The Most Strategic Networking Strategy Ever?

0:00From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like, it's not selling. It was like we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.

0:24I moved to New York City when I was 28 years old, and I gave myself a policy. A policy with a name. And that name was Something Every Night. Something Every Night. That was my policy. That was my life policy. Something Every Night. Never go home after work. Do not just sit around by yourself on the weekend. Go do something. Don't care what it is. Just go meet somebody for coffee or dinner or just go to a random book reading or buy tickets to something. Do something. And I kept this up. I kept this up from the age of 28 to the age of 35. Something every single night. Now, some big life changes happened during that time.

1:09Well, number one, at the very beginning, I didn't actually have that many friends in New York City. So I was doing a lot of things myself. And then I was doing things with work friends. And then I was doing things with friends sometimes that I met out doing something that night. And then I was dating. And then I met this girl, Jen, who became my wife. And so oftentimes Jen would come out and we'd do something every night meeting up with other people. Anyway, I loved this. I loved this so much. And look, I'm an extrovert. So of course, I loved this. But it's funny, because now I'm 45. And I tell people, I tell friends sometimes about this policy that I had.

1:49And I say, I talk about it wistfully now. Like, I wish I could go back to it. I mean, I have two little kids at home. I can't go back to it. It's not possible. But I have the energy for it. I frankly kind of have the desire for it. but most of my friends say, oh, that's crazy. I could never do that. That sounds exhausting. Why would you want to do that? Why would you want to go out all the time? It wasn't about like partying or whatever. It was about experiences and more importantly, about people. It was about meeting people. And as I look back on it now, I realized that I met so many incredible people And those people became a resource for me in a way that I just didn't even begin to anticipate.

2:33Those were the people that led to job opportunities. Those were the people that gave me great ideas for new projects or new products. Those were the people that introduced me to my next whoever, my next friend, my next writing partner, my next whatever. And none of that would have happened had I not done something every night. and that is why recently i i was trading emails with a guy who i have become friends with who's in the film industry and he mentioned that he has a version of this policy not exactly something every night but some kind of social networking ish activity every day something gotta have a meal with somebody gotta go out and meet with somebody never just sit at the office never have a full day that's just closed in by yourself or just seeing the people that you work with every day, get out there.

3:28He's been doing this since the very beginning of his career, and he has built it into the policy of his company. And I said, man, that sounds great. I got to hear how and why you're doing that. Because I have a hunch. I have a hunch that this is something that in some form, we should all be doing all the time. All business, even with how much technology has moved, there's so much relationship value. Certainly it sets leaders and companies apart significantly. This is Matthew Helderman. He's the co-founder and CEO of two companies in the entertainment space. The first is Bondit Media Capital, which is a film, television, music, and live entertainment financing and executive producing platform.

4:16So basically, in case none of that made sense to you because it didn't, to me, the first time I heard it. Basically, Matthew's company helps finance things that you love. They finance close to 500 film and TV projects, including Oscar nominees, Emmy winners. And he also runs Buffalo 8, which is a production, post-production, and distribution business. And how does he do all this? Well, the answer is a lot, a lot of great relationships. So I think with a lot of entrepreneurs, I was obsessively sort of quote-unquote hustling. I know that word gets derogatorily used sometimes these days, but certainly in my early 20s, you're hustling.

4:55And oftentimes, you're hustling aimlessly. You're taking tons of meetings, many of which later in your late 20s, early 30s, mid 30s, you start realizing, wow, a lot of those were dead ends from the start. But you're chasing things to create momentum for a business or businesses you're trying to build. And then over time, you put more structure around it. You end up more with a sniper rifle approach than a shotgun approach, and you're much more thoughtful. He's talking about systematizing meeting people, and not just for himself, but across his entire organization. What does that look like? I will give you a hint.

5:27It involves a custom CRM. Yes, we aren't just something every nighting it like I did in my 20s. We are all the timing it and tracking it and being able to draw real lines between breakfasts and lunches and dinners and business and business and business. If anything, by the end of this conversation, I think that you will be inspired to just be reaching out to people more, to recognize that sitting at home or that sitting in your office, wherever that is, is not going to get the job done, that you got to get out there. And that if you want to do it right, you got to do it systematically. That is what we're talking about today on Problem Solvers, coming up after the break.

6:18all right we're back i am talking with matthew helderman co-founder and ceo of bondit media capital and buffalo eight and we're talking about how to not just get out there and meet people but how to systematize it how to make sure it actually happens and how to drive real business because of it and so i asked matthew to start by just taking me all the way back to the first time that this idea of getting out there and getting out there intentionally really got on his radar. I had early on picked that up from a conversation, I think, with my dad around some CEO, whether it was like an old school, like a Jack Welch type leadership tactic of every meeting, certainly for the senior executive team, every lunch opportunity or breakfast opportunity is a meeting chance.

7:06It's your point. All business, even with how much technology has moved, there's so much relationship value, certainly that sets leaders and companies apart significantly. And so that became a big piece of it. And then I probably was like late 20s when I read the CAA. I think it's called Powerhouse is the name of the book. And it's the oral history of how Michael Ovitz built CAA with Ron Meyer. And CAA, just for those who don't know, Creative Artists Agency, one of the largest talent management agencies in the world, right? Correct. In its earliest days, it was purely in the talent management business.

7:42Today, we think of it as this sprawling thing that is in sports and technology and managing capital for family offices. Today, it's much, much larger, but you can probably, and I'm sure the Ovitz fanatics would appreciate, tracing its success to a lot of these systems he put in place. And I read that book and became really into it for a number of reasons as a student of the entertainment and loving the history of this business and all of the above, but his leadership style and how tenacious he was. And it wasn't just something he said, it was a requirement that every single EAA team member that came into the team was required every day, seven days a week, weekends included, whether it was a breakfast, a lunch, a dinner, a screening, an art gallery opening, going to a client's house, going to a sporting event, a hike.

8:29It was a requirement that you were using outside office relationship structured time to build and sell the story of CAO. And so at that point, again, I was like 27. I started putting that in place both for myself, but then also for the wider team. Because one of Ovid's big points was if you're able to demonstrate the value that you are achieving by monetizing relationships outside of the office inside the firm, the rest of the firm will likewise become interested in following that same framework. And so that became the framework. It also probably just builds a muscle that is really valuable for anybody in a relationships business, right?

9:11If you force people to go out, what you're really challenging them to do is to build the architecture of doing that, which means that you have to get really comfortable now reaching out to people and proposing getting together and getting really good at those meetings and making them worthwhile and starting to network your way around. And in a way, it probably becomes something of a filter for who's good at that and who isn't. And the way to build that or to see who can actually do it is to just force them to do it every single day. Is that right? Very, very much. Yeah. And I think not to mix leadership tactics or leadership books, but we then became similar timeframe, became very interested in this idea, this whole Ray Dalio radical transparency construct, where everyone within the firm can see what everyone else is making and how much of it is based and how much of it is commissioned and structured from those relationships.

10:08And so you can start to trace to your point, oh, I can see what my peers are making as a result of they are out there hustling. And it's not aimless hustling. It's very pointed and it's translating to them earning X. And that became even more powerful. Oh, I bet that has got to be quite motivating. In other words, you could see one of your colleagues made X bonus or something, and you can draw that back to that they had a lunch with somebody who introduced them to somebody else that led to a deal. Big time. Yeah. And we would start encouraging team members to say, because everyone had access to this basically internal CRM type dashboard where you could track monthly performance of how much your peers are making, you could then, and you would encourage the team members that are crushing it to speak up about, I took a lunch on a Saturday, or I took a breakfast on a Sunday morning, and it converted to this piece of business, which is why my month looks like it did when you saw that.

11:03And that became really powerful. It was almost like your job's done. The team has now become this motivating sort of self-sustaining wheel that's now spinning. Okay. So how did you actually implement this? You said that this is a thing you had to develop some systems around. We did. I'm definitely a systems-focused person, but I was not the person, certainly in the early days of building our company, that was even in the top three or four or five team members because I was very much powering it forward, building those relationships, raising capital. And I probably devalued how important a lot of these systems were.

11:41And so we got to a certain level of scale. And I definitely had an early CFO and then an early president, sort of much more logistical in their approach that helped me see, okay, you can be a lot more thoughtful in this. And then what's the, I'm going to forget who's to measure what matters. Like this whole idea of if you don't measure it, you don't track it, you can't really improve it. And so we started tracking everything. And we then built that into a CRM system. So it was an off-the-shelf CRM system, maybe from Zoho, that we then customized. So worked with them over the course of a number of years across all the parts of our business.

12:17So from relationship management to the deal intake, right? As a firm, we originate close to a thousand inbound media financing opportunities per year. And so we want to trace where they came from. When was the last correspondence? Who owns that relationship? How is that deal intertwined with another deal we're talking about? That took time to build that system. But then everyone, again, has access. Everyone has basically a quote-unquote seat to look at that CRM and, again, track the firm at large, but also what's the person sitting in the office working next to you actively achieving as a result of their inputs.

12:55Yeah, not just what they're making, but who they're meeting. I mean, that's a really interesting thing that you are giving visibility to inside of the organization. And so when somebody joins, you tell them this flat out. You're like, here is a policy that we have. I need you to be out every single day building relationships and meeting people. And I expect to see that reflected inside the CRM. Very much. Yeah, it's actually in the company handbook. So in the company handbook, there's all types of policies, but there is a business development section of the handbook that drills into how we expect the team members to be out there.

13:32And I want to be clear. I mean, there are certainly team members on the finance team or certain members in more sort of operational areas. I doubt that they're five days a week, but their relationships. But their relationship building is different. Again, it's even more pointed or sort of drilled down. But then we have team members that are more than five or seven meetings a week. They're doing this even more aggressively. And to your point of strengthening that muscle, I would say I take pride in we've definitely shaped a few of our younger team members who are now sort of mid-trajectory within the organization.

14:04They were good business development people and now they are exceptional at it. And I think it comes from being so pointed in where they're going to get value and they're great at it. Yeah. I'm curious what you're telling folks like that. How does someone go from being good to being exceptional at business development? What are you driving them towards? Are there things that they're looking for that aren't intuitive? What's going on there? Yeah, it's funny. I'm going to use one example in particular on a no-names basis, but we have a team member who started as an intern with us and now has a very senior role with the team.

14:38He's entrepreneurial by nature, built things as a kid, built and sold businesses before he joined us, studied business in school, but he is naturally more drawn to being sort of extroverted entrepreneur. He would spend time on deals and opportunities and people that I would look at and think he's just wasting his time and chasing his tail. And I remember sort of having to catch myself and back off and let him do that mainly because he started yielding results on deals and opportunities and meetings that I wouldn't have taken that I thought this is wasteful. He's spinning wheels. And I bet we've generated seven figure type dollar amounts more probably from his tenacity and being able to find diamonds in the rough for lack of a better phrase.

15:23And so for me, it's become, okay, my style of relationships and where I want to sort of spend my relationship time building is different than what other team members who have excelled at it. And again, it taught me also about not discounting a meeting immediately or discounting a connection immediately just because I don't see the A to B connective tissue. This person taught me intensely. Yeah, because in a way, I wonder if this is a matter of this younger person who realizes that they're going to have to hustle their way through a lot of possibly dead-end meetings in order to find that great one.

16:13And they have a higher tolerance for it than you do because you're the boss, because you're older, because you have less time, whatever. And so you naturally, as you get older, you start filtering out things that as a younger person, you wouldn't have filtered out. And that preserves your time and it allows you to focus on the big wins. But what you miss is that range of developmental opportunities. When I started, Matthew, in magazines, I would take meetings with anybody. I mean, just anybody, right? Publicists would reach out and I'd meet them and random CEOs would reach out and meet them and other writers would reach out and meet them.

16:59People would want, you know, hey, can I get you coffee and ask your advice? Sure, no problem. And I was just doing this all the time. And now I don't at all, like at all. And that's because I have a lot to do. And I have a pretty clear sense of how an hour turns into value for me. And the end result of that is that it's actually pretty hard to get me to a meeting now. And I say no to almost everything. And frankly, I don't even get to see my friends all that much, which I need to fix. But, you know, when I think back on it, I think one of the reasons that I excelled as a young magazine editor and got to the place that I am now was because people thought I had a great network.

17:40And I always had somebody to call upon. And I always had the right person in mind for anything. And people were giving me opportunities because I would pass along opportunities to them. And why did that happen? It happened because I was just saying yes to every stupid meeting that I possibly could. And I enjoyed getting coffee with people. And a lot of that stuff was absolutely worthless. but I ended up bringing back the stuff that the boss would never bring back because the boss is too busy for this. And I was willing to bat, you know, in the low 200s for meetings to value, whereas the boss is expecting like for their own time batting close to a thousand because they're really busy.

18:17So do you think that that's what's going on here? And like in some way then, a great piece of leadership is as you get older and you naturally develop this filter that you make sure you're bringing in younger people who have a different filter from you and are willing to go and spend time on the things that you yourself will not, but that could yield fruit? Very much. I also think it naturally happens, especially if you're scaling an organization or your career is advancing in an aggressive or exciting way. To your point, there's only so many hours in the day and the responsibility on your shoulders as you advance in your career change.

19:00So I completely agree. I want to reference, there's another book around this. Brian Grazer, for those that are familiar or not familiar, is Ron Howard's business partner and founded Imagine Entertainment. And he wrote a book, I think it's called A Curious Mind. And And it's about how he has literally had lunch or breakfast or dinner with a different person each week. And this isn't a business thing, although it turned into it. This is an awesome, and again, he obviously had the ability and the resources to do this. He had a staff member called a cultural attache whose job it was to basically research and track down things he was fascinated in.

19:36So it could be meeting Muhammad Ali. It could be meeting the biggest chef in the world. It could be meeting a programmer. he would find things he was interested in. He would pull on the thread of it. And then he would have this team member at Imagine rack those people down. And he would sit and have not like a one-hour meeting, but like a multi-hour long meal with them. And some of the biggest pieces of content that came out of Imagine, A Beautiful Mind being one of them, these amazing stories, again, a different era of entertainment and storytelling. But he literally likens the success of his career to being super curious, tracking down super interesting people.

20:15Again, to your point, not taking every meeting, but being really, really interested in getting deep on specific topics and people that broaden your mind, broaden your thinking. And then it led to the Grinch, by the way. It led to all these amazing pieces of entertainment that they weren't going to do until Grazer got really, really into these different topics. But okay, so let's think about it like this. It's pretty easy if you're Brian Glazer to like get a meeting with anybody, right? It doesn't take much. But I think a lot of people might be listening to us right now and think like, yeah, you know, I would love to meet more people and build a great network and like have this policy of getting in front of the people who could create great deals with me.

20:59But I don't have an inbox full of invitations and I'm a random founder of a small company. So who's going to take the coffee with me? So if you could rewind to some earlier days when your name meant less than it does now, what did you find was a good strategy for just getting in front of people or getting someone to actually meet you for coffee or lunch? Yeah, first off, I fully agree with you. Back to sort of the top of our conversation When I agree, you're just out there trying to create momentum and the ball is not rolling. It starts rolling, it stops rolling, it starts rolling, it stops rolling, and you're continually trying to get something going.

21:41Again, my story is a little different in that in college, I made this feature film. And that was like the birth of Buffalo 8 was having this feature film. So I was able to frame the meeting, our company website, and our marketing materials, even in the earliest iteration of we run a feature film production company. and we just sold this movie, all of which was true, but all of which was incredibly watered down relative to how that reads and sounds on face value. And so it was a matter of one step after the next building value and showing we were actually in the marketplace doing things. And I'm going to say something that's incredibly broad and I guess somewhat annoying, but I am a genuinely interested person in all kinds of things.

22:23And so being able to sit and speak with someone, interesting people know other interesting people, they would help make introductions that would then lay the foundation for what became my network of interesting and cool people know other interesting and cool people. And that then just becomes this path that you start walking because they've already tread down it, especially when you're a young 20-something taking meetings with people who are later in their careers who do have more of that foundation. So to us, it was sort of first domino, we actually have something to talk about that's meaningful.

22:53And the second then is be genuinely curious and interested in other people broadly, not just business, but art, travel, wine, all of these things that became huge parts of my life. I do business with a lot of those people that the relationship didn't begin transactionally. It began relationally. Yeah. Number one is it sounds like one of the things you were doing is if you had an interesting conversation with somebody, you were, if not overtly, then in some way, basically saying, hey, who else should I talk to? Is that right? You were hopscotching people in an intentional way. Were you prompting them?

23:28What do you do? Very much. Yeah. I would literally, one of my action points at the end of a meeting would be, how can I follow up with this person? What is the value that I get in the connective tissue I can keep with them? But then I would literally say, are there people you think I would gain from connecting with and chatting with? And entertainment is an interesting sort of apprentice fields, producers that have done it, directors that have done it well. Many of them are interested in the next generation. And so one of the best pieces of advice I got super early on from a really amazing producer, a guy by the name of Kim Winther.

24:01So he's a assistant director, huge movies, worked with Tom Cruise for years. He was so amazingly generous with his time. And he said to me, what you'll find in this industry, and I can't comment on whether it's true in others, but if you meet interesting, good people and they genuinely see you're interested in them and you're interested in the field for the right reasons, they'll be generous with their time and don't feel like you're bothering them until they tell you, hey, I need a moment here. You're blowing up my inbox too much. And I found that to be correct. A lot of these people were willing and able to be really helpful and thoughtful to us as a full team and me as an individual, but it did come from asking at the end of each meeting, who can I talk to?

24:43Yeah, just being really overt about it. And what you just said there tees up the final thing that I wanted to make sure that we hit, which was when you're reaching out to people, even if you don't necessarily have something to offer them, right? I think we often have this thing where I should have some value for them instead of just them having value for me. And sometimes that's just not necessarily the case, or it's not obvious how you're going to be valuable to somebody. So How do you get them to sit down with you? And the answer is, be really interested in what they have. And that's what I found.

25:19Like when people reach out to me, if they have done their work, if they have researched me, if they exude a personality that I feel like I could, I would enjoy spending time with this person. And even if they have nothing tangible to offer me, the time is going to be worth it because they seem really joyful and interesting and funny or curious, and they understand me and what I have to offer and what I do and how I think, and they've read a bazillion of my things, I am so much more likely to say yes. I mean, I just said a minute ago that it's really hard to get me to a meeting, and it's true, but I do sometimes do it.

25:58And at this point, I do it when people reach that level of showing me that they've invested their time in me and that they're going to to be interesting and that I'm going to walk away feeling mentally fulfilled. And that just can't be understated, the value of it. And so I wonder if you're building that into maybe what your younger staff does or what you did a lot of. It's not just the hustle of getting someone to say yes, but it's the hustle of getting to know everything about them before you even reach out. For sure. And obviously, we live in an era where it's not that hard, right? You can spend 15 minutes and have a pretty comprehensive overview on someone, certainly talking point-wise and how to connect the dots between what you're doing, what they're doing, and where you can find common ground or opportunity business-wise.

26:47And also, I feel like that's a lot of the fun of building new relationships is doing some research on someone and finding out that they've done X, Y, or Z that's really unique. I've never met anyone that's done that thing before or been to that place before or is super passionate about that thing before. And it's also opened up, certainly for me, later life, deep passions that I don't think I would have had, had I not met people and pulled those threads. Yeah. All right. Final thing. Tell me, I don't know that you have this ranked in your head, just some unexpectedly incredible value that came from some meeting that you just hustled to get, right?