Midlife MavericksI was halfway through painting my son’s new desk when I had to put the brush down.
Emma Grede’s Start With Yourself was playing in the background and I was focussing on not getting paint spilled over to the walls. Then she said something that stopped me: people come to her constantly asking for help. Introductions, mostly. Can you put me in front of this person. Can you get me into that room. Then she named the thing I had somehow never let myself see: this happens to women all the time, and we almost always say yes, for free.
In men’s world, she pointed out, that introduction has a price on it. A man wants into a room, he says so, and he says what he will pay to get there. A percentage of something. A flat fee. Nobody finds it grasping. It is just how the thing is done.
I stood there with a wet brush going tacky in my hand and did the maths on twenty years of saying yes for nothing. If you work for yourself, I would put money on you having done the same. Possibly last week.
Quote of the Week
“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.”
Charlie Munger
An old contact named his price
Earlier this year I had a conversation I have been quietly embarrassed about ever since.
An industry contact, someone I have known for the better part of fifteen years, told me he knew several people I would want to meet. The right kind. Then, in the same breath, entirely relaxed about it, he asked what I would pay him for the introductions.
My first reaction was a small internal flinch. Something close to: oh. We are doing this, are we. For about half a second I had him filed under grasping.
Then I caught myself. He was being normal. He had something of value. Setting up those meetings would cost him time and a little of his own credibility, and he put a price on it the way you would put a price on anything else. I was the one standing there expecting his network for nothing, and I had been doing exactly that my entire career while calling it relationship-building.
I said yes. Of course I said yes. Then I went away and felt slightly stupid, which is usually the sign that something useful has just happened.
Both sides of the same coin
It took me longer to see the next part.
Paying someone for a referral and being asked for a free favour are the same problem, viewed from opposite ends. The question sitting underneath both is the same: is there any reason for this to keep happening?
When I started paying for referrals, the referrals kept coming. The fee gave them a reason to think of me on a Tuesday morning when I was nowhere near their mind. That is the whole job of an incentive. It puts you in the room when you are not in the room. Icing on the cake: the referrals I got were exceptional in quality.
Now turn it the other way. Every time you make an introduction for free, with nothing on the other side of it, you teach people that your network is a public garden. Pleasant to walk through, and owned by no one. Emma Grede talks about her husband Jens, who is Swedish, and how even when he does something for free he registers it. A favour has been done. There is now a small credit sitting in an account somewhere, and one day he will draw on it. He simply refuses to pretend the favour did not happen.
Most women I know do the exact opposite. We do the favour and then we actively talk ourselves out of it counting. We manufacture the warm feeling of being generous by deciding the thing we just did was worth nothing. Men tend to treat a network as an asset on a balance sheet. A lot of us treat it as a character reference.
Both habits cost you. Pay nothing for referrals and you have no pipeline. Charge nothing for your own and you have no asset. Same coin, two faces.
You build the pipeline before you need it
When you work for yourself, the money stops being regular. It arrives in a lump, then nothing. Feast and famine. And the famine is almost always the bill for some quiet work you did not do three months earlier.
You do not find clients when you need them. By the time you need them it is already too late, and the need leaks into your voice on the call. You find them before. Quietly and constantly, while the current work is still paying the bills. That is the real difference between working in your business and working on it, and the on part is always the first thing to get dropped, because nothing visibly breaks on the day you skip it.
Paying for referrals is the most reliable way I have found to keep the “on” part running when my own energy for it is low. I have other people incentivised to do that work for me, on the weeks I cannot face it myself.
Two of the clients I signed this year came in through referrals I paid for. Neither of those conversations happens on goodwill alone. Goodwill is a lovely thing and it is not a pipeline.
Why this feels grubby
I know exactly what the resistance to this feels like, because I carried it for two decades.
It feels grubby. Putting money against a relationship feels like admitting you cannot win the work on merit, that you are buying a seat at a table you should have reached on talent alone. Nice women do not do that. Nice women get chosen.
That story is costing you real money. The relationship was always a transaction. Every introduction has a cost to the person making it and a value to the person receiving it. You have been running the unpaid version of a paid thing, and the unpaid version has one fatal flaw. It is unreliable. It happens when people happen to remember and happen to have a free minute. Put a clean incentive in and it starts happening on purpose.
Your Move This Week
One job this week. Name the single person best placed to send you business. Just one. The person who already knows what you do, and already sits near the people you want to reach.
Go to them with an actual arrangement. A referral fee, or a reciprocal deal where you send work back the other way. Make it specific and make it worth their while. You are handing them a reason, not asking a favour.
And the smaller half of the move. The next time someone asks you for an introduction, pause before you hand it over. Charging for it is optional. Noticing that it counted is not.
Hit reply and tell me one thing: who would you put on a referral fee tomorrow, if it did not feel weird? Just the name and what they do. Naming them is most of the work done.
See you Wednesday
P.S. The desk got finished. It’s looking fab!
