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Empowering Your Family and Friends to Network for You
By Pat O'Donnell
© April 24, 2008, all rights reserved.
This is one if my favorite networking stories and it shows the power of enlisting family and friends to help.
A man I was counseling, we will call him Max, was on his way to a Hanukkah celebration where there would be 50 family members. He had been out of work for several months, working only part-time as a consultant, and his uncles were asking him whom they could call on his behalf. He was dreading the event because he was imagining aunts pinching him on the cheek and uncles having people call him with leads that would not be a close fit.
He had a problem, you see. He has been a CFO (Chief Financial Officer) for a custom machine shop and few of his relatives were likely to understand exactly what he had been doing for a living. So he called me before the event and asked my advice.
The family and friends resume
We created a half page resume in prose form in “plain English” that explained that a CFO not only makes sure that incoming bills and outgoing invoices are paid by his staff, but also figures out how a company will be able to raise money to build another factory 5 years into the future, etc… He then went on to explain that the custom machine shops he had been associated with did things like replace broken machinery parts that could not longer be bought from the original manufacturer.
On the day of the big event he had 40 copies of the “family resume” but not enough for everyone. His 88 year old Aunt Hattie said “I want one!” several times in a shrill voice and after a while he gave her one reluctantly, figuring he had just wasted a copy.
Aunt Hattie saves the day
The next morning Aunt Hattie calls him up at 6 a.m. and says: “So you are a CFO. That means you… ” She delivered a correct definition of what a CFO does. Then she says: “And Company X is your competitor, right?” Finally, she announced she had been reading the obituaries that morning and the CFO of his largest competitor had just died.
He called me up laughing very hard and asked me for advice. Obviously it would be very inappropriate to call up the company and tell its President: “Hey, I heard your CFO died.” What should he do?
After we spoke he called the President and asked this question: “I am working as a consultant with one of your competitors, Company Z. Would you be interested in sharing resources with us? When we can’t handle a particular job because of a scheduling conflict or because we don’t have the right machinery, we will ask if you can if you can help. And you could do the same in return. Does this interest you?
The moral of the story
The happy ending to the story is that he started work for the other custom machine shop a week later. And the moral of the story is to remember to empower friends and family to help you reach your goals.
Topics: Networking, Resume |
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