2119 - How to Leverage Relationships for Business Growth with Devin Sizemore

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments.

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1:05With us right now, it's Devin Sizemore. Devin, you are a connector. It's probably one of the best ways I'd like to describe you. You're also a consultant, speaker, and author. Your website is devinsizemore.com. And Devin, you are also the author of the bestselling book, Connection Expansion. You are one connection away from massive success in your life and business. I believe it. Devin, it's great to have you. Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here. Excited for this conversation. That's a bold statement, Devin. You are one connection away from massive success in your life and business.

1:43Do you mind talking about that a bit? Yeah. So I love that question. You know, I help people write books for a living with one of the hats I wear. And when I wrote my original subtitle, it was a traditional best practice subtitle, right? A duplicatable, scalable system that helps you build a million dollar network or something like that, which which explains exactly what the system in the book does. And as I was going through editing revisions, they're like, that's great. But like, I know you and it's more than that. And you have more stories than that. And we were talking. I said, you know what?

2:17I hear this a lot with clients. I hear this a lot from stage. I hear this a lot when I'm talking to people is, man, that one introduction, that one conversation, that one thing changed the momentum of my business, my life, my family. It changed something in a big way. And so I really wanted to own this idea that you are literally one connection away from whatever you're chasing. And we happen to be recording this in the beginning of the year, right? So whatever you're chasing this year, it's one connection. It doesn't have to be hundreds, although it will be, right? It can be one connection that can change everything.

2:53But you have to stop self-sabotaging yourself from missing that one connection. Yeah, well, let's stop that. How can we, Devin, in 2025, how can we increase the rate of relationships, meaningful relationships that we build? Because, you know, and again, I was kind of teasing before we started recording. I'm like, I'm just going to save it. I was like, I was tempted to tell you kind of my point of view on this. I listen, I I think that as founders, there are a lot of things that we could do that are probably not the best activity for us in a business. Right. So if we kind of go back to an old school e-myth view of our productivity and our work in our business, you know, operations generally.

3:43you want to get a great team put together and handle a lot of that customer support. You know, again, you just start getting out of a lot of these things that perhaps are outside of your zone of genius. I would argue, Devin, that one of the most valuable things that any founder, anyone who's responsible for growth, you know, growth director, revenue director, officer, the number one thing, in my opinion, they should be doing is building high level relationships. What's your take on that? Yeah, 100%. I get pushback a lot from the more successful you get. So whether it's a high net worth individual who owns a lot of businesses or someone who, again, you feel like you've earned the right to be particular with your calendar.

4:31That's great. That really becomes the tipping point for where your network stops growing and you stop tapping into all of these things that have got your business to where it is today. And that's where the plateaus stick in. That's where we start, you know, dispositioning all this to a sales team that's not running as fast as we were running. And you start running into a lot of these troubles with business development really come down to you being too protective of your calendar and making way too many assumptions about the people you should be meeting with versus going back to being open and curious and building a real and meaningful network.

5:09Talk about, yeah, let's, let's talk about some activity that we should be doing on a regular basis so that we can make ourselves more available to these high-level relationships. Because I, I, I listen, I, to me, nothing fuels me more than an ideal connection. You know, just met with someone yesterday and it's, you know, you know you've hit it well when it feels like, oh my gosh, you have been just obsessed with this world over here and doing this. Guess what? We've been obsessed with this world building this network over here. And then it's like we kind of come together and we're like, oh my gosh, what you have lines up perfectly with what I have together.

5:53It's not one plus one equals two. It's not one plus one equals three. It's one plus one equals 11. How can we do more of this, Devin? Yeah, so the first thing I recommend to anyone listening is you have to change your ask because the ask is the thing that impacts who you're being connected to and the frequency at which you're being connected. And so let me explain, right? Let's go deep so that there's real value. When I ask people, who do you want to be connected with? The default answer is I want to be connected to some sort of prospect profile, right? You have an ideal client profile or some sort of metric for what you perceive the perfect client to be.

6:31That's great. You should have that. You should know that in an elevator pitch, you should know how to answer that. But when you ask for connections, you have to change your ask because if Josh says, hey, Devin, who do you want to connect with? And I answer with my ideal client profile. What I'm doing is I'm setting Josh up to fail because now he has to think in his database, identify someone that he thinks might be a fit advocate for me and position that person to be sold and so one quote i always use for everyone is everybody wants to buy nobody wants to be sold we are in a consumer society you don't have to sell them they will buy if it's a fit so stop selling right so your ask shouldn't be that either what your ask should be goes to what i talk about in the book is the connection expansion exercise and this is shifting from asking for clients to asking for the people who have access to your clients.

7:21So this is vendors, where your clients seek education, where they gather, who has influence over them, who impacts them. So coaches, consultants, thought leaders, and who are general connectors. If we shift the ask and we say, Hey, Devin, who do you want to meet? And I shift my ask to, Hey, I want to meet business CPAs because we're targeting similar clients. All of a sudden Josh can go through his network and be like, Oh, I know half a dozen business CPAs. I would love to make an introduction because it's collaborative. It's value driven. There's no friction of sales. It's not slimy. And so what happens is you end up getting way more introductions and they will actually be more meaningful and high value because they have access to many of your clients or stages with access to many of your clients or audiences with access to many of your clients.

8:05And so you're actually going to have a higher book rate, way more aligned meetings, way higher value meetings because you shift your ask. And so it all comes down to that at the beginning. Yes, there's a lot of work on the back end, but you've got to change your ask. You have to start thinking bigger and shift from the one-to-one approach to one-to-many, to many, to many. Yeah. Well, tell me about Devin, your work. What do you do? Like how are, I mean, obviously you wrote the book, Connection Expansion, but can you tell me a little bit more about the services you provide? And I know you've got, Obviously, you facilitate a lot of connections as well.

8:43Yeah, so I wear two hats. I am a serial entrepreneur. I always say that to everyone. I love business. But the two hats I primarily wear, I help people write and publish books in a partnership with Million Dollar Author. And I was a client, yes, with my own book. And so on the connection side, I run ACES, which is a weekly connection group where we help you build your network. Think BNI, LaTip, typical networking, but national, international reach. And you can do it from the comfort of your own home. And then I do do strategic consulting in that space, and I do guaranteed connections for people to help you actually build your network in a strategic way.

9:17Yeah. Well, tell me about why that would be valuable and maybe who's a part of that, why they've joined, what kind of experiences they've had. Yeah, so three primary types of people, high net worth individuals, business owners, and sales professionals. Typically, right, you want to grow your business, right? You want to grow top line. You want to grow revenue. The issue that you may find and that I found when I owned my marketing agency a decade ago was crowded marketplace. I'm a voice with everyone else and I'm trying to find a way to do something different. So when we get back to basics and building meaningful relationships, we can exponentially outgrow most of the strategies you're implementing today.

9:57And so that's who we're attracting. People who really want to focus on meeting high caliber people. they want to do it in a strategic way and they want to have the support if they have a meeting that they feel was misaligned or they didn't see value in that they can they can debrief that and we can have real conversations about like hey where was that one plus one and you guys missed it like you missed the conversation because you were too focused on selling or positioning or all these other things which actually have nothing to do with building relationships and so that's who we connect with is people who actually want to build meaningful relationships you want to build huge networks.

10:33And yes, at the end of the day, you want to make money. Yeah. Well, Devin, do you mind maybe just sharing a little bit about the book side a little bit? Like, do you do that work? Yeah. So thank you so much for asking on that. Yeah. So with Million Dollar Author, we help thought leaders and people who sell their expertise write books that close more deals. I use that language very specifically because we work with people who sell your expertise. So financial advisors, coaches, consultants, marketing agencies, IT, if you have to be credible, and that will help you close more deals, that's we work with.

11:08And the books we write, we call them airplane books, high value, very easy to digest books, but they have to be able to be read in less than two hours, because attention spans have gotten shorter. And so there is an art to writing persuasive books that build your credibility, inspire the person to take action, and then they actually follow through and take action. So that's the kind of books we write. And then we work with our clients to make sure you're a bestseller and to make sure that your book generates six, seven, eight figures in revenue for you by using the book as a tool, not focusing on book sales.

11:43Right. Yeah. Yeah. No, I completely agree. You know, when someone, what would be an example of maybe an author that you've worked with or, you know, someone that you've worked with now they have a book, how did they use it very specifically? And, you know, how does that, what's the business justification or the, you know, the economic justification for having a book? You know, because I think, again, no one wants to go through all of the effort, have it sit on a shelf and just, you know, hey, they've got a box of books sitting at home, but no one's ever done anything with it. And they're not convinced that was a good use of their time.

12:17We want to avoid that. Yeah, we do. And we've all have those books where the bookmark ends up halfway through the book and you never finish it again so that the style of book matters i'm going to give you a couple uh relatable stories so the first is this book liberty spenders kurt and kristin they're great people they were transitioning from one industry to another and they use the book as the moment to get clarity in their new service offering in their new direction and so if you're making a pivot in your business where you have authority and credibility but you need to transfer that authority to a new niche, to a new vertical or to a new service offering, book is a great way to solidify that so that you can use it with your current database to re-educate them about a new direction.

12:59So that's a good example about like a pivot, get wealthy for sure. MC is great. This is a financial advisor we worked with. He specializes in whole life. He has a phenomenal podcast, phenomenal content creator, but what he realized is he needed a leave behind. He needed something that when he's on stages on podcasts and at events that he could give to people that was not expensive. This is a tip for people. When you write your own book, you can order author copies. A paperback is anywhere between$2.50 and$3. So for$3, I can give my book, my permanent marketing card to an ideal prospect. I just had a meeting with MC this week and he told me the two meetings before me were people who read his book, took full notes in the book and booked a meeting.

13:45He did nothing. So they reached out, they bought a copy, read the book, got on a meeting and they were qualified. Right. In the conversation, they opened the book, said MC, I'm on page 62. You said this. What's that mean? right and so that's another example of you're already credible you're already out there but you don't have this low ticket easy to digest offer that people can engage with and a book is a great way to do that and then for myself i do a ton of connections and referral relationships and so i sent my book one for all my referral partners one they could give away they gave those books away that led to a seven figure pipeline and so once you have a book you can leverage it to build credibility.

14:24And this is just a sampling of the a hundred plus clients we worked with just last year on how they're using books to generate phenomenal revenue. Yeah. All right. So let's, to our friend that's been listening here, let's give them some things to do. First off, Devin, let's give them some, some, some things that they could do. No charge doesn't cost anybody. They don't need to talk to anybody, but maybe just some things that you think that would be really valuable for business in the months ahead. 100%. So the quick action activity I talk about in my book, and I love telling people is, let's reignite your network.

14:59What that looks like is what I call my nourishing check-in email. And I'm going to give you the template, the script right now. The script sounds like this. Hey, Josh, it's been a while since we last connected. I hope you're doing well. Anything new and exciting in your world? Any new challenges? Hey, I'd love to get time on the calendar to catch back up so I can realign on who would be a best fit for you as I'm building my network. Here's a link to my calendar. Let's catch up. The reason I give you that script is it's all about the other person. It genuinely is about checking in with them. But what it does, it starts to fill your calendar up.

15:29So you can have these realigned, updated conversations, especially heading into a new year. And you can recalibrate who has access to your ideal clients. Was there opportunities you've missed in previous conversations? And go have some of those conversations in a genuine way without selling anything and being genuinely curious. and you'll be amazed at the opportunities that expose themselves to you. If you just do that, just do one or two a day, start re-engaging that network you already have. You're already successful. Don't waste the network you've already built. Amen, love it. All right, Devin Sizemore, your website, devinsizemore.com.

16:05So now let's talk about someone who's pretty serious. They need to have a conversation with you, Devin. Where do they go? What would you recommend they do? Oh, obviously go snag connection expansion. That's on Amazon. And it's on Kindle, it's on hardcover paperback and five stars on Amazon right now. Devin, obviously, aside from that, for someone who, they wanna grab some time with you. They're curious about connections that you might be able to help facilitate. What do they do? Yeah, so for sure. Thank you for the shout out on the book. Grab a copy. Audiobook coming soon. By the time this gets released, there's probably an audiobook link on there as well.

16:43DevinSizemore.com, connect with me there. All social platforms. You can message me. There's a contact form. Reach out, say hi. I will meet with anyone to talk about anything. So just find a way to raise your hand and I will get back to you on whatever your favorite platform is. Awesome. Devin Sizemore, DevinSizemore.com. Devin, thank you for joining us. Josh, appreciate you.

17:08Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

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