Tag: Chamber of Commerce

How Important Are Relationships? 👫 (B2B Networking)

Posted on by brianjpombo

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Thoughts on the value of relationships and networking after Brian just recorded an upcoming podcast with Grants Pass local, Cat Bonney.

Transcription

How important is relationships?

Hi, I’m Brian Pombo. Welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Today, I wanted to discuss the concept of relationships in business specifically. So it’s all about being relationship reliant for me.

In fact, there are three pillars at BrianJPombo.com.

The first one I like talking about the most, right off the bat, at least, is being relationship reliant.

This is something that came later in life for me, even though I was surrounded by it, and the evidence was everywhere. It didn’t occur to me that the relationships you have the strength of the relationships, but even the loose ties that you have out there in life, or that one of the most important things possible.

That all business is based off of people, you know, like and trust, it’s based off of some form of relationship.

Now, sometimes you don’t necessarily have a relationship with the person, most of the products and services you use, that you spend money on, you don’t know the person behind it. But you have a relationship with that brand.

There is something there, someone has created something, put it forth, and you’ve taken it and exchanged it for money.

There’s a relationship there even at the most crass you know, just financial interaction, you know, even just that there’s still a relationship, and it goes on from there. The strongest relationship you have with someone the people that you paid the most amount of money on the most regular basis.

That’s some of the most powerful stuff and it can tell you something about even the things that you pay a small amount for. It all has to do with the same thing. It all comes back to some form of relationship.

I was reminded of this today because I had a really good podcast interview.

So I have a podcast that’s local. It’s called Grants Pass VIP. And what it does is it covers basically stories of movers and shakers in Josephine County, Oregon. And Grants Pass is the largest town here.

It’s named Grants Pass VIP, because that’s where most of the people will relate to it. Up this past year, about Yeah, about a year about this past year, I’ve been working very closely with the Chamber of Commerce.

Even though a good portion of that year, we weren’t even meeting in person. But meeting over over video chat. So I got to meet somebody that we had known each other kind of at a distance or name’s Cat Bonney.

Cat, she’s just a million different things in town. And she’s one of these people that I finally got to sit down and have an interview with for my podcast, this will be coming up. Not available yet if you’re watching this right away, but you’ll see it soon over at GrantsPassVIP.com.

Cat is a very interesting person, her entire life has been built on the idea of getting out there and making a difference and encouraging other people to do the same thing. And having her hands and a whole lot of different items.

But all around this concept of really making a difference for people and in doing things that that stirs her soul, not just a way to pay the bills, you know, obviously, there’s always that end of it, but you have to have things that really make a difference for you.

Even the short period of time we hung out today at the coffee shop, recording the podcast, even that short period of time I found it really interesting how useful her knowledge is. I mean, just she asked what she can do for me and I just tossed something out there.

And she threw some advice out that I know is gonna save me many hours, and many headaches. And so I thank her so much for that. That’s one simple, subtle relationship that I that I’ve had that I have that I share with her.

You can’t put a price tag on that. But at the same end, it’s going to profit me if you could put a price tag it’s going to profit me greatly over time. If nothing else in the saving of time just for a brief moment, a brief conversation.

These are the things that are true throughout. And if you’re looking to grow things, if you’re looking to look at the world differently, if you’re looking to think more like people who have something that you want out of life.

It comes back down to a relationship. My entire way of building my business for the past, you know, two-plus years, via podcasting, and via the book that I wrote, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

These are things that that happened because of relationships because I connected with other people, sometimes at a distance will originally at a distance online with a lot of people.

And then also in person talking with people and going through it and wanting to reach out and meet certain people that I couldn’t find a way to get a conversation with until I could find a gift that I could offer them.

The gift in this situation was the Podcast, the podcast allows me to offer a gift of publicity to somebody.

In exchange, I get to meet this person to get to know them better, and find out if there’s anything that I can do in their life and maybe even learn something from them. Simple, simple concepts, these simple ideas, but it all comes back to the relationship.

Business is about other human beings. It’s about you and other human beings connecting. That’s all it is. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re making dog food, it doesn’t matter what you’re making. I don’t know, why do I always go back to dog food, it’s interesting.

Maybe it’s because I have no experience in the dog food market. And but for some reason, my mind always jumps to dog food when I’m thinking about things. It doesn’t matter what your industry is all a relationship based.

This is very difficult. If you have a task oriented mind, my mind is very much at least on the forefront is initially task oriented. I have a little bit of people orientation back there. But mostly it’s task oriented. And it took me many years to realize the practical benefit of relationships.

I hate to say it that was sounds weird, doesn’t it? If you think like a robot, it’s difficult to put it into words. But that’s a sadly that’s where I come from. So that’s all I got for today.

Go check out my book if you want to hear some more about about how to take relationships and take them to the next level and also meet people that you would have never met before. That can be really helpful to you.9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. You can get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com.

AmazonProofBook.com.

And I’m going to be back here tomorrow talking about the second or the three pillars for BrianJPombo.com. Stay tuned for that, we’ll see.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

Gifts for Local Business 🎁🦊 (ROE Motors & GP CarFox)

Posted on by brianjpombo

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Brian shares a gift he got from GP CarFox of ROE Motors, while attending his local Grants Pass Chamber Greeters Meeting.

Transcription

Gifts for local business.

Hi, I’m Brian Pombo. Welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I have here a gift from a local, I guess we could call her an influencer. Amy fox, GP CarFox here in Grants Pass is a bit of a local celebrity among people who know her.

She has developed kind of a persona, and I’m here to talk with you about it today.

First, I want to remind you about my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business, you can get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com. Or you can purchase a hardcopy wherever books are sold, including amazon.com.

But I want to show you now what is this gift.

This is a gift that I received from attending the Chamber of Commerce meeting today. And that’s why I wanted to go over it, and haven’t even taken the ribbon off of it yet because we are going to unwrap it right here.

I want to I want to kind of break this down for you.

Now what happens it specifically at our chamber of commerce and you can I don’t old Chamber of Commerce work a little bit differently, but they tend to have a weekly or bi weekly mixer type meeting. We call ours greeters.

You go to a greeters meeting and everybody has Well, in our case, we have 30 seconds in order to give kind of an elevator pitch for our business, and a lot of them mostly people you’ve heard something from them before, but some people try and wrap in news and other things.

They’re also allowed, you’re also allowed to bring a gift every time. So to pass on to the next speaker, whoever gets their card pulled next. Now let’s take a look at this. This was a gift that I ended up with. Right take this ribbon off, let’s break this down.

So who is Amy Fox?

Amy Fox is a as a car salesperson here locally. And so she always gives away Little Hot Wheels. Cars. Here’s one here.

That’s cool. It’s a Rally Baja Crawler. Tyler is going to love that. My son is a Hot Wheels junkie, so he’s definitely going to love that.

Along with that I’m saving some of the best pieces here for last. We’ve got Baby Ruth funds eyes for people that enjoy their candies. I mean, how do you get go wrong with candy?

If you if you don’t eat candy, you can always pass it on to somebody else. So that’s I mean how you go wrong with that. That’s awesome.

Also, this is unique, the $2 bill one of these nice, fresh $2 bills, unusual because you don’t see them very often.

The famous for Jefferson being on the front, if you don’t know about $2 bills go and look it up. It’s fascinating history.

Then here’s the cool part. She’s got her card, which is very cool.

But look at this…she has her own kind of logo, Amy Fox, and she’s got the little cartoon Fox there with her phone number. She’s with ROE Motors here in Grants Pass.

She always has kind of little updates on what they’re doing locally at ROE Motors in terms of what they have available and so forth.

It’s always very interesting.

She also does a lot of social media videos on social media, which is very cool and unique for local. A lot of local businesses do not take full advantage of video. So that’s a quick tip on top of anything else and doesn’t have to be fancy video, you could just be behind the wheel, giving an update.

She’s got her own logo sticker with phone number and email address. So this works as a quasi business card, but also something that you could put up that people were saying, what is that, right?

How do you go wrong with having having your own logo that reminds people of your last name, that’s just the coolest thing of all. Hey, Amy, we’d love to have you on Grants Pass VIP, the podcast that’s all about Grants Pass and Josephine County as a whole, the movers and shakers that work here.

So if you know Amy, be sure and send this to her, make sure she sees it and Amy reached out to me and let’s let’s get you on the show because this is quality stuff.

It’s really important whether your chamber of commerce offers a gift giving a situation like this, or whether you just need to do it yourself.

If you’re if you have a local community or you have any type of community that you’re able to plug into of professionals, of potential clients, customers, patients, parishioners, what have you, it whatever you’re looking for.

You need to give out gifts in order to get attention It’s a simple concept. It’s not over the top, and people aren’t going to hate you for it.

They’ll enjoy the gift even if it’s something simple and or silly, and you can’t go wrong, you can’t go wrong with a gift. That’s just another way to be able to stand out. And the more unique your gift is, the more you stand out, the more people will think about you talk about you.

Maybe they’ll even talk about you on their video podcast. So that’s all I have for tonight, you have a good one. We’ll be back tomorrow.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

When Goals Won’t Work 😤

Posted on by brianjpombo

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Thoughts on goal setting from an upcoming podcast conversation Brian had with a local he met from the Grants Pass Chamber of Commerce.

Find more local conversations here – grantspassvip.com

Transcription

When goals won’t work.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Like seeing you again, it’s fun. I love being here and being able to have our conversations on a nightly basis. And I love to be able to actually talk back and forth with you.

So if you ever have any questions or comments, leave them down below.

I’m Brian Pombo. If this is your first time, I am a business investor,

I have nearly three years’ worth of content going back all the way on nearly a nightly basis.

So you can see that over at BrianJPombo.com/media.

You go to the media section and go and check that out. And wherever you’re watching or listening to this, you can also see what we have archived there on whatever format you’re watching or listening on.

Now, I want to talk a little bit about goal setting because it is one of those things that it’s necessary. But I think quite often gets it overshadows everything else as being the only thing that’s necessary.

I don’t think it is the main driver of setting a goal, I do believe that it is necessary to have one, especially if you’re dealing with more than one person in the direction of your goal.

If you have other people that are involved, it’s important that everyone knows where you’re going and when you expect to get there.

Make sure it’s something that’s specific and measurable. So that you actually know when you’re there versus just having a feeling about it.

Goals are important but there are certain periods of time where you can’t, you can’t work with a goal that isn’t going to help. A lot of that happens in the early days when you’re fleshing out the idea of what it is you’re actually trying to accomplish.

Because you may not know, you may have a whole bunch of different things that you know, work, a whole bunch of talents that you have a whole bunch of different types of people you might like to work with.

You’re just kind of tossing things around trying to figure it out. I had a great conversation yesterday with a fellow named Shane Russell.

Shane is running a company called Spirit of the Fair. He has a background in working within the fair industry and he wanted to see okay, how can we take this and apply it year-round?

Too many different organizations and businesses?

How can we allow everybody to synergistically work together and use some of these concepts that he came across while marketing in the fare industry?

So it is really is it’s an interesting concept. And he has been working a good three years straight from belief, I remember from our conversation, you’ll be able to hear that when it comes out over at the Grants Pass VIP podcast. GrantsPassVIP.com.

But before then I just want to tell you a little bit about his story because I find it interesting. And it’s it’s, it’s a story that I find myself in quite often, which is you end up having a whole lot of things you’d like to do a whole lot of things, you’re interested in a whole lot of things that you may be good at.

On top of that, so you got the things you’re passionate about the things that interest you. And then you also have the things that you’re actually good at that you have, you have something that you’re good at.

And sometimes those things don’t completely overlap, but there’s always some area where they do. Then there’s things of what you think, though, will actually have an economic interest, it’ll actually fit in with, with somebody paying you money to do it.

That’s sometimes the toughest thing to find, especially if you’re a passionate entrepreneur, you have a whole lot of things you’re interested in, but not necessarily know how to best take it to market.

So we had a little bit of that conversation going on and it reminded me a whole lot of my entrepreneurial journey has been doing the same thing, where you’re trying to figure out exactly how to make all these wonderful toys, all these wonderful things that you have.

How do you make them function and be a viable marketable product to enough people and have it be haven’t had the standard to where you could produce predictable income off of it, you know, which is the idea of business is actually finding some profit eventually.

So that’s an interesting concept and it brought me back to a lot of those early years. And a lot of the places that I find myself going back to again, every time we start a new business venture or start a new idea. In those early days. You can’t develop a goal because

As you don’t know where you’re going, here’s, here’s the problem with that, you have to allow yourself that space to do that.

You have to also realize that if you do not have a goal if you do not have a specific place that you’re planning to take it, you can’t expect much, not a whole lot of things are gonna get thrown against the law, and quite possibly nothing is going to stick.

These are things you just have to expect. So you got both of those worlds happening at the same time.

On one hand, you have allow yourself, depending on on your personality and your coordination, you have to allow yourself some space to experiment.

But at the same end, you can’t expect anything to come from it because you don’t expect anything, because you haven’t specified something that you expect to come from it.

So you play with it, and you see what it produces on its own but you don’t really know where you’re going quite yet.

As soon as you can define it, start working towards a goal. That’s a great place to be in and when you realize that that isn’t necessarily the goal, you want to you have to allow yourself the flexibility to change that goal, and move it and adjust things where they need to go not because you think you can’t make it.

But because you understand the goal better, and you understand more about what it is that you want. And what it is you can best create.

Hopefully that makes sense is this whole lot of this goes into the thought patterns and planning. And it’s kind of my specialty when it comes to strategy. It’s a planning art, right?

So if you’re really needing help in helping if you really know what you’re after, and then you just need to know how to get there. That’s kind of why I wrote my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

You have a business model, you’re in the process.

Now how do I get from point A to point B?

When you’re at that point, go and check out this book, go grab yourself a copy@amazon.com. Or, if you don’t mind reading it off your phone or tablet or PC? Go download a free copy. AmazonProofBook.com.

It’s all I have for tonight. It’s a simple idea.

I want you to sit with it a little bit and let me know what your questions and comments are about this. I’d love to hear what you think about this.

Do you think goals are always necessary or do you think there are periods of time when you just can’t?

You can’t possibly wrap a goal around a nebulous idea. So you have a good night. Think about that one. We’ll be back tomorrow.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

Testimonials Are Very Important! ☺️

Posted on by brianjpombo

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Brian shares a recent experience he had at his local chamber of commerce meeting.

Podcast with Candy Morasch – https://grantspassvip.com/candy-morasch-once-upon-a-horse/

Transcription

Testimonials are very important.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Every night, nearly every night, I will promote my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

It’s just because it’s the latest book I’ve come out with it is the main way in which I start a conversation with many of the people I ended up doing business with as a business investor, I am always looking for partners I’m always looking for people to team up with.

I don’t have a very clean process because depending on whether we’re actually a good fit or not whether I move forward with people. And sometimes I work on an equity deal, or sometimes I work on just a straight line, a very specific short-term deal.

But one thing is true, I always tried to recommend this book, or have people at least peruse it before we go any further with business. Because I’ve had so many great business conversations today.

I’m not even sure where to start but I want to talk a little bit about testimonials.

I’m going to tell you how they handle testimonials at my local chamber meetings. So what they’ll do is they’ll that will have a group of people and of course, we’re all meeting in person nowadays. So we had a really good-sized group of people.

And they’ll tell everybody, you can give one testimonial to one other person, all right.

And you’ll do that after they get up and give their 30-second talk.

So everyone gets 30-seconds that’s there. And they get 30-seconds to give their pitch or talk or whatever.

Then if there’s someone with a testimonial, they can talk and give a testimonial but you’re always only able to get one because they don’t have to have limited time.

So it’s kind of fun. It’s kind of cool to see. And there’s always good stuff that comes out of that. Well, I was lucky enough to have some people bring me up. I actually got to I think I got two testimonials when you’re always supposed to get one.

I ended up with two testimonials from some great people, Mr. Tom Parker and Mr. Steven Sable, I really appreciate what they said about me today.

I like to say what Candy Morasch said during her own time, she took time out of her own time to talk about a section in my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business now she spoke about an area that I talked about in here regarding lumpy mail, and how to basically show up differently.

It’s in my it’s in the third chapter on being different and lumpy mail an example of that.

Now how you do that is if you’re sending a piece of mail to somebody a piece of direct mail, physical snail mail to somebody, you could send it in a regular envelope. If you just put something in there that they can feel through the envelope, they’re more likely to open the envelope.

It’s just it’s an old trick but it’s extremely useful, especially if you’re trying to get somebody’s attention. And there are other tips on how to get that type of attention.

But that very specific idea of having that piece of mail be a little bit lumpy and if you’ve ever noticed, if you get something that’s a little bit strange, even if it just has a hard surface on the inside, sometimes that will get people open and says this what was why is there cardstock in here or whatever. And people will open it I’ve talked about this a lot on my other podcasts hear regarding direct mail and so forth.

But she was so impressed with that she let everybody know at the Chamber meeting to read my book, I had multiple people come up and want a copy of it.

So it tells you about the power of a book.

It also tells you about the power of testimonial and makes a big difference I had also a number of people come and talk to me about wanting to be on my podcast which Candy was on I will include a link in the description going to take two candies interview on Grants Pass VIP which is a local podcast that I have that just concerns people within Josephine County in Oregon, United States. and

It’s a really interesting show because even if you’re from nowhere in this area, you can listen to people talk about their lives talk about their businesses talk about their projects, and their passions in life.

Candy is a great example of somebody that just has a zest for life. She’s just out there getting it brightening other people’s lives, which is it’s just the coolest thing in the world. So thank you very much candy for the testimonial thank you to everybody who has provided testimonials to me in the past I don’t use them nearly enough.

You should use them to you need to take what people say about you in print. What they, you know, what they either write about you physically or what they comment they leave on your social media.

Things that people send you maybe video getting people on video or audio saying great things about you and being able to use that and put it back out there because when people hear it from other people.

It means it makes 100 times bigger difference than If they hear it from you directly, you can say all these great wonderful things about yourself.

But unless they hear about it from somebody else, it’s unlikely to have the same impact. And if you notice, when you really hear real testimonials, not just fake ones, actors and so forth, when you hear real testimonials, it makes you stop and pay attention.

Which as the name of the game is getting people’s attention, you know, getting how to stand out that’s, that’s the subtitle of my book, How to Standout in Your Industry and Make Every Competitor Irrelevant.

You can get a free copy of my book over at, AmazonProofBook.com. If you want to hard copy, go on to Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com or all the other booksellers online, you can go and find, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

That’s all I have for tonight. You have a good one. We’ll be back tomorrow. In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

Secret Zoom Hack 💻

Posted on by brianjpombo

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Brian talks about tips he uses when on local Chamber Greeters calls on Zoom.

Transcription

Secret zoom hack.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Let’s talk about zoom, shall we?

I have a lot of meetings that I have on zoom, sorry about the shaky camera work, I’ll get it stable here. There we go.

I’ve got a lot of meetings I do on zoom. Most of them are one on one meetings with individuals but I have a number of meetings that I do with large groups of people, a lot of them that I don’t even know. And here’s a fun thing to do.

This comes in real handy if you’re would normally go to something like a public meeting but this is now because of a certain situation, you may be stuck on zoom.

So a lot of mixers and things like that right now a lot of them are contained to zoom meetings. And so I go to a what they call a chamber of commerce meeting that’s called greeters.

Sometimes they’re called mixers, or that there are other terms for him. But it’s the basic ideas that everyone has a chance to speak real quick about their business. And it’s just a way to get to know everyone. And a lot of the stuff happens.

While before and after the meeting, it’s getting to talk to everyone before and afterward, that’s really where the magic happens, you don’t have that on zoom.

So what you’re left with is a little bit of chatter going on in the chatbox and you just kind of have to get bits and pieces here and there.

So here’s a little hack that I’ve been able to come up with and it’s extremely simple, and you may already be doing it. But if you’re in a situation like this, here’s what I recommend you do.

While it is going on, you either sit there with your phone, or another device connected to the internet and you’re looking for the things that people are bringing up, or you’re writing down their information, you’re writing down their names, and the names of their businesses, so that you can then connect with them in other sources.

So I check LinkedIn, I check Facebook, I check Instagram, any other places that you think you could connect up with these people. And if in a situation like Chamber of Commerce, you’re kind of expected to be able to meet and be able to connect and all these different places.

So it’s not that big a deal, I throw out a connection on LinkedIn pretty easily out to these people, because they’ve already heard from me, so they know me from there, I know them from there, whether we’ve had a one on one conversation or not, I do try and connect with people.

If you’re in a situation where you’re not quite sure if they know who you are, and everything else, you could just say, Hey, I saw you in the meeting this morning. just figured I’d see if you’d be willing to connect here.

Or if you want to be friends or whatever, if you’re talking to Instagram, and but places like Instagram places like Twitter, you can follow them without them having to follow you.

You’re just tossing it out there you’re putting, you’re putting everything out there. But at least from that point forward, you can start to pay attention to them.

If I don’t get somebody connecting with me on LinkedIn, I’ll follow them, it’s a very common way to be able to still connect with someone without them having to connect back with you.

Then you can learn more about them over time and start a conversation sometime later. It’s not that big of a deal. But it’s a start, it’s a start to, if you’re looking to reach out more and meet more people, it’s a great way of doing it. Now here’s the reverse side of that hack.

The reverse side is you’ve got to make sure that you yourself are able to be contacted easily. So you got to make sure that you put your name out there. In my particular greeter’s meeting that I’m thinking of we’re allowed to post our stuff in the chat.

So I’ll post my name and I’ll post my company and I’ll post out specific link one, I give one place to go to every time one specific place to go to time so I’ll post a live link in the chat. If you’re using zoom or any other type of video chat, oftentimes they’ll have that option.

So put it out there make it easy for people to find you and invite them say hey, if you’re on LinkedIn, connect up with me because I can’t find everybody out there and be able to connect with them.

If I haven’t connected with you connect with me on LinkedIn, toss it out there. Find ways to get to know more people, it’s only going to help your business.

Business is about people. It’s about relationships.

Hopefully, that makes sense. I have a book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business stuff short one, easy read, go get your own free copy at AmazonProofBook.com.

It’s all I got for today. You have a great one.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.