May 20, 2021
LinkedIn To Your Advantage A Step By Step Guide - Making Connections with Roy Barker
The second in the LinkedIn series discussing making connections. Last week we talked about completing your profile. Do some research and fill in the gaps thoroughly. LinkedIn can be a greater networking tool, lead builder, research tool, and aid in job hunting or searching for employees. LinkedIn is a long-term play so please manage expectations and get started ASAP.
About Roy
I have been fortunate enough to have had an awesome and diverse career. I have been in the right place at the right time to learn a lot of valuable lessons. All I ever really wanted to be was a pick-up man in the rodeo. Yep, that’s correct. I loved watching those guys. During the rough stock events. They would sit at the end of the arena on those big beautiful horses. Just waiting for a wreck. Then, they would swoop in. And the cowboy would jump off the bucking horses onto the pickup man’s horse. And they would never miss a stride.
While I was never a pickup man, I was lucky enough to chase the rodeo a little in my younger days as a bull rider. That is a great story in itself. But I want to talk a little more about business. If you would like to hear some stories of going down the road, let’s grab some coffee. I am always willing to share those stories. Anyway, I digress. Back to business.
I started my business career at the age of 14 selling manure out of the back of my mother’s car. To city dwellers for garden fertilizer. Me and a lifelong friend had a lot of fun. And learned many lessons about sales and marketing along the way. Then after high school, I fell into an amazing position with a major utility. Working my way through the repair and construction departments into management. Again, at this point in my life I was surrounded by guys much older than I was. They taught me some great lessons in craftmanship, work ethic, and life.
By now I have figured out that I do need higher education. My parents were proven right again. Its amazing how much smarter your parents are the older you get. I went to night school for about 12 years and completed my undergraduate degree in finance. At this point I spent a few years at a major brokerage house before transitioning into operations consulting in 2000.
During 2007, I got interested in employee retention while I was in grad school. As I mentioned before, I was a late bloomer educationally. Our class was studying a book on Nursing Home Administration. In some part of the book, it referenced that most nursing homes had an average of 300% employee turnover every year! Yes, you read that right, 300%. That means they turned their entire staff over three times every year. Unbelievable!
While I understand to some extent, the work is hard, and thankless. The pay is even more thankless. Still, it made me wonder: how much did it cost employers every year? What was their risk exposure? I started doing a little research and found that the true cash cost can be exorbitant. The inherent risk can be even that much more.
As I mentioned earlier, prior to my consulting years. I was manager at a major utility. Employee turnover for reasons beyond retirement were virtually nonexistent. I know a couple of guys who were tragically killed on the job. There was one who went to prison for an off the job murder. And a few more over the years for just not showing up. In my 18 years with the company, I was the only guy I know or heard of that just left the company willingly. Prior to retirement.
There are a lot of factors that led to the low employee turnover rates or high employee retention rates. A few were: a union environment, decent pay for those of us with only a high school education, great benefits. And a decent retirement. The reality was, I didn’t know what employee turnover was. Until I read it in a book.
Once, I read some research. I started asking some questions of the companies I was working with on other consulting engagements. Some of these companies had employee turnover rates in excess of 100% and didn’t even flinch. They didn’t know any other way. They all uttered a version of the five most deadliest words in business. “It’s Always Been This Way!” Yikes I thought!
I was hooked. I knew right then and there that my passion was to help companies and their leaders, to close the gap on employee retention. It is a needless waste of money and a talent drain. It is reversible. There is a better way. And it will also improve your company culture and bottom line at the same time.
Listen to other great episodes of The Business of Business Podcast here
www.thebusnessofbusinesspodcast.com
Full Transcript Below
LinkedIn To Your Advantage A Step By Step Guide - Making Connections
Sun, 5/16 6:40PM • 8:25
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
linkedin, connections, connected, john smith, little bit, talk, business, request, call, roy, podcast, building, depend, person, premium, people, friend requests, reach, job, posting
SPEAKERS
Roy Barker
Roy Barker 00:03
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the business of business podcast. I'm your host, Roy, when I'm be bringing you the second part of our continuing series how to use LinkedIn to your advantage a step by step guide. Last week, we talked about the importance of completing your profile, took a little bit of time to walk down through that. That's kind of area by area what we need to do there. So today, we're going to talk about making connections. And what I would challenge you to do this week is to reach out and make seven connections, just do one a day should be simple. The thing you want to really think about with LinkedIn is we don't want to be connecting to people who we don't know, in order to send a connection request, we should have some form of relationship with them. Maybe it will school, maybe it's been at a past job, maybe it's our current job or client that we've dealt with. So just make sure that there's some established relationship, because unfortunately, LinkedIn has gotten a little bit spammy, like some of the other things that go around just because people will send people unknown people will send you friend requests or connection request, and then you know, the minute you connect with them, they start, you know, spamming you with wanting to talk to you or send you something. And you know, if you're looking for something, that's okay, but you know, a lot of people, we want to control who we reach out to. So a couple ways that we can connect on LinkedIn. First, I'm gonna show you the if you know somebody, let's just take john smith here, we're going to sign in. And when you type in the name in this top bar on the homepage of your LinkedIn, you'll see that you know, we get this john smith comes up with the Maxwell team, and this one here is a funding, it'll tell you a little bit about them. But maybe it's unclear if this is the same guy that you know. So one thing you can do is you can either just hit the Return button or go down here at the bottom and hit all results. And then it'll bring up a little bit better picture of everyone that'll tell you, more or less, you know, who they are, what their job position is, or what they do, what their headline is, and then also their location. So look down through there very carefully. And let's make sure that, like I said, let's make sure that we are connecting to people who we already know for sure. That's what we want to do is we want to, you know, build up our our influence depend on what you want to do with this. And we want to if you're looking for a job, you want to be able to put yourself out there where others can find you. But also, if you're marketing or looking to get acquire business for your company, you're going to want to post some things eventually, but take it one step at a time. And like I said, we're going to connect. So that's one way we can look at john smith, the other thing you can do is if you already at least have a few connections, you can go to my network. And this is a little bit faster scan. So what it'll do, it'll show you these are different organizations that you can view. Like here, it this will give you a list of all these people and they'll give you have the option to connecting now that there is two, two ways that you can reach out to people on LinkedIn first is connecting, you know, you send them the request, they accepted and you can both see what each other's posting or different activities. But the other thing you can do if you don't know a person, but maybe you're just interested in what they have to say, it's a thing called follow. And so like these are some, you know, celebrities or more influencers. And what you can do is just, if you find one that you want to just hit the Follow button, that way you can see everything that they post, they won't really have access to your stuff won't be in their feed, but it's still a good way to look at some people that you may respect in your industry to see you know, kind of what they're talking about what information is going on. And also it may be, you know, way too, if you want to do some prospecting, it might be a way to learn a little bit more about the prospect. The other thing that is available, you have to upgrade to the I don't know what they call it the LinkedIn, professional or paid version. what that'll do, it'll, it'll allow you to send they call them in males that will allow you to send an inmail to people who you do Do not know and who you're not connected with. Because right now people who you're not connected with you cannot send them a message through LinkedIn, it'll like it'll just try one here. But we'll look at john smith. And since we're not connected, it gives us the connected button. Or if you go over here and look and see the message has got the little padlock on there. So if we try to send it to them premium is what they call so if you reactivate premium, or if you activate premium, you get so many emails every month and what an inmail is, it just lets you send a message to somebody that you're not connected with. Also, there's some other other advantages to that, that we'll get into at a later date. But for this week, I just was, you know, one of make sure that got our profile completed, got it all built out to all star status. And then this week, we want to take time to go through and to at least make seven connections go the find somebody who you know, already know who you're connected with, like I said, you know, you have some form of relationship, either maybe you went to school together, somebody in the neighborhood that you know, somebody at work, have, you know, some basis of knowing then before you do, because also Scott and like I said, it's gotten so spammy, that a lot of times, if people don't know your don't recognize you, they just want to accept, they'll just let it sit there. So the other thing you may want to do is if you're really new at this is a you know, give the person you're gonna connect with the heads up, say, Hey, I'm fixing to send you a connection request on LinkedIn. And then that way, you can just start building up your start building up your connections, that way, you'll be able to see what they're posting. And they'll be able to see what you're posting. And also, it'll just expose you to more people depend on what your end goals for this is. But anyway, that's all we got for this week. So take some time, make your list before you sit down make your list look through make sure it is the right person because there's so many LinkedIn users now that typically you're going to find four or five for for every every name that's out there you'll find a few anyway, so make sure you're getting the right person look them up. Make sure it's the title city everything is correct before you send that connection request. As usual, if you know if you have any questions, I'm always here you can always reach out to me at Roy at the business of business podcast comm be glad to try to help you through this. And that's gonna do it for now until next time, so you can always find us at www dot the business of business podcast.com we are on all the major social media networks as well as all the major podcast platforms. And a video of this will go up on YouTube when it gets when it goes live. So until next time, take care of yourself and take care of your business.
www.thebusniessofbusinesspodcast.com