Try This Team Building Outline!

Opportunities come to you in a variety of ways:

Referrals. These are by far the most desirable. These come from people who generally have a great deal of respect for you, and they feel that they can trust you with their contacts.

Advocates. Advocates are people who follow you. Once you discover who they are, it is amazing what the cross-section of talent is.

Colleagues. I consider this group part of my peer group. They are in many ways my competition, but they bring certain specialties to the table that I can draw from. You could call them “strategic competition.”

Friends. We associate generally with people who share our values and interests.

To develop more of these contacts you have to be proactive in your efforts to locate them. You can do this effectively by doing the following few examples. There are infact any number of ways to mine talent, these should get you thinking in the right direction:

Live networking

Getting out into your community and meeting people allows you the luxury of sizing up people by how they handle themselves. You’d be surprised at the amount of talent that exists with an hours drive of you. When you’re networking, don’t just mine this resource for new business, BUT talent as well. You know the market you operate in, look for people who could make your services more compelling.

Online networking

Sites like Linkedin are terrific networks to find talent with which to expand your service network. As you start to see individuals with talents that appeal to you, start the conversation. Look for ways that you can reach out to them. Give first. This is true for any situation, online or off. Showing your willingness to help them, makes you a trusted contact to them.

Blogging

Whether it is my blog and several other blogs that I frequent, you would be surprised at the number of followers you eventually become acquainted to. Over the years respect for one another grows and because you are all essentially in the same community, certain expertise is realized and the opportunity to share in it rises. In several cases I have built a pitch for new business, from the unique expertise that I have acquired from blogging associates. They in return have brought opportunities my way.

I am always on the look out for opportunities that will help grow my circle of influence. So if networking for new business doesn’t appeal to you, then maybe the fit is discovering new resources that you can add to you roster that will enable you to go after business, previously out of reach.