John Corcoran is the Co-founder of Rise25 Media, a company that connects B2B businesses with their ideal clients, referral partners, and strategic partners through their done-for-you podcast service. He is also a recovering attorney, an author, a former White House writer, and former speechwriter to the Governor of California.
Throughout his career, John has worked in Hollywood, the heart of Silicon Valley, and has run his own boutique law firm in the San Francisco Bay Area, catering to small business owners and entrepreneurs. He is the host of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast where he has interviewed hundreds of CEOs, founders, authors, and entrepreneurs.
In this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, John Corcoran, host of the show and Co-founder of Rise25, explains what building a network with intention means and discusses its importance. He also talks in-depth about the five questions people need to ask themselves when building a network in order to achieve their goals.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- What does building a network with intention mean?
- Questions to ask yourself #1: What is your goal and who do you want to connect with?
- Questions to ask yourself #2: What tools will you use to build your network?
- Questions to ask yourself #3: What is your outreach strategy?
- Questions to ask yourself #4: How will your featured guest experience the interview?
- Questions to ask yourself #5: How will you take that relationship further?
Resources Mentioned In This Episode
- Rise25
- Rise25 contact email: [email protected]
- John Corcoran’s email: [email protected]
- Dr. Jeremy Weisz on LinkedIn
Sponsor: Rise25
At Rise25, we’re committed to helping you connect with your Dream 100 referral partners, clients, and strategic partners through our done-for-you podcast solution.
We’re a professional podcast production agency that makes creating a podcast effortless. Since 2009, our proven system has helped thousands of B2B businesses to build strong relationships with referral partners, clients and audience without having to do the hard work.
What do you need to start a podcast?
When you use our proven system, all you need is an idea and a voice. We handle the strategy, production, and distribution – you just need to show up and talk.
The Rise25 podcasting solution is designed to help you build a profitable podcast. This requires a specific strategy, and we’ve got that down pat. We focus on making sure you have a direct path to ROI which is the most important component. Plus our podcast production company takes any of the heavy lifting of production and distribution off of your plate.
We make distribution easy
We’ll distribute each episode across more than 11 unique channels including iTunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. We’ll also create copy for each episode and promote your show across social media.
Cofounders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90x, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, Rx Bars, YPO, EO, Lending Tree, Freshdesk, and many more.
The relationships you form through podcasting run deep. Jeremy and John became business partners through podcasting. They have even gone on family vacations and attended weddings of guests who have been on the podcast.
Podcast production has a lot of moving parts and is a big commitment on our end; we only want to work with people who are committed to their business and cultivating amazing relationships.
Are you considering launching a podcast to acquire partnerships, clients, and referrals? Would you like to work with a podcast agency that wants you to win?
Contact us now at [email protected] or book a call at rise25.com/bookcall.
Rise25 was co-founded by Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran who have been podcasting and advising about podcasting since 2008.
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:01
Welcome to the revolution, the Smart Business Revolution Podcast where we ask today’s most successful entrepreneurs to share the tools and strategies they use to build relationships and connections to grow their revenue. Now, your host for the revolution, John Corcoran.
John Corcoran 0:41
Hey, welcome everyone, John Corcoran here, and welcome to another live episode where it’s just me, solo, for the first time in many years. Coincidentally, my business partner Jeremy had two different conflicts, so wasn’t able to make it to the last livestream that we did, and he wasn’t able to make it today. But in this episode, I’m going to dive in on a topic that I love talking about, which is how to build your network with intention. And I’ll get into it in a moment, I’ll explain exactly what I mean. But basically, I’m a huge proponent of deliberately and intentionally building your network and connecting with people who you resonate with, and where there is the opportunity for collaboration and synergies in some way professionally. And so we’re gonna dive into that.
But first, before we do that, you know, every week I talk with amazing guests, CEOs, founders, entrepreneurs, investors, venture capitalists, in the startup community and the business world. Go back, take a look at some of my past episodes. Like I recently interviewed the co-founder and original CEO of Netflix, executives from EO, YPO, members of those fine organizations, leaders and founders of Activision Blizzard, Lending Tree, Open Table, and many more. I’m also the Co-founder of Rise25, where we help to connect b2b business owners to their ideal prospects. And this episode, of course, is brought to you by Rise25, where we help b2b businesses to get clients, referrals, and strategic partnerships with done-for-you podcasts and content marketing. And if you’ve ever been curious about building relationships deliberately using a podcast, I love to talk about it. I’m happy to call or hop on a call with you. So reach out to me, send me an email at [email protected] or you can email the company at [email protected].
Alright, so we’re going to dive into this topic, and what do I mean by how to build your network with intention? What do I mean by that? Well, what I mean is, you know, a lot of people actually don’t build their network intentionally. So the network that we have, will change and evolve over time, whether we do anything deliberately with intention, or not, in other words, we will meet new people, you will meet people all the time, and some people will fade away, you know, you just don’t get in touch with people anymore. You don’t talk to them as frequently, you don’t see them as frequently, maybe you move away, maybe you have other priorities in life. And so your network is constantly changing and evolving. And you can either do that with intention, or without intention, and it will happen to you. In other words, you will find yourself surrounded by a network, which is composed of people who used to work with people who you went to college with, people who happen to live on your street, people that you know, for whatever reason entered your life. Or you can be very deliberate and intentional, intentional about it. And you can decide, you can look around, and you can decide, these are people who I want to get to know, these are people who I want to connect with people who I resonate with, we have shared values, who have shared goals, we’re marching down similar paths, or you want to be marching down a similar path, you can look at someone and say, I admire that person, I admire what they’re doing, I’d like for them to be in my orbit in my universe, I would like to get to know them. And you can very deliberately get to know them.
And I’m a huge proponent of doing that. And I think you should be doing that. So first, there’s a couple of questions that there are five primary areas that I want to talk about here. And first of all, the first question you want to ask yourself is, what are your goals? What are you looking to do? You have to look at, you know, what’s your history, your career or your business? Where are you coming from? Where do you want to go? And a lot of people don’t stop and slow down and think about that. Are you really happy with what you’re doing right now? Is it something that you want to do completely different, because if you really, ultimately, if your passion is that you want to do something different, then you’re never going to be happy, going to the same events, conferences, connecting with the same people that meet yesterday’s goals are meet the person, the values of the person you used to be not the person that you want to be the person you want to come want to become. And so that’s incredibly important to get really clear about what your goal is. And once you get clear about that, then you can start lining up, you know, who are the right people who would be a great referral partner in this area that I want to go in, and who would be great clients for the work that I want to do? Who would be great strategic partners, who are the people in this orbit in this sphere in this niche, whatever you want to call it. That’s really step number one.
Step number two is what are the tools that you are going to use in order to build that relationship? Now, I have used all kinds of different tools in order to do that. And when I’m talking about tools, I’m not talking about hacks or software or something like that. I’m talking about, you know, we’re proponents of content, and networking, combining those two using your content, in order to build relationships, and network. And for years now, I’ve done it using a podcast. But I’ve also done it using articles writing for different publications, blog posts, you can use Facebook Lives, LinkedIn lives, like we’re doing here, now, you can use writing a book, what I found was, you want to have the right combination of ease of use. So you maximize the number of relationships that you’re building, and lack complexity, efficiency, and also attractiveness to the person that you’re seeking to connect with. So you know, it might be super easy for you to write a blog post on your website, but does that really have appeal to others? For many years, I wrote articles in Forbes and Huffington Post, and in different publications like that, which had great appeal. But it was so labor intensive, it took me so much time, energy and effort to get those pieces published, that it ended up resulting in very low output. I ended up producing very few articles per year, I ended up building very few relationships because of it. So it could continue doing it, but it just wouldn’t be as efficient. What I found was using a podcast, that it was the right combination of all of those things, you know, if you do a weekly podcast, even if you take some vacations over the course of a year, you’ve got 45 or so 50 people that you are strategically building relationships deepening a relationship with and for anyone, that’s going to be super meaningful if you do it, right. And it’s going to have a big impact on your business. So that’s how I’ve always found podcasts, combined with content marketing, turning it into micro content these days across your social channels, is the right combination of maximizing relationships, plus efficiency and also the ability to delegate all the pieces off of your plate that you shouldn’t be focusing your energy on. Like, for example, I could be writing books. But if you’re writing a book, if you’re writing yourself, it is certainly very time consuming, very labor intensive, and the output is not high. The number of relationships built is not high. Unless you do one of these compilation books where you’re featuring a lot of people.
The third piece, what is your outreach messaging? What is your outreach strategy, because you can only go so far with your initial network, but you want to actually craft your net, your messaging, this is incredibly important, especially if you’re just getting started with doing a podcast, your messaging is really important because you have to position it in the right way. Or else you’ll fall into the trap of people not wanting to be a guest on your podcast, because it’s something new, but that doesn’t need to be the case. We’ve had many clients with a quote unquote, new podcast, who get tremendous guests on there. So you have to think about what’s your outreach strategy? What’s your messaging? How are you going to position this using to borrow my friend Michael portes phrase, the velvet rope strategy. That is to position it in a way that the podcast is something very special, and that not everyone is let in the door? It’s not like you’re just going to take anyone. Then the next piece that I like to think about here is how do you want the person that you’re featuring to experience going through that experience of being your guest.