EPISODE 202 WITH MICHAEL RODERICK: INCREASING OPPORTUNITIES THROUGH THOUGHT LEADERSHIP AND REFERRALS

Transcribed with Descript

Erin Marcus: All right. All right. And welcome to this episode of the Ready Yet podcast with my new friend, because you’re kind of speaking my language here, Michael Roderick. And Michael is all about referrals and referability and creating an opportunity to become referable, not just make referrals. Which is really like how I’ve grown several businesses, so I can’t wait to have this conversation with you.

Erin Marcus: Before we dive into the details, why don’t you tell everybody who you are, what you do, a little more officially? Sure,

Michael Roderick: sure. So I, I started out as a high school English teacher, and I went to, from that, to becoming a Broadway producer in under two years.

Erin Marcus: That’s a very logical jump, first of all. Exactly, very, you know, simple, right?

Erin Marcus: That’s the path.

Michael Roderick: So a lot of people as you sort of pointed out, we’re curious about that. And originally, when I started to look at that journey and sort of reverse engineer it. I thought networking was the answer. I thought, okay, well, I’m just really good at building relationships. I’m good at connecting people and sort of introducing people.

Michael Roderick: So for a very long time, I was really sort of geared towards that idea of, okay, well, let me teach relationship building and let me sort of think through that process. And then probably about six or seven years back, I was doing one of these relationship building workshops. And I just took a second to ask myself if I took networking out of the equation.

Michael Roderick: What was it that still got me into all the rooms I get into? And I had this realization that it was because people would talk about me when I wasn’t in the room in a good way. Exactly. And I literally just have these instances where people would just like make intros. So I was doing this workshop. And I basically took 15 minutes to talk about a theory I had, and I basically said to everybody in the group, I was like, so I have a theory.

Michael Roderick: I know I’ve been teaching you all a lot of relationship building stuff, but I have a theory that if you create a referral brand for yourself, if you make it so that other people just are always talking about you, then a lot of this networking takes care of itself because everybody just wants to interact with you.

Michael Roderick: Because you’re the shiny object and I get to the end of this workshop and sure enough ask everybody what they want their hot seat to be on. And everybody’s like. Can we talk? How do I become a referable brand? Like, what do I do? Like, how does that work? So I was like, you know what, this is the thing that folks want to learn.

Michael Roderick: So I shifted gears and I shifted into this world of helping thoughtful givers become thought leaders, because usually people who are really great subject matter experts, they’re fantastic at what they do. They love to give and they love to support. Their audience, but most of the time they deprioritize packaging their own intellectual property, coming up with what are their frameworks, what are their big ideas, and often people who are not as well versed in their subject matter as them end up getting all of the attention because they’ve taken the time to do the packaging.

Michael Roderick: So I love just digging into that and making those ideas and those concepts referable and helping folks get their stuff out there.

Erin Marcus: Love it. I have 85 questions, maybe 87. No, I love it. Like some of the things that you said, like to me I’m big on networking and giving referrals and, and that to me, referrals are intentional networking.

Erin Marcus: It’s a higher level networking. It’s not the antithesis to networking. It’s a more intentional, higher level networking. And what I noticed you said about your theory was. Creating a referable brand. You didn’t say offering higher referral fees.

Michael Roderick: That’s right. That is right. And

Erin Marcus: people miss that. Referrals are great.

Erin Marcus: I’m a fan. That’s great. If that’s part of how your business works, it’s not always the right answer. It depends. There’s rules sometimes in my last business in six, six years, I referred out 6 million in real estate deals. Wow. I didn’t have a license, so I wasn’t monetizing that directly. There’s other ways, you know, to make that work, but you didn’t say the answer is just giving away more money.

Erin Marcus: No. Because

Michael Roderick: it never is. No. It never is. It never is. The, and, and what you’re bringing up I think is, is so, so important because there are people who You will actually damage your relationship with them by saying, I want to give you money for this because for them that feels weird and they just don’t want to do it that way.

Michael Roderick: And it’s just not, it doesn’t work in, you know, in that regard. And I think so often we, we come to this place where we think that everybody. Is going to care about money in the same way. And the fact of the matter is I call this a TCM index. So every single person, no matter who they are, no matter what industry they’re in, they have an index of time connections and money, and they care immensely.

Michael Roderick: About one of those things. Exactly, you know, and the thing is so so often what ends up happening is people will try to, you know, make referrals happen or make business happen by thinking. Everybody is focusing focused on money, and if the person is actually way more interested in, I want to make sure that this thing is done in the shortest amount of time possible, or if they’re more interested in who am I connecting with and what is this experience going to be?

Michael Roderick: The money actually does not matter to them. And you can really kind of destroy the relationship in many cases by putting a focus on something that they don’t actually care about.

Erin Marcus: Well, and the other piece of that is most small businesses, and we’ll just stick to that. That’s my audience, right? Most small businesses are already completely filled to the rim with the heavy load of making their own sales.

Erin Marcus: Yeah. And you’re not actually It’s a too big of an ask, quite honestly, for them to sell on your behalf as well. Yeah. However, however, back to your point, if they can add value to someone that they’re trying to turn from a prospect into a client by making an additional Introduction. Now they’re not putting their own sale at risk.

Erin Marcus: Now they’re not putting their relationship at risk. Now they’re not monetizing this situation and taking their focus away from what they’re trying to get done. They’re just helping.

Michael Roderick: Exactly. Exactly. And, and the thing that I always like to think about in regards to this is that your clients are on a timeline.

Michael Roderick: And there is something that they need and that they, they need to focus on. And the second that they’ve solved one problem, they’ve made another problem for themselves and there’s somebody else who needs to solve that problem. So when we’re thinking about our services, it’s important for us to think about where do we fit on that timeline and do I know people who.

Michael Roderick: They need to meet this person before me, or they need to meet this person after me. And am I having conversations with those people about how do we support each other? How do we send folks to, you know, to each other? And what does that look like? Right? What is that, you know, what, what is that process? And I think that all too often referrals, especially.

Michael Roderick: It’s broken down in this sort of like systematized way, right? Like it’s all about like, build this, you know, funnel kind of, you know, kind of scenario. And the way that I like to think about referrals and even just relationships in general is you want to stay away from the idea of a system and you want to think in terms of an ecosystem.

Michael Roderick: You want to think, how are all of these pieces working together? How are we all supporting each other? How are we helping the industry as a whole rise up and providing great experiences across the board versus, okay, you’re a, you’re, you’re a good potential client and that’s all you are. Right. Right. And, and that’s the thing.

Michael Roderick: I think that all too often, I often like to say people love to feel useful. They hate to feel used. And when I am looking at you as more than just your potential client or your, you know, you’re going to refer me business or whatever the scenario is. And I see you as a person. Then we’re going to have a much, much stronger relationship.

Michael Roderick: There’s going to be a lot more opportunities and the money piece of it is probably not going to be nearly as important and, and driving the deal as the actual relationship, which I think is so, so key.

Erin Marcus: So I have a weird question for you. I’ll try to make this as it’s not really inappropriate, but it is a little I’m curious about your take on this.

Erin Marcus: So in my last business, in my last business, I worked with families with aging parents. Right. So I used to network a lot and build relationships one because my clients needed so many different resources and as a group that’s effectively at risk of being taken advantage of, it was very important to me to make sure I put the right.

Erin Marcus: People in front of them, of course. Right. And so I used to go to networking groups with other small business owners, not because they were really my necessarily my client, but they’re easy to find groups of small business owners are very fine. And they all have parents and their parents have friends and their friends have parents.

Erin Marcus: So I didn’t need to do advertising. I could just do it that way. Right? Yeah. What I found was that women were magnificent at this. Because they’re so relation relational. Relation? Relational? I don’t even know what the word is. But, the men that I worked with, if they could connect with one dot, what I did to what they did, they were fine.

Erin Marcus: Yeah. But they didn’t know that their friends had parents, they didn’t know that their parents had friends, they didn’t know what their own parents were dealing with, let alone their friends parents, so there was no way, they were not, not every man, that’s why I say it’s a little judgmental, but I think whether it’s cultural, gender, there’s a lot of groups.

Erin Marcus: That are just inherently

Michael Roderick: battery. Yeah. No, that’s I, I, and, and I agree. I think that there are, there are things that we get taught. There are things that sort of get presented to us. And we are always put in the position of. Do we follow what is taught and just never test our assumptions about those things, or do we decide to test our assumptions and, and, and try something different or sort of do something different?

Michael Roderick: And if you look at most of the, the networking groups and organizations they’re often taught. Very, very specifically around the concept of reciprocity and reciprocity is almost always taught without nuance, so

Erin Marcus: reciprocity linear right there. I exactly when you give to me and that’s. As opposed to the bucket of the universe.

Michael Roderick: Exactly. Exactly. And the thing that I always like to say about reciprocity is that everybody has a reciprocity impulse and everybody has a reciprocity timeline. And your reciprocity impulse is different. Based on your experience of life. So if you’ve had people who have helped you and supported you, you usually have a stronger reciprocity impulse because you’re like, okay, well, when somebody helps me, I’m supposed to just help them back.

Michael Roderick: Right. But if you’ve had an experience where. Most of the time people just do things for you and you’ve never really had instances of like feeling or even being told like, Hey, you should say thank you and sort of do, then you probably don’t have a very strong reciprocity impulse and somebody might need to actually remind you about the fact that, Hey, somebody, maybe you should say thank you.

Michael Roderick: Right. And like, you know, that type of dynamic, but when we treat it all the same, Yeah. Right. And we don’t pay attention to something like that. We then become, we, we start thinking in that binary way that you’re talking about where it’s like, Oh, well, you’re just, you’re just not a good referral partner.

Michael Roderick: You’re just

Erin Marcus: not a match. You’re just not a match. And you just never know. One of my favorite referral stories, because we tend to do this better in our personal lives, I think. And yet in our business, we get very linear, like we were talking about, but one of my favorite. referral help each other out stories is there was a woman who I met at a networking event.

Erin Marcus: Great. She was the marketing arm of a car repair company. Okay. Great. I something happened to my car. I knew her. I brought it to that company because of her. She knew that she reached out. She made sure I was taken care of and I appreciated it. Turns out that that woman’s Brother in law lives two doors down from my mother, and in a conversation we found out that her daughter was interested in a certain industry, that my boyfriend was at the top of that industry, so I got her daughter a internship.

Erin Marcus: That she would have never even known about because it didn’t exist. It was created for her. And then, as she changed jobs, she brought me in for a speaking gig in front of like 200 people. Right. And there’s no exchange of money there. Yeah. There’s just Who do you know? And how can I help? Who do

Michael Roderick: you know?

Michael Roderick: Exactly. Exactly. And, and that’s the thing. It’s like when we, when we think in that sort of ecosystem way, we open ourselves up to all of the other possibilities. And I think that all too often, especially in business contacts, we almost always only talk to people about the business. We, you know, we’re basically like we, we spend most of our time in a professional, like, well, what do you do and how does it work?

Michael Roderick: And, you know, let’s sort of walk back and forth, but there’s also the personal. Which, you know, the, the fact that this person has kids, the fact that they live in a certain area, right? There’s also the inspirational, which is like what actually excites them and, and, and what lights them up. There’s also the aspirational, which is what do they want?

Michael Roderick: Like, what are they aspiring to and what are they sort of looking for? And then finally, there’s the problematic. There are the things, the challenges, the issues that they’re dealing with that if I’ve gotten to know you on a, on a fairly. Deep level, you’re very likely going to talk about a challenge or an issue that comes up.

Michael Roderick: And I think that we don’t take enough time to explore those other avenues. And in a lot of these networking groups, referral oriented types of scenarios, we’re almost always just like, Boom. This is what a referral is. A referral is I’m going to send you a buyer where a referral could be, this is a really, really great podcast, or this is just a really great introduction for you of somebody who I think could be really cool to talk with and hang out, or hey, This person can help your kid get into, you know, X, X, Y college.

Michael Roderick: Like those are referrals and we have to just remember that it’s not this binary thing. And I just, I see that a lot in, in this, in this world. Well, and I

Erin Marcus: know that you talk about becoming a referable entity, a referable, not just referring but a referable entity. And it’s so interesting that you say that because I, between my podcast, the podcast I’m a guest on, what I do for a living, I probably talk to no less than 10 new small business owners a week.

Erin Marcus: And I ask the same question every single time, as you know, who do you need? What do you need? Who do you need? What do you need? And it is amazing to me that less, I would say less than half of people have an answer to that. Oh,

Michael Roderick: yeah. Oh, yeah. And they’ll

Erin Marcus: be like, No, it’s all good. Like, because it’s never all good for me.

Erin Marcus: How are you doing that?

Michael Roderick: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, no, it’s I mean, it’s a fascinating dynamic. And there’s this concept. I’ve talked about before. I call it the giver’s fix. Where basically if you love to give and sort of support and kind of help other people, there’s a chemical reaction that happens in the body.

Michael Roderick: Some say it’s oxytocin, some say it’s dopamine, but regardless of what it is, you get a rush when you give, there is no chemical reaction associated with asking in many cases, other than anxiety. Right? So it’s one of the things where what ends up happening with the giver’s fix is we get Get hooked on that giving and we never ask or we never think about what we’re going to, what we’re going to ask for.

Michael Roderick: And all of a sudden we actually educate our network to the fact that we have no needs when we’re just giving and sort of helping everybody else. They’re like, well, this is just as wonderful, generous, magnanimous person. They must be, they must be killing it. They’re fine. You on amazing. Right? And, and often, I often we’ll talk about the advocates in our network, right?

Michael Roderick: And the folks who like help us and support us. And the thing that I see time and time again is that advocates are awful at advocating for themselves. Like they’ll do everything for you and they’ll help you out, but they could be, they could literally be on like the, the The worst year of their business and they will not come to you and ask you for for that help or that support because they’re still kind of in that place of givers fix where they’re just doing and doing and doing and getting that rush and not paying attention to the things that they need.

Erin Marcus: And I was I don’t know where I heard this a long, long time ago, but if you think about how happy you are helping someone, think about making them happy by allowing them to help you.

Michael Roderick: Yeah. Yep. Right. It’s just so, it’s so, so powerful. The way that I like to think about it is if we do think about it from that oxytocin sort of standpoint.

Michael Roderick: It’s actually selfish to have the giver’s fix because you’re hogging all of that oxytocin. You’re hogging all the good chemicals. You’re not actually giving anybody else the opportunity to feel good. You know, and, and sometimes like that’s the shift that folks need. Like sometimes they need to hear that and be like, Oh, wait a second.

Michael Roderick: I’m not letting anybody else feel good. I’m taking it all for, you know, I’m taking it all for myself. Feel good’s all for me. Exactly.

Erin Marcus: Switching gears a little because I’m curious. I always, I’m always curious about this because I come out of corporate, right? Blue collar childhood, corporate, God only knows how I even got that far.

Erin Marcus: And then I jumped off the cliff into entrepreneurship, small business owner. And one of the things I know was that employee mindset. is a just absolute killer to the entrepreneurial journey. And so you come out of education, which is probably worse than corporate, like harder. Well, just not worse.

Erin Marcus: Yeah. Right. Harder. And then. Into New York’s version of Hollywood, right? Yeah. So, also not real, you know? Yeah. In an entirely different way. How did you, like, did you jump off the cliff? Were you pushed off the cliff? How did you get the tenacity, the courage, all of the things? Yeah. To now do what

Michael Roderick: you’re doing.

Michael Roderick: Yeah. I mean, so with, with the teaching sort of transition, I had always been sort of involved in the theater, you know, in the theater world. But I tend to, so I tend to reverse engineer stuff. Like I’m always kind of like looking at like, okay, well, how do things work? And one of the things that I learned about Broadway was basically what everybody in Broadway wants as a producer is credit.

Michael Roderick: They want their name to be above the title on a particular show, so they’ll raise a certain amount of money to have their name above the title. And I was like, well, what if I decided not to go for what everybody else is going for? And I decided to go for learning instead. So what I did was I went to a bunch of producers and I said, listen, I know everybody else is pitching you on raising money to get credit, but if you just want to give me.

Michael Roderick: Deal flow. I’m more than happy to go out and just raise money. You don’t have to put my name on anything. Do you want to

Erin Marcus: be right or do you want to be happy? Exactly.

Michael Roderick: I just want to get better at this. And, and I ended up with, it was a whole different shift because most people were going to an investor with one show and I was always coming with a portfolio.

Michael Roderick: So if somebody was like, I don’t want this. I’ve got like four others for you. Exactly. Connected to all these other producers. And the thing that, you know, sort of sent me into that like entrepreneurial world is when people had seen me kind of move so quickly, I would just have like these like days of coffee meetings where people from, you know, different industries would come and be like, well, how do I Yet, you know, into this circle, or how do I learn about, you know, this type of thing and I would just go back to sort of the reverse engineering piece.

Michael Roderick: And I was like, well, have you ever thought about doing this? And, you know, well, this is how your industry works. Let’s, you know, rejigger, you know, this whole type of thing. And what I found was people were like, I will pay you. To help me figure that’s, you know, to help me figure that stuff out. And I realized the two, my two favorite things to do in the world are solving problems and connecting people.

Michael Roderick: So

Erin Marcus: what? Like, right. I know I liked you. Yeah. Right. So I was like, solve and I’ll find you the person to do

Michael Roderick: exactly. Exactly. So then it was like, okay. Who has probably one of the biggest problems? The subject matter expert because the subject matter expert the way I like to think about this and it goes back to my theater sort of background is the thought leadership world.

Michael Roderick: Like if you want to be followed, you ideally want to be a triple threat. Of thought leadership and in the acting world, it’s actor, singer, dancer, singer, dancer, actor, right in the thought leadership world, it’s scientists, celebrity magician and the subject matter expert most of the time is the scientist.

Michael Roderick: They really, really know their stuff. They’ve got everything down. They’ve taken the time to sort of figure all of those pieces out, but the celebrity is really good at actually promoting themselves. And they’re really good at building the relationships and making things and making things happen. And the magician knows how to package.

Michael Roderick: The magician knows how to get you to say, I want more of that. Show me your next trick. Show me your next thing. So when I looked at all this, I was like, these subject matter experts, these unseen brilliant geniuses, they do not get positioned like a Broadway show. Their businesses are not positioned like a Broadway show.

Michael Roderick: So I said, okay, well, let me do that. Let me help them build frameworks, build models, make it so that people are like, wow, you came up with X, Y, Z, you have, you know, that, that title, and then they can finally actually be recognized for their stuff. And one of the core reasons why I started doing this work is that I saw all of these people who had, who were Subpar in terms of what the what they could actually do like the work that they would do, but they had extraordinary marketing And then I saw all these extraordinary people who had this subpar

Erin Marcus: marketing the one of the worst like Nuggets truth bombs that I ever was told from a mentor was you don’t get the business you deserve you get the business you ask for Which is why there’s so many rich idiots out there because they were brave enough to ask for the business.

Michael Roderick: Exactly. And to package it in such a way that basically somebody is like, Oh yeah, no, I’ll spend 25, 000 for 30 minutes with you. Right, exactly. Yeah, that sounds great. You know?

Erin Marcus: Exactly. So let’s do one more thing. Let’s lessen people’s learning curves because I can see where all of your what you’re proud of and all the accomplishments, but I’m a big fan of like, let’s lessen people’s learning curves.

Erin Marcus: If you just do what I did, you’ll be better off for it.

Michael Roderick: Right? Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah.

Erin Marcus: Share with us. I love sharing the dirty underbelly. Like what, what’s gone wrong? Just don’t do this. Yeah. Yeah. Learn from my mistakes that you would know. Oh,

Michael Roderick: 100%. 100%. You pick one. Yeah. Yeah, I know. Right? Like, I’m like, how long do you got?

Michael Roderick: Right? Oh, but, okay. So this actually ties back to all these networking groups. So I basically was, you know, in a lot of these groups, I went through a lot of these, I went through a lot of these programs. And one of the top things that gets taught is this idea of pitching yourself. And it’s like, do your 32nd pitch, do your, I help X, Y, Z, do X, Y, Z every time you meet with somebody and then they’re going to buy your service.

Michael Roderick: I did that for years. And, and, and to this day, I’ve got the snappy, I help, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what I learned. Was that if you open with that, you might as well just stop the business because you are not going to get any business out of it because people do not care about your solution.

Michael Roderick: They care about their problem. So the shift that I made. And the discovery that I made and this, every single person can do this. Every single person listening can do this. This is probably one of the simplest things that you can do, but it will completely transform your business. And it is rather than spending all your time trying to figure out a target market, which, you know, everybody gets into target market and they want to talk to, you know, talk to dog owners in Peoria who, you know, are 35 and above, you know think about a target problem and really take the time.

Michael Roderick: To talk to past clients because your best copy is always in your past clients mouths right and find out from them what was the struggle that they came to you with in their own words and then when you get into that meeting. Rather than doing the pitch, rather than being like, I hope such and such, you say, you know how a lot of the time people are really, really great at what they do for others.

Michael Roderick: They can, they can’t just seem to do it for themselves. They’ve got kind of like that shoemakers kid syndrome where it’s like they’re a brilliant marketer and they sell everybody else’s stuff, but they try to sell their own stuff and they just can’t do it. I help with that.

Erin Marcus: Yep. Right. Percent. And then it’s like boom.

Erin Marcus: Problem that you

Michael Roderick: solve. Exactly. And it’s just, it’s so, so, so the other thing I’ll say is that everybody teaches you content as promotion. And if you do content as promotion, you’re basically going to just be lined up with everybody else. And if there’s a cat video above you, you lose. Content. Is market research, spend your time writing about your problem.

Michael Roderick: That you solve, breaking it down, giving it its own language, using this target problem methodology, and then see, are people commenting about it? Because if people are commenting about it and being like, oh my god, that’s me, oh my god, that’s me, you know, raising their hand, you are learning so much. About your market and what they’re looking for and what they need.

Michael Roderick: And you can build around that. Spend the time using your content as market research, not promotion, stop getting into, don’t go out into the world and shout everybody else’s shouting whisper. Like, there’s so much more opportunity, possibilities, when you focus in that area.

Erin Marcus: And what I love about that, and what I learned is, doing it that way, takes all the pressure off.

Erin Marcus: It takes all the pressure off of me because, so I have a degree in journalism and my favorite compliment that I got during my MBA was from my communications teacher who talked about my ability to communicate with intent. And when I got into the entrepreneur world, I felt all this pressure to come up with the magic thing to say, right?

Erin Marcus: I was looking for that magic thing to Say to get right. Notice the word, get somebody to buy from me when it’s dead. What I figured out was all I had to do was stop because that just doesn’t work and start asking questions. Oh yeah. And now there’s no

Michael Roderick: pressure on me. And it’s so powerful because so few people ask questions.

Michael Roderick: They spend most of their time pitching or sort of describing or sort of trying to sell you on like this is the, these are the values of, you know, this whole thing and I can’t tell you the number of times where the sale just happens when you’re basically like, okay, well, let me just make sure I understand.

Michael Roderick: Is this actually a problem that you’re dealing with? Like, is this actually what you’re looking for? Are you looking for something or are you looking for something else? And then it’s like, and the great thing about that is, you know, whether or not you’re a fit, like you’re able to be like, Oh yeah, they’re, they’re complaining about something that I know that I can help with.

Michael Roderick: And you can, and, and so, so often it’s, you’re asking them the questions that show your expertise. I can’t tell you the number of times where people are like, I’ve never been asked that question before. And that’s the thing that got them to have more of a conversation than, Hey, well, you know, you should do this, you know, And

Erin Marcus: thanks to chat GPT.

Erin Marcus: We’re all now experts. So, Oh, of course. Yeah. Like, so who wants to play in that world? So awesome. All right. This is amazing. I absolutely love your approach to everything, how open you are, all your insights, if people want to continue this conversation with you. I highly recommend they do. What is the best way that they find you?

Erin Marcus: Easiest way to find you?

Michael Roderick: So if they just go to myreferabilityraider. com, they can basically do a test and see how referable they are. It gives them a score and they’ll get their, they’ll get their results. And then I read a daily email. Riffing on these things, and they will get an invite if they if, if they’d like to check out the daily email.

Michael Roderick: And that’s usually the best way to, to stay in touch with me and, and hear about all my stuff.

Erin Marcus: Get in your world. My referability rater.com. We will make sure, sure. There’s a link in the show notes for those people who just wanna make sure you are one. Click away. So Michael, thank you again so much for joining me.

Erin Marcus: This is amazing.

Michael Roderick: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. This was an absolute blast.

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