”, which is like every email that I get every hour of every day. He went, “Here’s a great guest for your show, I’ve being listening for a long time, also here is another great guest, here is the link to the guys website, here is his email, do you want me to write an introduction? If so just reply with a yes and I will send the following two paragraph introduction that he had pasted below.” So I replied with a, “Yes.” And 10 minutes or an hour or whatever it was later, I had an email from him ccing me, introducing me to the other guy saying, “I’m a fun of both of you guys and I think you will be a great fit for Jordan show dot, dot dot, here he is, he’s already said that he’s interested.” He saved me time, he saved me effort and he knows exactly what I’m looking for. I, you can’t buy that. It’s virtually impossible. I’d have to train an assistant for years to do that for me.

Steve: It sounds like he didn’t even need your course. This is what it sounds like.

Jordan: I think he learned that from our show. We teach that at the Art of Charm all the time.

Steve: I see, okay. And it’s kind of also implies that he also kind of had his own little network as well, because of the fact that he was able to introduce you to people.

Jordan: Not at all. Here is how that works. So and this is the key. And this is where most people go wrong. They go, “well I don’t have any money, I don’t have anything to offer, I don’t have any way to give value.” It’s not true. There is other times where he’ll come to me and he’ll say, “Hey do you have anybody that knows this and this and this because I want to meet this person and I know he’s looking for this.” And I will say, “Sure I can introduce person A, who is looking for these three things to this other guy in my network who has this.” But rather than me making the introduction, I’ll say actually, I will introduce you to him first and he will give that person value. So basically I’m introducing Victor this is this guy’s name to person A. And person A is looking for these things. Victor will email him over me. I will make that intro and then he will make that intro to person C. So now both of those people are like, “Yeah this guy Victor hooked us up men, really appreciated you introducing me to him.” Doesn’t cost me anything. Sure I could have gotten an ego bound for hooking those two people on my network but, one it wasn’t my idea and two, I don’t need that. I don’t need that social currency I already have it. So I basically gave it to him but he printed it. Does that make sense?

Steve: It does. Actually I’m just realizing now because Noah Kagan actually introduced us together. And he’s actually introduced me to a lot of other podcast guests who I’ve since interviewed and now I really feel like I owe the guy. Dumb I do yeah.

Jordan: And I will tell you a secret. The reason he introduced us is because I was like, “Hey I saw you were on this show, I would like to get on more shows because that’s how my podcast grows, can you make the intro?” And he did. Now I owe him, and you owe him.

Steve: Well played Noah, well played.

Jordan: Exactly, but that happens all the time. And so maybe I don’t have any value. Say I don’t have any value to offer you and I don’t have any value to offer Noah Kagan, which hopefully is not true. But I know that you guys randomly don’t know each other, and that you actually need something that one of the other– each of the others has. By virtual of me making that connection, I just printed social currency because both of you guys now are like, “Oh Jordan is the man.” And then I’m like, “Hey can I have XYZ and a dollar 50 for a beco?” You are like, “Yeah sure.” Because I made that valuable connection. So you don’t need to have a network to create a network and you certainly don’t need a value other than, you don’t need monetary value or some sort of intrinsic expertise. Once you brought that Rolodex, that is value in and of itself and you can keep using it by weaving connections in it together. And you know a lot of people are afraid to do that, they are like, “I don’t want to hook up Steve and Noah because then they are going to hung out without me.” That’s a scare city mindset. What you need is an abundance mindset, which is the more people on my network that know each other, the more important I actually become.

Steve: So then you act like the hub?

Jordan: You are the hub of the network. Even if they are doing things without you, they are not like, “You know if I introduced you to Noah and you guys are off doing something, you are not going to be, when I come to you guys and I’m like, hey you guys both have really cool business, I kind of really need help from that business, you are not going to be like, screw you that introduction was a year ago, we don’t owe you anything.” You are going to be like, “Oh yeah he kind of was in the beginning of this thing and one of the reasons that it started.”

The principle of reciprocity is there. It’s just Robert Cialdini writes about in his book ‘Influence”, “Psychology of Influence” and sure, sometime, in some ways, sometimes people are just going to screw you over, but guess what those people they do it once and then you don’t help them again. And they are gone and you learn a cheap lesson and also it didn’t really cost you anything. Like what if I introduced you to Noah and Noah is like,” Whatever Jordan, you are a duck, I don’t want to hang up with you.” You know that’s fine. I didn’t really lose anything by introducing you guys, right. May be I got rejected and I feel bad about myself for a while, but it’s not really big deal.

Steve: Oh there is a little bit of credibility in there. Like let’s say I introduce Noah to someone who is kind of a loser, right. Then he might discount my future referrals.

Jordan: Exactly, you put your relationship thread on the line and that’s why you don’t make introductions to people that you don’t really know or you don’t really like. In fact you can also– you never want to make an introduction to somebody that’s going to blow that for you. On the other hand I’ve gotten introductions from people that have not worked out and have been totally flaky. And that person feels bad but here is the thing, “it’s okay, I would rather have 10 intros and have one of them not work out than no intros and have all of them work out. What’s a 100 percent of zero, right?

Steve: Yeah, no I hear you.

Jordan: So people really won’t fault you for that. Like I could introduce you to Noah and then he like steals your TV and I’m like, “Holy crap, I did not see that coming.” You are not going to be like, “Jordan, you did that on purpose.” You are going to be like, “Wow, we both really got, sobered by that guy.” And it’s not like every intro I make for you, to you is going to be that bad. Noah Kagan is a special case, right?

Steve: Exactly.

Jordan: Yeah so like it really doesn’t matter if that happens. That’s kind like of a scare city mindset as well like “Oh what if this happens.” Shit happens dude, you know what and it’s not that big of a deal when it does but yeah you definitely want try to avoid that if possible, but I would say error on the side of making the intro anyway. And you can always follow up with somebody. You know, if I’m going to do it again, if I introduce you to Noah, I can also write you or Noah and be like, “By the way for just FYI he seems really cool, but we’ve never met in real life, so you know don’t let him sleep on your couch.” You know whatever and that’s fine. You know and I would hope that the introduction would say something along those lines anyway, because the more authentic those are the better in my opinion.

Steve: Awesome Jordan. You know we’ve been talking for about 50 minutes now. I’ve actually gotten a whole lot out of this podcast, so I thank you for that. I just thought I end this interview by asking you how people can find you online and you know hopefully where people can learn more about your relationship advice. I think it’s very valuable especially in business. And you know some of the things you talked about, I didn’t even realize, was actually going on. And you know like the fact that I now kind of feel like I owe Noah for these introductions and that sort of things. So I think everything you’ve spoken today is just great, and it’s really nice that you pointed everything out in a very concise manner that I now can actually recognize and actually act upon.

Jordan: It’s all about seeing the matrix’s men. Now that you see it you can focus on things that are working. You can see subconscious processes in yourself and other people. And that of course closely mirrors what we teach at The Art of Charm as well.

Steve: Nice, okay so where can people find you?

Jordan: I would say you know what typically people go to my website but I would say, Listen, you are listening to a podcast, go back to iTunes or station or wherever you are listening to this and search for The Art Of Charm and subscribe and write a really nice review for me if you would, optional but you know go ahead subscribe it’s all free. There is 260 episodes or so in there and go through that stuff and then if you really love what we are doing then you can buy something from me, before that don’t bother.

Steve: All right, well thanks a lot for your time Jordan. I really appreciate it.

Jordan: My pleasure men.

Steve: All right men, take care.

Jordan: Take care.

Steve: I’m going to be honest with you. Before this interview, I actually had no idea who Jordan was, but he came highly recommended from Noah Kagan. And honestly I wasn’t sure what to expect, but after talking to him on this podcast I now have a deep respect for what he does because it’s true doing business and making money online, it’s all about the relationships. And it’s important to work on your social skills in order to succeed. For more information about this episode, please check out the show notes at mywifequitherjob.com/episode14 and while you are there, be sure to sign up for my free six day mini course where I will teach you how my wife and I made over 100k in profit in our first year of business with our online store. Go to www.mywifequitherjob.com for more information. Thanks for listening.

Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.