One Panicked Phone Call Almost 20 Years Ago Is What Started My Business
The real estate market was in meltdown mode, and I was just trying to save my job. It didn't work, but I got a whole new career out of it.
I was recently interviewed on a business podcast and decided to share part of it here, where I describe how I started my business without even trying, and how utterly random it all seemed at the time.
Below, you can read the excerpt in text format, or listen to an audio clip by clicking “play” on the voiceover button on top. If you want to hear to the entire podcast episode, it’s here: How One Connection Can Change Your Life with Ron Stauffer.
Jared Orr
It’s good to have you on, man. I want to start right out of the gate with something that you said to me via email when we were getting this whole thing scheduled, and you were like, “I got this great topic to talk about,” and so I’m just going to read it right here. It is: “How one panicked phone call you made 20 years ago to a real estate agent that you barely knew launched your business without you even knowing.”
Ron Stauffer
Absolutely.
Jared Orr
That’s a stacked statement right there. So take us to that moment. What was that like?
Ron Stauffer
Yeah, so when you first reached out, I started thinking like, Okay, what’s something interesting about me and the business that I run that maybe hasn’t been heard before?
Because my name’s Ron, I do websites, I do digital marketing. Okay, blah, blah, blah… right? Aside from my name and my company name, Lieder Digital, how different can one web design agency be?
So, I just thought, actually, the start of my company was a bizarre circumstance. So just like you said, you queued it up there: it was over 19 years ago, almost 20 years now, I was working for a construction company.
I was the marketing director, and I don’t know if you remember almost 20 years ago, but 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 was about the worst time in many decades to be in construction or home building or anything related to real estate.
And so we had a company meeting. We saw the signs: the market’s doing this, it’s bad, it’s probably going to get worse, it’s not going to get better. We’re thinking, okay: Do we need layoffs? Do we need to start firing people? Maybe we need to start selling better? Do we need to go hire a full-time salesman?
Because we were a real small company and mostly had worked on referrals. So, we had this brainstorming meeting, and I’m just thinking, Oh, this is bad, and the company owner was really panicked, and he said:
“Okay, everybody in this room, pull out your phone right now. Look at all the people in your contacts list and today, start calling every single person. Ask them: ‘Do you know anybody who needs a home built? Do you know any real estate agents who are willing to refer people our way?’”
So I open up my phone and I just start at the very top, and, in alphabetical order: A.
So I’m looking at this list of names and I’m just thinking, Okay, so if I start calling every single person in my phone book, this is going to get weird because I don’t know everybody in my contacts list, right?
Like, probably some of these people I’ve met at events, I saved their contact info, and then I thought: I’ll follow up with them someday. But some of the names I don’t even recognize.
I get down to the B’s and there’s a guy in there, Ray Brown.
Okay. Ray Brown. Let’s see: I remember Ray Brown. Okay, cool. Perfect. This is going to be a great opportunity. We’re a construction company—he’s a real estate agent.
So, I call Ray Brown. I had met him at a credit union first-time home buyer seminar like two years earlier. Because I had just recently gotten married and I thought: I’m going to learn about buying a house.
And that’s where I met Ray Brown, the real estate agent, and he said, “When you’re ready to buy a home, call me.” I didn’t because I wasn’t ready to buy a home yet.
So, I call Ray Brown. He says, “Hey, Ron, good to hear from you. You ready to buy a home?”
I said, “No, actually… different kind of call. We’re bankrupt, essentially. We’re about to go out of business, everybody… we’re going to get laid off, we’re going to have to go look for jobs unless I can start bringing in some new leads or sales, or something like that. Do you know anybody who wants to build a home?”
And he said, “Not really. It’s a pretty bad market, but I have an idea for you. Why don’t you come with me to BNI, and I’ll introduce you to a bunch of people?”
And I thought, BNI? What’s a BNI? And he said, “It’s this thing called Business Network International, and we get together every Thursday morning at 6:45 AM, and you can meet a whole bunch of people there and tell them what you do.”
And I thought: Okay, that’s not exactly what I was hoping for… definitely more of a longer-term answer, but why not? Sure.
I’d never been to a business networking event. I didn’t really even know what networking was. At first, when he said networking, I thought he meant like computer networking—like putting computer chips and ethernet cables together.
He said, “No, it’s a business networking event. So, we get together, we drink coffee, we shake hands, we learn about each other’s business.”
And I thought: Okay, all right… I’ll try that.
So, I show up, a week later, and he introduces me to a bunch of people, and they say, “Nice to meet you. No, we don’t know anybody who needs a home built, so we can’t help you there, but why don’t you join BNI?”
And I was like, “Whoa. Okay… so, that escalated quickly.”
So I went from this guy that I barely know, who happens to be a real estate agent, who I called out of the blue, and he said, “Come to my BNI meeting on Thursday,” and I did, and then they said, “Why don’t you join?”
And I thought: I’m not really sure what to do because now, instead of getting money by selling something, now they’re asking me for money.
But I took the application back to the office, I talked to the guys, and I said, “This looks like a pretty good opportunity. It’s a couple hundred bucks, but every Thursday I can meet with a whole bunch of people in this room and in this scenario where you can broadcast who you are, what you do, and the kind of business you’re looking for.”
And they said, “Yeah, okay… is there anybody in the group who needs a home built?”
And I said, “No, I don’t think so. But as I’m learning, that’s not really the point. The point is you meet with people in your BNI meeting, and then they go out and in their networks. They can think of people to refer your way.”
So, it’s not about who’s in the room, it’s about who do they know outside?
And there’s this whole sales pitch and spiel that BNI gives, which is degrees of separation, and first-tier referral, second-tier referral, third-tier referral. But the point is, you as one person can go into a room and talk to 15, 20, 25 people.
But the network that every single one of those people has is magnified to an exponential point where you’re thinking, I’m just talking to 15 people. But really, what you’re doing is you’re talking to 15 people who will then keep you in mind in their network now.
Jared Orr
I’ve been to a BNI before. And I’m not part of a BNI right now, but I’m part of a networking group that’s very similar. We refer each other, we refer people to each other, things like that. Yeah, I totally… I get what you’re saying.
Ron Stauffer
But that was all so foreign to me because I had never done sales before. I had never—I think I even had to get business cards printed up because it wasn’t my job or role to actively solicit business. Because marketing and sales are not exactly the same thing. So, I wasn’t a salesman, but I thought the best way to market our business is to go meet with people who do this as part of their process. Right?
They understand that if I stand up and say I’m looking for somebody who wants a $500,000 to $800,000 house in the El Paso County area, or something like that. Then the idea is that the lady in the group next to me, who’s a florist, if she has a friend that she meets at the hairdresser, and she overhears, we’re thinking about building a custom home.
Ding, ding, ding!
Right now, all of a sudden, top of mind awareness—she refers them to me: we get a half a million to a million dollar home. Everybody’s happy.
Here’s the ironic part: the company paid for my membership, and I joined for the purpose of getting leads for this construction company. That was the whole point, I was picking up the phone to call people I know to see who we could meet and learn how I could get new business to come in for our construction company to build homes.
It didn’t work, and I never got a single referral for a new home the entire time. But what happened is I got laid off after I joined as a member.
Jared Orr
Okay.
Ron Stauffer
I got a free year of membership. So, the timing was really bad in a sense that it was too far gone, and it was too late. And by the time we were making these panicked calls, it was like—we’re 99% of the way there, just, the writing was on the wall. So, it was really a last-ditch effort.
But what it did for me is, okay, now I’m a member of a networking group. I’m not selling houses anymore. I can use this for me.
And they said, “Yeah, sure, absolutely. Here’s the application to change your category, and you’re all paid up for at that point. I think I had been a member for three months or six months or something like that, and they said, yeah, you’re a member, so just keep coming back. And I was like, “Great. Okay. Awesome.”
So, I started my own business because the problem is, when you work in an industry like construction, when you get laid off from one company, you can’t just go find another company in the same industry and say, “Hey, I have all this construction experience.” Because they’ll be like, “Dude, we’re not hiring either. We’re also firing people.”
Jared Orr
Yep.
Ron Stauffer
Yeah, so it’s kind of like with the tech layoffs that are happening these days: if you get laid off at Facebook, it’s not so simple that you just say, “Okay, I’ll go get a job at Microsoft,” because they’re also doing layoffs.
Jared Orr
I was unemployed for nine months because I’m in tech, so I know exactly how that goes.
Ron Stauffer
So, you know what I’m saying. So, I got laid off right around Thanksgiving and I thought:
Okay, this could be a very long, depressing, complicated, frustrating experience of spending months looking for jobs for people who are probably not hiring… Or I can take my skill set that I have, that I used for this company and start my own business and then see if I can get clients that way.
So that’s what I did. And so, I just—I rebranded and in that BNI group I said, “Hey, my name’s Ron Stauffer and I build websites. And at first it was a little bit weird, they were like, “Wait a minute, you’re the home builder guy!”
And I was like, “Nope, not anymore. Now I build websites, I don’t build houses.” And it worked. It worked really well. And what I got out of that was I learned how to walk into a room full of strangers and say, “My name is Ron. I build websites,” and stick out my hand and shake hands of people that I’d never met before and turn that into business relationships.
And I give BNI huge credit for launching my career, really, the way that I learned to speak publicly, enunciate properly, and stand up in front of a room full of strangers and have the confidence to say they’re going to want to hear from me. And no, I’m not wasting their time. And no, I don’t need to rush everything from the clock and the timing, you have 60 seconds, and they give you training and stuff like that.
But anyway, there’s this referral period during every meeting where you pass out referrals.
And when it was all said and done, I ended up hiring Ray Brown, the realtor who had introduced me to that BNI chapter in the first place that I ended up joining. So, I had a referral for Ray Brown, the realtor, but then—and I made a list here right before we got on this call—I passed 17 referrals.
It was the craziest thing because through the process of buying a home, inspecting the home, taking ownership of the home, and then improving the home, I gave referrals to a realtor, a roofer, a handyman, a flooring guy, a chimney sweep, an arborist, a title company, a mortgage lender, an HVAC company, a plumber, a home inspector, a concrete company, a landscaper, a painter, and an electrician… and I’m sure I’m keeping someone out.
I was like royalty in that group. They were like, “This is what BNI is all about!”
Jared Orr
Yes, exactly. You’re an introvert, right?
Ron Stauffer
Self-confessed. I pretend not to be, but I am.
Jared Orr
Exactly. Yeah. There’s a lot of people that get in their own way when it comes to networking and building connections because they’re introverted. For anyone who might be in that category, and they want to start networking, but they’re afraid, what advice would you have for them?
Ron Stauffer
That’s a great question, and I’d give it a two-part answer.
One of them is very silly: just imagine Stuart Smalley from Saturday Night Live many years ago. Get in front of a mirror and tell yourself, “I’m good enough. I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!”
You really do sometimes have to tell yourself, “I deserve to be in this room.” The people that I’m about to meet actually do want to meet me. They really do. So that negative self-talk, you gotta overcome that negative self-talk. Sometimes I still—I give myself a pep talk before I walk in, and I say:
“Okay, I’m going to a networking event. That means that the people who are here came here to meet people like me. So we have the same goal in mind. So, this is good, and I want to be here, and they want me to be here.”
So, overcoming the negative self-talk… giving yourself a pep rally.
The second thing is: give yourself a very small goal. If you walk into a room and there are 57 people you don’t know, that is tremendously overwhelming, and it can be very frightening, and you look and you think, what am I going to do here? Oh, my goodness.
Jared Orr
Even for an extrovert like me, it can be very overwhelming.
Ron Stauffer
Totally. “Should I meet every single person and have a one-minute conversation with all of them?” No. No. So what I did in the very, very beginning, and I still stick to this every time I go anywhere, is I say: I want three business cards. That’s my goal: just three.
If I get more, that’s great. I went to a networking event two days ago. I got eight business cards. Right.
Jared Orr
Oh, look at that. Yeah.
Ron Stauffer
That’s just bonus—that’s just gravy. But having a small, attainable goal: “I’m not leaving until I have spoken to three people that I can get their business card and say to myself, ‘this was a contact worth making’”—that’s the best way to take what is potentially incredibly overwhelming and make it very small and doable.
Because if you can make three contacts this week, three contacts next week, three contacts a week later, you’ve got 15, 20, 25, 30 contacts in just a couple weeks. That’s a tremendously effective rate.
So, start small... and even keep it small. Like I said, almost 20 years later, I’m still only doing three. That’s just my goal.
So, give yourself a bite-sized task where you say… something else that I’ll say is: “I’m going to stay here for one hour.”
If it’s a three-hour meeting or something like that, I don’t have to be there the entire time…
But I’m going to stay here for one hour and I’m going to meet three people and then I’ll walk away smiling, saying, “I accomplished what I came here to do. This is why I was here. It was worth going to.”
That’s what I would say. Start small, get three business cards, and tell yourself, “Doggone it, people like you!”
Jared Orr
And the nice thing about these networking events, I’ll add my 2 cents, is that people go there to network. Just walking up to someone or walking up to a group of people and joining the conversation or starting a conversation—that’s acceptable in those situations.
Don’t psych yourself out too much. You’re not like at a bar and like trying to go meet someone: that’s a little different because not everyone is there to meet someone. Whereas at these events, that’s the mindset most people are in.
Ron Stauffer
Yeah, absolutely. It’s not overly salesy to say, “My name’s Ron. I build websites, let’s talk business,” because that’s the whole purpose of the event.
Jared Orr
Exactly. Yeah. Or “Hey, can I join this conversation?” Like seriously, like I’ve done that. I’ve had people do that at these networking events to people I’m talking to. It’s not a big deal. So yeah.
Anyone who’s listening, don’t be nervous about that. Just know if you’re going to a networking event, 95% of the people there are totally cool with you just talking to them and approaching them, it’s all good.
Ron Stauffer
Yeah. We’re all here for the same reason. I want to build my business, and I want to help build yours. And everybody else in the room has that same thought. We’re all here to win together.
Jared Orr
Yeah, exactly. Ron, thank you.
I hope you found this helpful. By the way, if you want to grow your freelance business without making cold calls, just copy what I did.
I wrote a free guide that shows you exactly how I did it. Steal my whole playbook.
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