Supercharge Your Networking with Joey Vitale 498

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If you want to become the visionary of your law firm, there is this whole “big relationships” responsibility that falls on your shoulders as the business owner. 

The three top ways to super charge your relationships and networking efforts are: 

➡️ being a giver

➡️ being a connector

➡️ being the go to expert of your area 

Listen in as Joey deep dives into each of these three ways you can network easily, with a mindset shift, and practical action steps to get started today!  

Episode Highlights:

01:45 Meet Joey 

03:16 There are three things that you need to become in order to be a better networker – Number one: you need to be a giver – look for reasons to give encouragement 

8:46 Number two: is to be a connector

12:25 Number three: be the go to expert in your space

15:00 There is a large responsibility that falls on your shoulder as a law firm owner so a way to help is to make those connections!

Book:

The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Acer

🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube.

Connect with Joey:

• Website
• Podcast 
• LinkedIn 

Resources:

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Transcript: Supercharge Your Networking with Joey Vitale

Unknown Speaker
In today’s episode, we’re sharing a presentation from Max law con 2020. To keep listening to hear joy, vitality, as we share his talk supercharged your networking, you can also head to the maximum lawyer YouTube channel to watch the full video. Let’s get to it.

Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum liar, podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.

Joey Vitale
Let’s talk networking. Who here loves networking? I want you to stand up, stand up. If you love networking, stand up. I figured it would be a minority in the group. But look around. Those are the people who you can just kind of walk over to they’ll be nice to you, they’ll treat you well. Okay, you guys can sit down. If you hate networking, stand up. I know that’s uncomfortable. Okay, I’m with you. I’m with you. Okay, you can sit back down. So in today’s presentation, I want to talk working in a way that can help both groups or if you’re in the middle. If you love networking, I hope that I can give you some strategies here to amplify it even more. If you hate networking. Over the years, I’ve come up with a way of doing it myself, because I don’t really love networking either. That really works really well. And just to paint a picture of how I literally got here on this stage. About five years ago, I was working at a law firm here in St. Louis, typical courtroom litigation work. And after working there for about two years, I realized, I’m not very good at this. I took some personality tests, I learned that I’m what’s called an Enneagram, nine, or a peacemaker type. I don’t like to argue. So I’m in the minority of lawyers. And I’m like, Oh, it makes sense that I wouldn’t like this courtroom work. So I started looking around my wife and I moved to Chicago. And I was thinking, okay, maybe the more I’m meeting other attorneys, the more I’m seeing these people who are starting their own firms, I never thought that I would start my own firm. But when I decided to go out on my own, I realized I didn’t know anybody in this space. Luckily, I got connected with Tyson and Jim, very early on in my career. Five years later, again, Brooks is a great friend of mine couldn’t make it here. So they asked me to be here. And that is because of the power of networking. You see, networking is great. I think supercharging your networking is even better. And so here are three key strategies that I’ve used over the years to really take my networking up a few notches. And the reality is how to improve your networking. It’s not just a matter of doing things differently. I love that I follow Alexis his talk here, because it’s really about getting over impostor syndrome and being someone different. And so there are really three things that you need to become to be a better stronger networker. So I want to talk about these three ways of being and I’ll couple it all with some action tips for all of you. The first is you need to be a giver. Now that sounds great, right? Like, oh, yeah, I’m a lawyer. It’s in my nature to give to others to serve. Being a giver sounds great. We all want to be givers, not just takers. The problem is, it’s really easy and natural for us as human beings to be takers. It’s great to be giving, and you know, thinking about donations to give to and very, you know, just generous with your time when you feel like you have more than enough time and money. But when time is short, when you don’t have a lot of money, when the world kind of sucks. It’s hard to put yourself in a mental space of being a giver. I was wrestling this a few years ago, and I came across this really great book called The Happiness Advantage. It’s written by an author named Shaun Aker, and his story is really interesting, because he is a Harvard professor, quick show of hands. Anybody here Harvard grads? We won’t we might be a little jealous of you. Any any hand raises? None. Okay. So how many of you wanted to go to Harvard? Or would have loved to have gone to Harvard? Okay, we’re seeing some hands raised. What’s really interesting about this book is he talks about how so many of the students at Harvard were unhappy, like seriously unhappy. It got to the point where he created what is now the most famous course on campus. It’s all about happiness. And so he has these, these tenants that he teaches, and one of them that I just thought was really, really fascinating. When Is this distinction between rose colored glasses, and rose tinted glasses. And before you think that I’m going into woowoo space, this isn’t some like lady who got high and wrote a book. This is a Harvard professor. And he pointed out that, at the end of the day, it’s really impossible to wear completely clear glasses. As much as we’re devoted to finding the truth, it’s impossible for us to see the truth without interpreting it some way, there is always some sense of interpretation. So what he says is, don’t wear rose colored glasses, don’t try to always just be overwhelmingly the glass is half positive, try and see the world as clearly as you can. But there’s always going to be a tint to the glasses. So choose to make them rose tinted glasses. So to be a giver, it really helps. If you put on rose tinted glasses first, then the world changes, it becomes much easier to be a giver. So I was working on this and I figured out a way that worked really well for me to really put this into practice. And I call them my morning, giving Sprint’s so this is on my calendar for 30 minutes every morning, where I go on to my computer, and I do very intentional social media giving. So I’ll go on to Facebook, go to their birthday page, wish people happy birthdays, and then DMS, I’ll look for reasons to congratulate people on a milestone or give support if they have maybe some bad news to share just doing what I can to be a giver in those space. I say that because a lot of times, it’s hard to reconcile these two things of wanting to be a giver, and building routines and habits of giving. There’s this quote that I love that I’m going to tweak a bit here of we don’t rise to the level of our good intentions, we fall to the clarity on our calendar. So it’s really powerful to actually put into your calendar, what you’re going to do to be in a giving state. Now, you don’t have to raise your hand here, but but raise your hand if you like this idea of having like a giving sprint to your mornings are some time in the day or in the week. Okay, great. So I’d actually like you all to stand up. Because as Tyson said, ideas are great. Not if you don’t execute. So we’re all going to it again, you don’t have to stand up. But if you are I want you to find a buddy. You can couple off maybe find a three pair if you’d like. But I want you after I’m done talking to find each other and watch each other, put this in your calendar, a 30 minute window where you are going to be good, you can figure out what that means. But it’s going to be on your calendar. Okay, you can sit back down. So that’s way of being number one be a giver. And you can use those giving strategies

Unknown Speaker
is apathy on his back. If you’re new around here, the ZAP Athan is the OG automation workshop at this next exclusive guild event we’re partnering up with maximum lawyers good friend Kelsey Bratcher. To bring you a day and a half automation workshop. The idea of automation is simple, right? Identify a repeatable pattern of tasks and then use technology. So that business process can happen without you. But setting up that technology can be daunting, time consuming, and even have a steep learning curve. Join us in person and you’ll create automations on site that will start working for you before you even leave Austin, join the guild today and grab your ticket at max slot events.com.

Joey Vitale
Number two, it’s related but it’s a connector. You see, it’s really common when people are networking to think about oh, I want to see how many new leads I can get here. I want to see what relationships I can create changes the game when you go to or any event with an initial mindset of how many connections can I make? How can I be a connector instead of someone who’s receiving things. It really just changes the game of how you are a useful asset to those around you. Again, this is something that people hear they’re like, oh, yeah, I want to be a connector. I want to start connecting more people. There are a few things here that I mentioned. And I’ll get to a really great thing that you guys can put into action. One of the things that I love doing and people in my network know that I do this a lot is connection emails. So I really want to quickly want to cover how I do this and how I take it to a next level that people tell me works really well. You see a lot of people will make some type of a connection email, but they make two mistakes. Either they don’t really clarify why they’re making the connection. Or they make the people that they’re connecting have to spend a lot of time and work to actually connect or figure out why they’re being connected. it. So when you’re sending these connection emails, it’s great to clarify in the body of the email and the subject line. What’s going on here? Is this a referral? Is this a collaboration opportunity? What else is that. And if you can, also, if you’re referring someone, this works really well find that person’s Calendly page, and include that in the email, make it super easy. So they don’t have to go back and forth and find a time the person can just get on their calendar. If you’re looking for any templates on how to do that, let me know I have a few different versions of connection emails that I send all the time. Now, some of you might be thinking connection sounds great. But it also sounds like a lot of work. I know a lot of people. And recently, I was working with a business owner as a consulting client. And we were talking about this, he loved the idea of managing his connections, connecting them to each other. But he’s got a big business. And he knows tons of people. And he was like, How can I again, put this on my calendar, have a routine have a process so that I’m actually doing this, because there needs to be a process or else I’m not actually going to make all of these connections. And so we talked a little while we conversation went in some interesting directions. And then we talked about this area of science, of trot of tribe, data, tribe science, tribal studies, that have found that it’s really natural for us as human beings, to have great human connections and tribes at either 150 people or below. And after that point, it’s really hard to maintain these relationships. So instead of having this guy tried to stay on top of all of his 1000s of connections, we figured out who was top 150, people were, you know, that sounds like a lot, you can go with your top 100 Or your top 50 Doesn’t really matter it by the way, if you can’t think of your top 50 just meet people at this conference, and you’ll find them pretty quickly. But what’s great is when you really focus on connecting other people to your top 100, or top 50, or 150, and connecting them to each other, the rest of it kind of takes care of itself. So the pressure can be off, that can be a really great way to kind of hack this way of being in and show yourself as a connector. Which brings me to the third way of being for really supercharging the way that you are networking. And that is to be the go to expert. Now, as lawyers, and there are all types of talks happening here about how you can show up and be the expert in your space. There are all kinds of ways to do it, you can write a book, you can do a podcast or a live show, I want to highlight one way of being a go to expert that has meant a lot to me and totally changed the way that I do business. And that is through Facebook groups. So when I launched my my law firm, again, like I said, I really didn’t know that many people. But we figured out a really cool niche of a business owner client that we could serve, we started a Facebook group. And after a few months, we had 7000 members in the Facebook group. And there’s something really special about not only being seen as a go to expert, but being a leader in that space that really can kind of shortcut your way to being seen as that go to expert. And I want to follow what I preach here. Because Liz, can you come up. So Liz is on my team, she’s in my top 100 She’s probably in my top 10. Liz is a type of expert. And it’s really rare to find. But she’s a Facebook group and community expert. So she’s helped me and she helps other people in the room, make sure that they’re building a really great Facebook group, that they’re becoming that go to leader that they’re building a sense of community that they’re doing it in a strategic way, our firm has grown in ways that I can’t even imagine with the help of building our own group that makes my team and myself being seen as a leader in that space. If that sounds like something that your firm might be interested in, I’d love for you to meet Liz. So your action item here is to talk to Liz at some point in the conference if you’re interested. And she can help you clarify whether a Facebook group might make sense for your firm or not. Do you have anything to share? Thank you. She’s also a great photographer so she can take great like selfies or whatever. If you feel like you’re not good at taking pictures of yourself with other people. So that’s all that I have for you guys today. But those are the top again, it’s not about changing these little tips and tricks. If you really want to become the visionary that you want to be. This doesn’t get talked about a lot in traction, all these other books about business growth. But when it comes to being the visionary of your law firm, yes, you have to cast the vision And, but there’s this whole big relationships, responsibility that falls on your shoulders as the business owner. And I haven’t found any other, better ways of showing up and being to cultivate those bigger relationships than being a giver being a connector and being the go to expert. Thanks.