Connections Are King in Business

I had a call this morning with Barry Moltz to continue our design discussions on the site redesign he commissioned me to do for his book, blog, and speaking website. To set up the rest of this story, let’s go back a couple of years.

I started blogging at the end of 2005 and ran across Liz Strauss’ blog about successful blogging, appropriately called Successful-Blog.com. I started reading and commenting all of the time, made some friends, and took a trip to Chicago in May 2007 for the first annual SOBCon – Business School for Bloggers. There, I met Phil Gerbyshak and Terry Starbucker amongst the crowd of great people. Back for the second year in 2008, I’d already done business with quite a few SOBs, as we’re called (Successful Online Bloggers), and I came back home to even more work as a result of the conference.

About a year ago, my friend, Liz Strauss recommended that Barry send me his book to review for his site. Connection #1. I was really busy and was in school — reading just wasn’t going to happen. Meanwhile, I’d ramped up my freelancing to work most evenings after my wife went to bed and I did a complete site migration and design for Phil, then another site, and another. I started my own company in March and he had even more work for me.

Out of the blue one day, I was sitting at Panera when a tweet from Barry came through asking if I’d be interested in re-designing his site. “Heck yeah!” was really hard to hold back, but I managed. We chatted, the price was right, so we’re working on that now for release in the next couple of weeks. Connection #2. I asked him how he came to me as a service provider, and he said it was a tweet about WordPress that got his attention and that he’d even forgotten the connection to my name and the book review. I reviewed his book within a week of that call. 🙂

I’ve been working on this and that recently when I got an e-mail from Hawaii for another site. Rosa Say was wanting to move Joyful Jubilant Learning, a community blog with about 2 dozen writers from TypePad to WordPress. Along with that, there were about 4 other sites to create or migrate, which was fine with me. She has several connections with SOBCon people, but it was Phil Gerbyshak who convinced her to use my services. Connection #3.

Back to the call this morning… Barry had Phil on his radio program to talk about social media and my name was mentioned; not once, not twice, but over 5 times. I lost count when I started blushing in my own living room.

Nurture your connections, and your connections will sustain you.