Why savvy business people build relationship capital | Daymond John | Big Think
Relationship capital. There's three phases, of course, to having power and giving power. And one of the most overlooked ones is relationship capital. You know there's a saying that it's 21 times easier to upsell a current customer than it is to acquire a new one. Most people are trying to expand their portfolio and their brands by operating new businesses instead of digging into the relationships that they already have—five, ten, twenty years—because when you already have worked with somebody, whether it's a relationship as friends or your community, or at the office, or as an investment, the first transaction is usually the lowest.
It is the ten transactions afterwards. Not only the transaction you’re having with the person; it's the fact that that person is probably another business person who has a relationship. And they're out there networking, telling people about how good you are. And that's exactly where it is. See, your reputation is like your skyline. When you drive through the city, everybody can see it. And when you have developed these relationships and nurture them, you do more and more business because the people know your ethics, your morals, and how you handle situations.
When you don’t nurture these things, it slowly corrodes the foundation of who you are. You have to go out and acquire new relationships, and that's why the development and the nurturing of a relationship is more important than anybody else. If you’re on social media right now and you have a good amount of people following you, it's nice if they keep liking your comments and saying happy birthday and thank you, but if you're not liking them back and you're not actually going into their avatar and seeing who they are, and making comments here and there, sooner or later, they're going to go away to somebody else who’s doing that.
You have to nurture these relationships. They are symbiotic, no matter what level you're at, and that's the importance of, after you've negotiated, now the real pot of gold is all those other transactions, all those other relationships, all those other references and networking things that they'll do for you, and you'll do for them, that will— you'll end up realizing—have paid the best dividends. You know, one thing about shifting power and relationship capital is I wish that I can tell you that you always have to be glossy and things of that nature. You have to be true to who you are.
It's the reality because a lot of people want to be something different than they are, or be perceived as something they're not. You have to be extremely aware, and a lot of us, because of society, we think well, nobody's going to accept me because I'm this way. And you know, the reality is they will accept you. You have to just be honest with yourself. What are you doing this for? Can you put yourself in two to five words? I made a joke, but I'm serious. Old Dirty Bastard was an old dirty bastard, and he delivered on that every single day.
And when you start to try to be something you're not, it crumbles. It kills your authenticity when you shouldn't be afraid of who you are. We've seen people often persecuted who are various, I think, because they can't be who they are, and once they do become who they are, their life opens up. So I want to make sure that I don’t give you this lava lamp, really prissy, kumbaya thing where you need to think that you need to only be one way.
Listen, if you're a coder and you come to my office to have an interview, you better not be wearing a suit because I know that you're supposed to be in your pajamas three nights straight coding all the time. You come to my house to be a construction worker to handle construction, you better not be in a suit because I think that you’re paying the people who are really wearing the knee pads and the dirty clothes with the wrenches. Be who you are and be authentic to it, and that's one of the keys of power shift.
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