From Connection to Collaboration: Networking Secrets with Ed Forteau

Are you tired of feeling like your networking efforts fall flat? In this latest Catalytic Leadership podcast episode, I dive deep into the transformative power of genuine business connections with Ed Forteau, the mastermind behind the Genuine Connections Revolution. Ed’s insights on strategic networking and authentic engagement are game-changers for high-performing business owners looking to drive growth and collaboration.

Ed, author of No More Cringe, shares his journey from early team-building days to his innovative client acquisition methods. His strategic ally approach focuses on expanding warm networks for consistent referrals, not just chasing potential clients. By leveraging LinkedIn's features like celebrating milestones and engaging with content, you can turn casual connections into valuable work friendships.

Ed emphasizes the importance of perseverance and a well-executed plan for overcoming entrepreneurial challenges, drawing parallels to sports strategies like the Green Bay Packers' "Packer Sweep."

Tune in to discover how to transform your networking game, elevate your leadership impact, and build a robust network that drives business success. Don’t miss these actionable insights on Catalytic Leadership—your path to leveraging genuine connections starts here.

Connect with Ed Forteau
I highly encourage you to connect with Ed Forteau on LinkedIn to explore his insightful resources and access his book, No More Cringe on Amazon. His LinkedIn Truths and valuable content on business building and email strategies can provide you with practical tools to elevate your business.

Books Mentioned: 

• No More Cringe by Ed Forteau
• Flip the Script by Oren Klaff

Ready to Finish 2024 Strong?
Don’t wait until December to address your challenges. There's a few months left in 2024, now is the time to plan for a strong finish! Book a free strategy call with Dr. William Attaway to create a plan for impactful results. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Ed Forteau
• 2:52 Building Authentic Relationships on LinkedIn
• 8:08 Expanding Your Warm Network through Networking and Referrals
• 11:53 Letting Your Content Do the Selling
• 16:03 Adding Value to Others in Relationships
• 21:29 Continual Learning and Growth as a Leader
• 26:32 Navigating Challenges and Embracing Hope

Transcript

Dr. William Attaway: 0:00

It is such an honor today to have Ed Forteau on the podcast. Ed is the leader of the Genuine Connections Revolution. He is helping service providers, entrepreneurs and sales professionals to build authentic relationships, changing the way we do business on LinkedIn. He is the author of the new book no More Cringe that I look forward to talking about today. Ed, thank you so much for being here.

Ed Forteau: 0:25

William, it's great to be here. Thanks so much for inviting me.

Intro / Outro: 0:30

Welcome to Catalytic Leadership, the podcast designed to help leaders intentionally grow and thrive. Here is your host, author and leadership and executive coach, Dr William Attaway.

Dr. William Attaway: 0:51

I'd love to start by asking you to share a little bit of your story with our listeners, and particularly around your journey and your development as a leader. How did you get started?

Ed Forteau: 0:59

Well, I've always had this entrepreneurial tendency all my life, and even when I was a kid, I was the one that was cutting lawns and shoveling snow from the driveways while other people or other kids were playing, and I even recruited kids to help me. So I was a bit of an employer back then, and also like the president of groups and organizations that I belong to. So I always felt like I was a leader and thought that I should be helping and supporting the people that were working with me, and that's just something that I've done all my life.

Dr. William Attaway: 1:38

I love that Building teams even at a young age.

Ed Forteau: 1:42

Indeed, indeed. It's something I enjoy doing. I enjoy just seeing other people advance and grow. I get a thrill out of that.

Dr. William Attaway: 1:50

And I think that leans into what you're doing now helping entrepreneurs and business owners around their content strategy and really their community strategy on social media. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Ed Forteau: 2:04

I can. I've had clients that have struggled with new client acquisition. They've tried a lot of different things advertising, facebook ads, cold email, cold calling, direct mail. All of those things are really low probability ways to attract new clients. And what they moved away from which was like 80% of my clients depend on this, is networking and referrals. And so I told them, like why don't we start working more on our warm network and expanding the warm network? And I came up with this concept called the strategic ally method, which basically expands your warm network so that the thing that you are getting the most clients from networking and referrals you're able to expand that. Because in the past once you ran out of your warm network, the referrals kind of dried up. And once you talk to everybody in networking groups, again business kind of dried up. And once you talk to everybody in networking groups, again business kind of dried up. So we created this to expand that, so you basically have a never-ending pool of warm people that you can connect with.

Dr. William Attaway: 3:21

It's fascinating to me and I love the strategic ally language, you know, not seeing people just as a potential client or not, but actually expanding that relationship, and that's so much of what you talk about is building relationships.

Ed Forteau: 3:38

Absolutely the way that I approach it is I don't look for and I'm not looking to get a client when I'm meeting someone.

Ed Forteau: 3:46

So when I go through this process, it's more of I'm trying to develop a relationship, I'm trying to make a friend, and when you do, when you approach people in that way, it takes the pressure off of you and them.

Ed Forteau: 3:57

Ultimately, what happens? Because we're all in business, we end up talking shop. We do business with people we're comfortable with, and so once you get to a level where you're comfortable with the other person and they trust you, then the next step is just for them to have confidence in the things that you do and the way we approach that is, we let our content do our selling for us. So we're out there making friends, building relationships, and we're letting our content do the selling of what we do and how well we do it Our work friends, I call them. They're exposed to this and over time, when they're looking for somebody to help them to solve the problem that we solve, and if we do a good job of identifying those potential work friends that have the actual problem that we can solve, they will naturally ask us to help them without us having to do any selling at all.

Dr. William Attaway: 4:54

It really changes the equation when you approach things with that posture and from that perspective. Instead of focusing on what you want from somebody it's like Jeff Henderson talks about you're focused on what you want from somebody. It's like Jeff Henderson talks about. You're focused on what you want for them, and I think they feel that in the conversation and as you're building that relationship.

Ed Forteau: 5:15

Indeed, In fact, when you're approaching them in any types of situations. For example, one trick that I use all the time is a celebration. For example, one trick that I use all the time is a celebration. I call it the celebration tactic, and on LinkedIn it's very easy to do. If you look at the my Network section, there you have two choices. When you go to that, you have growth and you have catch-up, and the catch-up part is people that have birthdays or work anniversaries and new jobs, and LinkedIn makes it very easy for you to reach out to people using that. So you go to that section of catch up and then you just start clicking. You click for the birthday and it'll give you the birthday message. You click the gift. You want to make sure you include the gift.

Ed Forteau: 6:01

Some of my clients think it's a little silly to send a gift, but the gift is what makes the whole thing work. So you're just clicking. You're going through five minutes a day. You're just clicking the birthday message and the gift and about 10 to 20% of those people will get back to you and some of them will start a conversation. Some of them will just say thank you the key to what you do after they get back to you is the important thing.

Ed Forteau: 6:27

The thing that you have to keep in mind is I'm just making friends. I'm not trying to sell anybody, so what you don't want to do is just send your booking link or send them a report or ask them, if there's, you say how are you doing? That's an uncomfortable question, Like you have to think in terms of whatever you say to them, how are they going to respond to it. So the easiest thing to do is you look at the profile, look at the last couple of posts that they've done and you comment on their last couple of posts. Just say something about what you learned from the posts that they had and maybe ask them a question about that.

Ed Forteau: 7:02

Or there's something new in their profile that you didn't see and you ask them about that, and that way you can get them into a conversation just after them saying thank you for wishing me a happy birthday, and then you can ask them, because we're not friends generally, we're just connections. We probably don't know them that well. Once you get into a conversation, you can start getting into more personal things like what did you do on your birthday? Did you have cake? Did you go out to dinner. Did you do this or that? Now you're starting to get comfortable with that person. They're getting comfortable with you, which is the first step to doing business with anybody.

Dr. William Attaway: 7:37

It really goes back to that old formula the know like and trust factor Indeed.

Ed Forteau: 7:48

So your new book really details a lot of the strategies that you're sharing today. Yes, it does. We start off by talking about the cringeworthy DMs that we've all received from people. So somebody will connect with you and they'll immediately send you a hey, would you like to do a 15-minute meeting greet, or? I've got this solution that I think would help you in your business. Would you like to meet with me for 15 minutes? Or can I send you a report or all kinds of stuff that we're really not that interested in? And so what we do is, when we send a connection message, when somebody accepts it, what we say is thanks for connecting with me and that's it. Then what I do is I do what I call a welcome package.

Ed Forteau: 8:34

So you say well, you connected with me, and I'm going to do several things. First, I'm going to thank you for connecting with me. Next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go to your profile. I'm going to look through things connecting with me. Next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go to your profile. I'm going to look through things and I may like two or three of your posts. I might even comment on one of your posts, and then I may endorse one of your skills and then I'm going to sit back and wait. I know that those have shown up in your notifications. So three likes, that means there's three notifications that showed up and I've endorsed your skills. So another notification and maybe I even commented. So there's a fifth notification.

Ed Forteau: 9:13

I want to see if you're going to come back to my profile and say who's this new connection of mine? Who did all of that? If you're curious enough to look at my profile, then that's somebody I could probably develop a relationship with now. If you didn't, then I know I may have to do a little bit more work. I'm going to come back to your profile once a week, once a month, once every two weeks, like a post, and see what happens and slowly build that relationship.

Ed Forteau: 9:42

I think the biggest problem that we all run into when we're connecting with somebody new is we'll have a really short conversation after we connect. A lot of times there's no conversation at all and then nothing happens. It's kind of like when you come across somebody in an aisleway and you acknowledge that they're there, like hi, or how you doing, and you respond I'm doing well, or how's your day, it's good. And then you keep going and nothing else happens beyond that, and I think that's a big problem on LinkedIn, where you miss this opportunity to actually develop a relationship with your connections, where most people don't. Let me ask you as a percentage how many of your connections do you have any type of relationship with?

Dr. William Attaway: 10:33

Oh my goodness, Probably a very small percentage.

Ed Forteau: 10:37

Yeah, it's probably less than 1%.

Dr. William Attaway: 10:41

Yeah, for sure.

Ed Forteau: 10:42

And these are opportunities that we miss. Whether it's we're trying to reach out to somebody and if they don't act the way we want them to act right away, then we miss an opportunity. Or they're trying to reach out to us and maybe they need the service that we're offering, but we don't try to continue the relationship. So the first thing to do is start to nurture the relationship and then see where it goes From there. What I'm always looking to do is support their content. So, because it's really the only thing I can do is support their content right out of the gate and let's see whether they're willing to reciprocate, I may have to ask them and I might do that a week or two later. The thing that happens once you start reciprocating each other's content or supporting each other's content, is you become work friends. It changes the relationship. At that point, the next thing you can ask them is if they would like to have some formal relationship where we're supporting each other's content and after that, somebody that would not normally set a meeting with you is willing to, after you do this for a week or two. If I were to come to you after we've supported each other's content for a couple of weeks and say, william, would you be open or would you be willing to meet with me on Zoom? I had a couple of things I wanted to ask you. More than likely you're going to say yes.

Ed Forteau: 12:06

Think of, if you're working somewhere and a colleague asked you if you had 10 minutes to talk about something and to come into my office, you're going to agree to that. If you didn't know who the person was, you would say, well, what's this about? You just start asking questions about what it is. But because you're work friends, there's no questions. Okay, sure, I'll do that. And that's how you start to really elevate the relationship to a point where you're building trust. They see, because they're looking at your content every day, every other day, they see what you do. It then becomes easy for them to take the next step and say let's collaborate on something. Maybe let's. I can refer business to you, or we can refer business back and forth.

Dr. William Attaway: 13:00

Or, you know, I've seen the stuff that you do and I have that problem that you've been talking about. Can we talk about how you can help me to solve that problem? This is so intentional, ed, and when we first talked about this and you shared this concept with me, it absolutely fascinates me, because you're bringing the intentionality that we would normally bring to a friendship, to a relationship in real life, into the digital space, and I think a lot of people don't know how to do that, and that feels like one of the big drivers why you wrote this book. Is that right? It?

Ed Forteau: 13:29

is, people are really uncomfortable. Well, on LinkedIn, we're all on LinkedIn trying to sell stuff At least most of us are and so everyone looks at everybody else as a prospect that they can sell their stuff to. There's way more value in a relationship than just the client relationship. I have clients that have referred way more business to me than I've gotten from them, that have referred way more business to me than I've gotten from them. I've worked with them on projects and gotten more business from that relationship than I have from the client relationship, and I understand that we need to make money today. We can't wait for months or so before somebody starts referring business to us, but people will do business with you because they're comfortable with you.

Ed Forteau: 14:15

It's a very predictable outcome when you follow this process. If you do it right, you're going to have one of four outcomes. They're going to either be a friend and they're going to just support your content, and that's maybe as far as it will ever go. But there's value there because if you like my content and here's a trick, an algorithm trick If, let's say, you and I are connected, and then I'm connected and you and I are also connected by a guy named let's call him Dave. And so when you like my content because the three of us are connected Dave is also going to see that you liked my content. And, let's say, dave is a person that I want to do business with. So he's seeing you somewhat endorse my content day after day after day. And because my content is showing up in Dave's feed, because you like it, because we have this three-way triangle going on, eventually Dave is going to reach out to me. Eventually Dave is going to reach out to me and I don't even have to have a connection with him. But he could be like a regular connection that he's connected to me, but we really don't have this relationship. But you and I have a relationship. You and Dave may have a relationship and I get to piggyback off of that relationship. So that's one of the ways that we can do this. The other thing is, once you have a work relationship with somebody, it's pretty predictable what the next step in the relationship is going to be, so you can ask them. After we've been supporting each other's content for a little while, this has been working really well. So, william, this has been working really well.

Ed Forteau: 15:53

I wonder if there's a way for us to elevate this so we could both benefit more from what we're doing. And I put that in your hands Now. Over time I may be dropping little hints about what we could do, so that sticks in your subconscious. So when I ask you that question, I've kind of primed the answer without having to try to the answer. Without having to try to.

Ed Forteau: 16:19

I don't want to call it manipulative, because this is something that we tend to do when we get excited about stuff. Like I might say, because Dave, we have this three-way relationship, dave and I are working together and I'll say I just started working with Dave and I know you and Dave are connected. I think what we've been doing together and supporting each other's content resulted in that. So it's kind of like a referral. So I just wanted to let you know I'm really excited. That's a normal conversation to have with somebody.

Ed Forteau: 16:49

But if we understand the intent, not the intent, the result of having that conversation is I've already put in your subconscious mind that you could refer business to me by just the way I phrased it. So when I ask you is there a way that we could elevate what we're doing so that we could benefit more from our relationship, in your head. You already have, oh, referrals, or we could collaborate. I could say that I'm collaborating with some other person that I'm doing this with, so it's pretty predictable what you're going to choose Now. You may not choose collaboration, referral partner or client, but you'll end up just staying the status quo and remaining a friend and we continue to support each other's content. You're going to win, no matter what you choose. You're going to win, no matter what you choose.

Dr. William Attaway: 19:06

I absolutely love not only the intentionality of that, but the strategy behind it, and again, it's not about what I get from somebody right, it's about how can I add value to them. How can I add value to them, knowing that the reciprocal nature of human beings is going to come into play there? This feels like it's going to take a lot of time, though, and I imagine the business leaders, the business owners who are listening to this, are like great, one more thing to do. How long is this going to take? Is this like three hours a day, like I don't have three hours a day? How long does it really take to do what you're describing?

Ed Forteau: 19:52

It doesn't take very long at all. And the thing I try to emphasize with people is we're just making friends here. It's a very relaxed approach and people want to press because they're so used to selling. Let's take a step back, because everybody's trying to sell everyone. At this point People are very resistant to sales pitches. So let's back off just a little bit. Let this play out.

Ed Forteau: 20:13

Usually, it takes from the time that, let's say, I connect with someone to the time we start becoming support partners and we're making a decision of elevating the relationship to something else is about a week to two weeks. It doesn't take very long at all. It's a fairly short sales cycle. There's ways to expand upon this. I call them snowball campaigns, where I'm looking for people in your first level Now that we're work friends, I'm looking at people on your first level my second level I can do this in Sales Navigator that are similar to you, and there are going to be people that are similar to you. We connect to people that are in the same profession, that do the same things, so there'll be people that have the same problems you have that I'm solving for you or can solve for you. So I'll reach out to those people that are second level to me, first level to you, and I'll say that William and I have been putting our heads together on a few things and I'm curious, I wonder if you'd be open to connecting. And so I've used you as the connection point, the person that we're connected to, and I haven't said anything other than we're putting our heads together, we're doing a couple of things, collaborating on a couple of things. I haven't said that you're a client, but I have given an indication that there's opportunity for us to work together on something that William and I are seeing success with. So those connection requests get about a 60 to 80 percent acceptance rate. Connection requests get about a 60 to 80% acceptance rate. Now the same thing happens that I mentioned before. Now that we have this three-way connection going on, when you like or engage with my content, that person is going to see that You're basically giving me an endorsement and you're saying nice things about me in comments. I'm saying nice things about you I can solve this guy's problem because I picked him out as someone who's got a problem that I can solve, and he's seeing that you're saying Ed can fix this problem, this, this and the other, and you two know each other, that person. I don't have to sell them, I really don't. They tend to come to me and ask hey, I see that William's been talking about some of the things you do. I'm kind of interested if you could help me with this. It works much better than any type of ad.

Ed Forteau: 22:33

You can run cold email very low probability things that people are doing right now. For example, cold email you would have to send at minimum if, if you're really good at it because we do work on cold email campaigns for clients you would be lucky to get an appointment for every 200 emails you send. I don't think people wrap their heads around that number. That means you have a 0.5% success rate one in 200. It's terrible odds. If you were to send DMs direct messages to people, you're going to have to send 400 of those to get one appointment. As I was talking about this stuff in my book, my wife looked at it and she said mainly because they don't know any better way to do it, and we're trying to offer an option that's very, very similar to what they're used to and that's networking and referrals. This is just an extension of that in a way that you can scale it and control the process and control the process.

Dr. William Attaway: 23:45

I love that you recognized what is happening and that you're like I want to get on the solution side of this problem. I want to help people move into a different space, to help them get better results. That is not something that I see a ton of people do and I see a lot of people trying to push the same tired, ineffective things 0.5% response yikes. You want to get on the solution side of this and that's one thing I appreciate about you. You are constantly leading with that kind of generosity, not just with your clients, but with people that you interact with and meet, regardless of whether they're going to be clients or not. You take the pressure out of that and I think that's something everybody listening can really take and leverage and begin to implement in their own leadership.

Ed Forteau: 24:36

Well, I hope they're able to look at this and at least have their mind open to a slightly different approach. This is very much the same thing that they're already doing. We're just applying it in a different way. It's a very natural way to meet people and instead of having unconscious, I'd say incompetence in your approach, like priming, subconscious, suggestion things that my wife would say when she first saw that in the book, she said well, that's kind of what. Did she call it? Well, not aggressive, I forget the term that she used and I said wait a second, you use this on me all the time without really knowing that you're doing it.

Ed Forteau: 25:25

If you understand how this has an impact on the other person, then you can apply it in a way that is beneficial to everyone. Clearly, you could misuse this if you wanted to, but if you really are going at this with the intent that I'm just trying to make a friend and I know that this friend could use what I have to offer, but I don't want to push it on them. I want them to discover it and they will you have to trust that. They will Just make sure that you're not overstepping the relationship, you're not selling. All the pieces fall into place if you do it right.

Dr. William Attaway: 26:05

And I think that motive comes through in your posture. If your motive is I'm trying to manipulate, I'm trying to leverage this relationship for what I'm going to get out of it, that comes through. You know you don't have to say those words for that to be communicated. Right, how you posture yourself, the language you use, people pick up on those things, even if it's on a subconscious level, even if it's on a subconscious level. And I love the heart behind what you're describing here and how anybody listening can leverage this, can begin to implement this for the good of the people that they're interacting with. That will eventually reflect in positivity on their business, their bottom line as well. But that's not the motivation.

Dr. William Attaway: 26:44

I want to talk about you for a second, ed, you are a leader today that is at a different place in your leadership journey than you were five years ago. You're leading at a different level today and three, four or five years from now, your team, your business, is going to need you to lead at a yet higher level. What do you do to stay on top of your game? What do you do to stay on top of your game? How do you level up with the new leadership skills that your team and your business are going to need you to have.

Ed Forteau: 27:20

Well, I'm always learning. I've always had intellectual curiosity, so I'm trying to figure out how to make things better, how to make things easier, how to shorten the process while still remaining true to the process. So the goal of the process is to expand my business, work with my partners to help them expand their business. A rising tide lifts all boats and I understand that some people can get impatient. They want to skip steps and I have to. What I tell people when we start working together is I don't know if you're a football fan or not.

Ed Forteau: 28:04

Oh yeah, but back in the 60s the Green Bay Packers had what they called the Packer Suite. Vincent Lombardi was the head coach. It was an unstoppable play and I tell people I'm going to hand you the Green Bay Suite.

Ed Forteau: 28:21

This approach always works. But I'm going to give you exact words to say. I'm going to give you exactly what to say. I'm going to give you exactly what to do, but you have to execute and you can't overthink it. You have to do exactly what's laid out for you. You can't ad lib, you can't go off script. If people didn't do their exact job in the grain-based sweep and the reason why it works so well is because they just practice it over and over and over and over again, because everybody knew exactly what their job was If you do this exactly the way it's laid out for you, it will succeed.

Ed Forteau: 29:00

You'll get the business that you want. You won't have to start worrying about or be up late at night saying I don't have any business right now. Do I run ads? Do I send cold email? Do I send direct mail? Do I pay cold calls? No, you don't have to do any of that stuff. This is a very predictable process and once you've built your network of work friends, the business will come in in a steady stream and you can adjust the amount of business that comes in based on how you choose your work friends and how you execute the plan.

Dr. William Attaway: 29:35

That's so good. What are some of the challenges that you have faced in your journey? Like I mean, somebody looking at you might think, man Ed, his journey hasn't had the same problems that I've had. He hadn't had to deal with the challenges I've had. Can you share one or two of the challenges you faced as an entrepreneur?

Ed Forteau: 29:54

Sure, I don't think you can be an entrepreneur if you haven't faced challenges. It's a constant rollercoaster. As an entrepreneur, I am very well aware of the fact that there's times that we may have a hard time meeting payroll, besides not even paying ourselves. I can remember when I first moved to Michigan I had a pretty good coaching business that I thought could travel. So we moved from Minneapolis to Michigan. It didn't travel as well as I thought it was. I was more out of sight, out of mind, even though most of my clients we talk via phone. Because I moved out of state.

Ed Forteau: 30:37

For some reason, the relationships got kind of disconnected business every month and trying to make relationships here in Michigan, making new relationships was difficult. This was 20, 22 years ago and we had bought a house, probably spent more than we should have on it, and we were out of cash. There was no money in the bank account and it was December. I'm looking at not having any Christmas presents for anybody, but can I pay the mortgage in January? And there was not enough money to do that or keep the lights on or any stuff. So I got out Yellow Pages books and I started dialing. I asked my wife and my daughters. She stayed with my in-laws, which are about an hour and a half away from us at the time, and I said I just have to focus and make phone calls. So I'm just smiling and dialing I don't like making cold calls at all but what choice did I have?

Ed Forteau: 31:43

I got down to the 20, I think it was the 22nd or the 23rd it had no success and I knew I've got to get at least one sale here today, because it's the 24th tomorrow and once we get into Christmas there's not going to be anything. We're going to be in a position where we have to move, the house will get foreclosed on and I made a sale I think it was like 3 o'clock that day, didn't know the person, but I sent them an invoice, faxed it to them. They filled out the invoice, sent it back for $4,000. I go okay, I've got enough to pay rent, I've got enough to pay mortgage right now. But I cut it really close and I've been close to that position before where I thought I'll never be in that position again.

Ed Forteau: 32:36

But I think the thing that entrepreneurs don't realize is that what you have right now is no guarantee that it's going to always be this good forever. We have ups and downs and there's things that will happen that we have absolutely no control over, that can disrupt us, but you have to hang in there and have faith and belief that you can make it through. I think hope. I had a post a couple of weeks ago just about hope. I think hope is what drives the entrepreneur, the hope that things will get better, that things will work out, and sometimes all you have is that and you have to lean on that to get through the tough times.

Dr. William Attaway: 33:17

That's so good man. Thanks for sharing that, ed. I think a whole lot of people can resonate, including me. These are challenges, are part of the journey, and anybody who's just looking at somebody's highlight reel thinking, ah, they haven't had to deal with this. It's just not right, it's just not accurate. You're a continual learner. You are constantly learning and growing, and we've talked about that already. Is there a book that has made a big difference in your journey that you would recommend to everybody listening? Hey, if you haven't read this, this was a game changer for me.

Ed Forteau: 33:51

There's several books that I've listened to over and over and over again. One of the ones I do a five-mile walk every morning and one book that I've listened to probably I don't know like 20 times, maybe more, is Oren Klaff's Flip the Script. He tells really good stories in that book. I can almost repeat the stories verbatim. I've heard them so often. But it really does talk about the need to get away from the pitching, the selling. It's more of a psychological book on persuasion, but an ethical persuasion, and then, like I mentioned before, having conscious competence in what you're doing.

Dr. William Attaway: 34:35

That's so good. I have not read that. I'll be checking that one out. It's worth a read for sure. So often, ed, people are going to walk away from a conversation like this with one big idea. If you could define what you want people to walk away with today from what we've talked about.

Ed Forteau: 34:56

What do you want them to walk away with? I would say that client acquisition doesn't have to be difficult. It really doesn't have to be hard. It doesn't have to be something that keeps you up late at night worrying about where's the next client coming from when you make a shift from I'm just trying to make friends than to try to close this client. Once you're able to make that shift and internalize it, then you get away from all the salesy cringey language which repels people and you start attracting more people. And if you can do that, then you'll find both success in your business and happiness.

Dr. William Attaway: 35:31

So good. I know people are going to want to stay connected to you, Ed, and continue to learn from you and check out your book. What is the best way for them to do that?

Ed Forteau: 35:42

Well, you can go on my profile on LinkedIn, Ed Forteau LinkedIn forward slash IN forward slash, Ed Forteau. You'll see in the feature section that I have a link directly to my book on Amazon. There's a lot of things that we're doing there. Also, we're going to be doing what I call LinkedIn truth LinkedIn. Yeah, LinkedIn that we're doing with a lot of different professionals, and you'll find really good information there on business building, things that you could be doing, things you could be doing with email also. If you are willing to do that, I think you'll find that there's going to be a wealth of information that will help you build your business.

Dr. William Attaway: 36:25

Ed, thank you so much for sharing so generously today. Ed, thank you so much for sharing so generously today from what you do, what you've learned and in ways that people can immediately go and apply this to what they're trying to build. I so appreciate your generosity.

Ed Forteau: 36:41

Well, thank you so much for having me on, william. I've been looking forward to the interview, so I really appreciate the time that we spent together and the opportunity that you give me to share this with your audience.

Dr. William Attaway: 36:54

Thanks for joining me for this episode today. As we wrap up, I'd love for you to do two things. First, subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode, and if you find value here, I'd love it if you would rate it and review it. That really does make a difference in helping other people to discover this podcast. Second, if you don't have a copy of my newest book, Catalytic Leadership, I'd love to put a copy in your hands. If you go to catalyticleadershipbookcom, you can get a copy for free. Just pay the shipping so I can get it to you and we'll get one right out.

Dr. William Attaway: 37:30

My goal is to put this into the hands of as many leaders as possible. This book captures principles that I've learned in 20 plus years of coaching leaders in the entrepreneurial space, in business, government, nonprofits, education and the local church. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn to keep up with what I'm currently learning and thinking about. And if you're ready to take a next step with a coach to help you intentionally grow and thrive as a leader, I'd be honored to help you. Just go to catalyticleadershipnet to book a call with me. Stay tuned for our next episode next week.

Intro / Outro: 38:21

Stay tuned for our next episode next week. Until then, as always, leaders choose to. To catalyticleadershipnet.