Thread: Ron Bates Interview (Ron has 40,000 contacts on LinkedIn)

Ron Bates Interview

On line Networking - Ron Bates

Networking - Discussion between Michael Beale and Ron Bates, April 2008,

Ron is a Managing Principal with the retained executive search firm Executive Advantage Group, Inc.



(Please allow up to 2 minutes for the MP3 file to download if you want to listen to the download)

http://www.nlp-expert.co.uk/networking/ron.mp3

Podcast transcript see following article:

Michael : Good morning Ron

Ron: Hi Michael

Michael : Firstly can I really thank you for taking the time out to take part in this podcast, I remember speaking to you about LinkedIn a couple of years ago when I was really interested in what you had to say, and I'm really pleased that you've taken the time to maybe update some of my thinking and give our audience a chance to hear what some of your thoughts are.

Ron : Sure, well thanks for the opportunity. I always enjoy our conversations.

Michael : Can you kick off by introducing yourself, telling us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Ron : Sure. I'm a managing principle with a small retained executive search firm called executive Advantage Group. Small as in I'm half of the firm - Michael Roffstein is the other half of the firm.

I used to be a partner at Heidric And Struggles, which is the largest executive search firm in the world. And before that I was at a smaller firm, about the thirteenth largest.

Kind of a different career from a lot of my peers, I've got a degree in physics, I was a microwave communications engineer, working on satellites and other stuff before I got into sales, got in the dark side, so to speak.

I was at Hewlett Packard selling tester-measurement equipment and multimillion dollar chip-testers to the semi-conductor industry, before I went into the software industry, selling semi-conductor design software. A number of different roles there, and when I left I was managing, consulting sales.

I was managing sales before I got into executive search, which I've been in now for about ten years.

Michael : And what experience do you have on online networking?

Ron : Well, more than some, not as much as others.

I got into online networking about five years ago, if I can remember right. Kind of kicking and screaming. I'd never been exposed to online networking before, in terms of leveraging online networking platforms. I'd network via email, but that's kind of similar to picking up the phone and networking with someone.

And basically I started getting these invitations to join a platform called LinkedIn, which I'd never heard of before, and just kind of ignored them. And then I talked to my partner and asked 'Do you get these things?' and he said 'Yes'

I asked 'What are they?' and he said 'It's an online networking platform, like Spoke.' And I said 'What's Spoke?'

So being kind of clueless - and I mean, I network with people and have done throughout my career, but never leveraged a platform to do it. So he told me a little bit about it and he said 'Why don't you take LinkedIn and I'll take Spoke.' and I said 'OK, we can figure out what these things mean for us.'

So I joined LinkedIn, and at the time they were about 1.5 million members, I think, so it was relatively early on - and found out that I had fifty or so invitations that were just waiting there to be accepted, and some of them were from venture capitalists that I knew, which was a good indication that it might be a good place.

And so I joined, and have been a member ever since, and a light bulb went on my head in terms of what LinkedIn was, what it could be, how it could impact business, my business - how I could help people especially through it, I'd get a lot of requests offline, if you will, given the fact that people know I have a large database.

And people would ask me 'Ron, we're looking to do a beta site for our new software, it goes into the financial services industry - do you know any CIO's of financial services companies, that it might make sense for us to talk to?' So I would fan through my Rolodex and try to find some names to help somebody out from a good will perspective. And when LinkedIn came along I realised 'Wow, I can do the same thing, but much more efficiently!'

So, that was kind of my introduction into networking.

Michael : How many contacts have you now got on LinkedIn?

Ron : The last time I checked I have more than forty-thousand direct contacts, but that and five dollars will get me a cup of coffee.

Michael : And a simple question - even if it's a complex answer - How did you get to forty thousand contacts?

Ron : Well the simplest answer is hard work mixed with some insanity. But what you can do with LinkedIn has changed over the years, It basically came down to, 'I'm just going to start loading up my database that we network with anyway, that we communicate with regularly, into the database - and upload it into LinkedIn, which you can do and see who's in LinkedIn, who's already a member, and start inviting people, '

And when you do that enough and you start developing a lot of contacts, and then you develop enough contacts and people who want to be connected with you because they understand how the algorithms of connections work within LinkedIn - and that if you're connected to large connectors than you have more exposure to the overall population in the absence of being able to connect to a lot of people yourself.

Michael : Building on that, what are the actual benefits that you yourself have got out of LinkedIn?

Ron : Well, I've developed some pretty amazing relationships with people around the world, which I never would have, probably, not having access to a platform like that. And it's as simple as somebody shoots me a request 'can you help me with this, that or the other thing?' and I put a little time into seeing what I can do - and although it might be something simple for me to reply to, or to hook somebody up, or to forward them through my network, it ends up being something that's a big win for them - and not so much what I did, but the end result of them being connected through.

And they're appreciative, so we start a dialogue, and I get to know them, and they get to know me, and before you know it one thing leads to another and now there's a relationship that wasn't there before.

And then on the business side, the nature of my work, is that its a very personal service - so all the work that we win, we win not because somebody referred you into something, you win it because you stand on your own in front of the client and demonstrate your competency.

But there are some cases where we might have been referred into an opportunity, so to that extent it's incremental to our business, but to no means is it something that's really driven our success. It's additive, like all of the different things one person tries to do in trying to pursue business.

Michael : Why do you think online networking is important in business today? If you think it is important.

Ron : Two ways to comment that. One with respect to my day job being a recruiter, and the other to respect to business in general.

Being a recruiter, the demographic reality of the professional working population is changed dramatically - today when you're looking at somebody, the average amount of time you're at a job, depending on who's numbers you're looking at, is between one and two years.

So there's so much more movement in the workforce today. And to that extent, just because you have a large database - we have a database of twenty million people - it doesn't matter if you're not constantly communicating with them, to keep there contact information up to date.

People move too much! People's contact details are out of date within one or two years. And what networking does is it allows you to develop those relationships in a much simpler way that lets you stay in contact with people more easily. And in the context of recruiting, it's not so much the people that I know in terms of my Rolodex, if you will, it's 'who does my Rolodex now?'

And that's what networking is ultimately all about, So you can reach out and contact a lot more people by looking at 'who do other people know?' vs 'who do you know?'

And to take that analogy into business in general, more and more business - especially if you're business function is external facing into customer or market population - again becomes more important as you're able to connect through to people that you don't necessarily know.

So again, leveraging the power of who other people know, not just who you know - what online networking does is it makes it extremely efficient, to be able to reach out to and potentially connect with huge numbers of people, because you're leveraging the power of the Internet combined with electronic databases - and what I mean by electronic database, is the database of the membership population of a given platform.

Michael : Moving on from that - what do you think are some of the characteristics of a successful online net worker?

Ron : That they operate with a giving-before-getting paradigm. The problem that I see with a lot of what people call online networking is that, to coin a phrase, it's not 'networking', it's 'needworking'. And that people only exercise online networking platforms when they have a need.

And networking should be a practice that there's something that you invest in every day. In the context that you're working on 'How can I add value? How can I help people? How can I extent myself, invest in relationships that I don't have, take a chance to help someone that I don't necessarily know?'

Because everybody has value, and then one day, when I have a need and I need to reach out into my network - because I've operated in a give-before-getting paradigm, I have a much better chance that an individual that I may need assistance from will have benefited from that. And will remember me, and we be much more inclined to help as a result of how I've invested in that relationship, without concern for what's in it for me to start with.


Michael : So you're saying it's about giving, you're saying you're doing it in investments, so you're doing a little bit all the time to keep it up to date and relevant.

Is there anything else - really top level - is there anything else that you would describe as a competence for a good worker?

Ron : Realise that not everyone is going to react the same way to your wanting to network with them, and to a certain extent have a little bit of a thick skin from that perspective. So if you're rebutted by somebody, or you don't get the response that you hope for from someone, there's a lot of people out there who can potentially, help you add value to your networking objectives, and just continue to invest and move on.

Almost like prospecting to a certain extent. If you run away from the first person that says 'No, I'm not interested.' Well, you're kind of dead.

Michael : Let's build on that a little bit. You mentioned LinkedIn, you mentioned Spode - is there anywhere else where you network online?

Ron : Over the years I've experimented with a number of different platforms, and that said, I only have so much bandwidth to devote to online networking, and where I have spent most of my effort is on two platforms. And that's LinkedIn, and then on Ecademy.

Ecademy is a networking platform that I know you're aware of based in the UK, but has a global footprint - but it's very small from a membership population in comparison to LinkedIn - but what I've learned over the years is that you can't just a networking platform solely based on the numbers of members it might have,

And to that end, even though Ecademy has a much smaller membership size compared to LinkedIn, there are things you can do on Ecademy you can't do on LinkedIn, just based on the capabilities of the platform.

So every tool has a different application, and the analogy that I use is that you wouldn't use the same saw for every application when building a house that required a saw. So right tool for the right job is kind of the way that I look at it.

Michael : Lets look at the sorts of things that you do on a network. If you were to teach somebody that is new to networking, -you've already talked about coming from giving and that they work at it, but what kinds of things would you advise them to do to get the things started?

Ron : A good place to start is 'who do you already know?' Who's in your personal Rolodex that you interact with both personally and professionally? And then if you join a platform, like lets say LinkedIn, you have the ability to upload that contact information, and LinkedIn will tell you who's already a member - so you might know people who are already members of a platform.

And if that's the case that's a good springboard, because its a nice warm way to start. And now you've exhausted who you know it's about who you don't know, and largely that's where it's all going to happen for you anyway.

But the best things to do are to think about what you're objectives are. What is it you're trying to accomplish from an online networking perspective? And then start looking at the membership population for individuals that you think there might be some resonance with with respect to your objectives, and based on what they do, what you think their objectives might be.

And then just start reaching out to people just stating that you're new. And that you wanted to talk to them a little bit about their experiences, wondered if you could get a little bit of their time, investing in the relationship, offering to help them in the context of what you do, as far as the give-before-getting sort of thing - and then stick your toe in the water and just start playing around with it.

And again it's going to work differently on every different platform, whether it's LinkedIn, or Ecademy or Spoke, or Myspace, which obviously isn't business networking, but it's a social networking platform.

Michael : What skills do you think that you have that enable you to do this? And looking at this in the context of getting the forty thousand contacts that you've got - what skills have enabled you to do that?

Ron : Well, prospecting skills for one. Like I said, coming back to having a database of contacts, I have access to different tools than people that aren't in the business of doing what I do.

So access to databases, contacts, are different to other people. But again, the point shouldn't be just having as many contacts that you can have on a given platform - that makes sense for me for what I do - it may not make sense for someone else,

So the skills really are communication skills, ultimately - that you can be clear and concise with what you're trying to accomplish when you reach out to people - so that you're not just reaching out to people in a generic way that people can see through - that it wasn't someone reaching out to them personally, it was reaching out to them generically.

And different people react to that differently. So just being honest, but thinking what value you could add to somebody else when you're reaching out to them is something to keep in mind otherwise some people are more suspicious than others, of 'why is this individual reaching out to me?'

And if they can see that there's value in potentially responding to you, from an incremental relationship than you're that much ahead of the game.

And it all comes back to your unique objectives as to why you are networking online to begin with - that's the fundamental thing that I point out to people, that ask how I've done what I've done with online networking.

And I say 'Well, why does it really matter? What are your objectives? You might be able to accomplish all of your objectives online by networking with a hundred people, as opposed to five hundred people, or a thousand, or more!'

Michael : What I find interesting, if you could build on that - could you give two different job functions or job ideas and just pluck out of the air some objectives that might fit them?

not so it's a right answer, but to give a view of what the objectives might be for different people.

Ron : Sure, so if I'm in marketing, which is probably the easiest one to come back with. If I'm in marketing, I'm obviously trying to figure out how to do things like more effectively position my company, or my products, I'm trying to understand the market space better, I'm trying to understand what customer needs and requirements are, or trends. Those sort of things.

So my business objective, to a certain extent, is one of research, wanting to connect with people that can educate me with their specific opinions, and expertise in those areas, that I'm trying to develop more information for.

So to that end you could target people that are more in that business segments that would have that kind of information that you are looking for. Then the issue becomes in terms of wanting to invest and develop into that relationship, what do you have to offer them?

Think about what their needs are, what their specific jobs are, and what help could you had in the context of your contacts, your resonant experience and expertise, and be able to put that forward and let them know that in the context of what their needs might be you'll be willing to help them, whether it's exposure to your network or expertise - and then reach out to them in an open and direct way.

Being concise is also helpful when you're reaching out to people?

Michael : What do you believe about yourself when you're networking online?

Ron : I believe that I'm someone that has value, that I can add value to most everyone in one way or another. I believe that I'm a sincere person, that I don't have any hidden agenda that I'm trying to peruse.

And to that end, that I'm an open individual and -

I could keep going on, probably, and have it be less meaningful, but those are the highpoints.

Michael : You have something to offer. And what do you believe about the people you're networking with?

Ron : Well I believe the same about them, I believe that just because we walk the planet we all have some sort of internal value, just because we're human beings. And the issue is, that somebodies' value proposition is stronger, or weaker from a networking perspective, depends on what the networking need is, right?

So in some respects I look at networking as similar to panning for gold, in that if you consider all of the people in your network, all of the grains of sand, if you will, in your pan, that in the absence of any networking need, they're all grains of sand.

And then in the context of a specific networking need, some of them morph into gold nuggets.

So to that extent it's not about the old debate about quality versus quantity. To me, there's quality in quantity. And it's all a function of what you're particular need should be in any given terms - where does quality come from then in your database, or your contact list?

The issue obviously when you have larger contacts - I get the question all the time 'how do you invest in these relationships?'

Well, one person at a time.

Michael : OK, well talking about yourself again, do you have a mission or vision as you're doing this?

Ron : Just that - it may sound bizarre - that I get some internal satisfaction out of being able to help people. I wish I had more bandwidth from that perspective.

And I try and sort out mechanisms and reusable information resources, and whatnot, that when I find out that what I do or say is helpful for more than one person I try to make that information available to others.

I like to help people, that's why I do this. If I didn't like to help people I wouldn't spend time online networking, because mostly what it is for me is it's an outbound effort for helping people, and a handful of times throughout the year I actually exercise it in terms of a need that I have.

Michael : What do you think is, is are the biggest, issues in networking today? And how do you deal with them yourself?

Ron : Well, it's two things - there's more than that - but there's two that come to mind.

One, it's creating awareness for why people would want to network online. I was asked to do a webinar for the human capital institute called 'Executive searching and online ntworking' and a lot of what I did was talking about 'Well why would you want to do this to begin with?' because there are so many people that are not networking online.

I mean you look at LinkedIn as being the largest platform in the world from a business networking perspective, and it's just a drop in the bucket in terms of the number of business professionals that are actually in the world, right? And the number of people that are unaware of online networking.

So there's so much to be gained from online networking, leveraging the power of online communication through the Internet, but I think it's a education challenge for people to understand why it requires an investment in time and effort to get a return.

And I think when people get over that hump they realise 'Oh OK, now I get in and do it. But how do I approach it?' And the problem with most networking platforms is that there isn't really anything that tells people 'How do I think about online networking? How do I do it? How do I get productive with it?'

And again educating people as to how to use it starts with having an objective as opposed to just doing it for the sake of doing it. That's more social networking if you're approaching it that way. And that's not necessarily productive from a professional perspective.


Michael : So it's about education, and it's education about what the benefits are of networking, but also how to do it effectively.

Ron : Yes, in the context of your objectives again.

Michael : If you had to describe networking as a story with fairy tale or fantasy characters, or animals, how would you describe it?

Ron : Wow.

Michael : I thought you answered it brilliantly as an answer to another question, which was the bit about panning for gold.

Ron : That's the best way that I've been able to get my arms around it, if you will, in terms of how to think about it and what it could mean for me and for professionals that have similar objectives that I do, in terms of what their business requirements are - and that they might need to reach larger numbers of people that go beyond their own personal rollerdex.

That might be a critical thing for them to do in what they're doing. So the whole panning for gold analogy in the context of the world of staffing, executive search, recruiting, I think is very applicable.

To a certain extent you flip that coin around now and you look at it from a business professional managing their career, and exposure to opportunity and networking being a component that they leverage to manage their career - that applies to everybody. It's again the same panning for gold situation in that depending on what your career needs are or what your aspirations, different people in your network can represent more value to you in the context of helping you further your objectives, whether it's by mentoring you, or by advice, or being able to connect you through to people that they have visibility into that have needs to leverage someone with your value proposition.

Michael : Before I ask you if there's anything that you'd like to plug and your contact details, is there anything important that you think we've left out? Either something that you'd like to reemphasise, or something new that genuinely think is important in networking that we haven't covered.


Ron : Well I think it's an aspect of networking online, that a lot of people from a career management perspective don't necessarily think about, and it's the context of being able to manage or invest in an online presence, in that when somebody googles your name, do they find anything?

And what's happening more and more like platforms like Ecademy and LinkedIn is that what people will find when they google your name is your networking profile.

So more and more in the context of how business is done - I know that when I was in sales, whenever I was going to meet with an executive, I'd always try to research them before I met them, to learn more about them so that I could have a better chance of connecting with them when I did meet with them or talk to them on the phone.

Same thing from a recruiting perspective, oh my gosh, there's all kinds of information that says that recruiters are more and more googling candidate names before they reach out to them. You find that just because you have someones resum?, you don't just reach out to them - it's not uncommon that you reach out to them by googling their name to see what else you can find on them.

Maybe you find their networking profile so now here's some more information on this individual that you're going to pursue from a candidate perspective, and if you don't have that information out there, it's not helping you from a business perspective.

I know when I would consent to meet with someone when I was an executive, before getting into search, I would find out who this individual was that I was meeting with, that was requesting a meeting with me.

So again, I could better align with them, understand the source or motivation for their issues were, and could act accordingly, so I think that's another component that could benefit to online networking that people don't think about, but is becoming more and more important given the reality of the Internet.



Michael : Before I ask for your contact details - you've obviously given us your time for the last half an hour - is there anything that you'd like to plug or anything that you'd like to remind our listeners that you do?

Ron : Sure, well there's two facets of our business, ninety-nine per cent of what we do is retain executive search, and that's on the client side of who's paying our bills.

But that said, we try to offer resources to help people that are seeking jobs, and on our website there are a number of different resources, from resum? development tools and webinars, and then we've also bundled a lot of the tools together in an economic package called The JobSeeker's Toolset, that has webinars in it, and resume development tool sets, that really helps a lot of people that are in job-search mode, conducting proactive job searches, develop their resum?, conduct interviews more effectively, those kinds of things.

And those can all be found on our website, under the candidate resources section.

I think you asked my contact information, I'm easy to find on the Internet if you just google Ron Bates, for that matter. And my contact information is pretty easy to find - it's on our website, Executive Advantage Group, Inc. - Experts in Mission Critical Retained Search

But my email is the best way to reach out to me, and I try my best to respond to all of the emails that I get - my email address is Rbates@executive-advantage.com

Michael : Excellent, I'd really like to thank you for your time.

Ron : Thank you Michael, as I say it's always a pleasure and I look forward to the next opportunity.