4 Tips For Shy People To Succeed At Networking

Networking events are the perfect place to meet people to help you grow your business. However, if you are a shy person in nature, they can be your worst fear.

You might think that you can get away without networking but you really need to face your fears so that you can grow your business.

Here are some tips for shy people to succeed at networking.

• Be Yourself. Many people can be pushy and aggressive when they network. There is nothing wrong with being shy and awkward in networking situations. It happens more than you realize. You may even bond with someone over it!
• Ask someone you know to introduce you to others. Though you may want to spend the evening with someone that you know, it defeats the purpose of going to a networking event. Instead, ask that person to introduce you to others. This is much easier than walking up to strangers and introducing yourself!
• Smile at others at the event. If you don’t have someone to introduce you, try smiling at others. This can be seen as an invitation for others to come over and talk to you. Be sure to really listen and join in the conversation. Even if it is not going to help your business, it is good practice.
• Join a club or group that relates to something that you really enjoy. If you enjoy reading, join a book club. If you like to watch football, find others that like the same thing. Once you get more comfortable around new people that have similar interests, you will have an easier time opening up to people that don’t.

Shy people may have trouble at networking events but, with some practice, they can still do well. They should always be themselves because most of the people at the event are also feeling a bit awkward! If you know someone, feel free to ask someone to introduce you around. If not, be sure to smile at others to invite them over to you. You might want to practice networking by joining a group of people who like similar things like reading books or watching football. Once you get over talking about something you love, it will be easier at a networking event.

Contact us to help you with your networking, both online and off!

How to Startup a Business

Whether you’re starting a business in Colorado or somewhere else, you’ll want to take a few steps that will protect you, save you money, and allow you and your business to grow with your customer base.

1. Incorporate your business in your home state. You’ll get a lot of advice about incorporating in states that will shield you from taxes or that give you greater anonymity or asset protection strategies. Ignore that advice. With few exceptions, your best and most cost-effective business strategy is to incorporate in your home state.

2. Don’t overdo your corporate setup. Talk to an accountant if you’re confused over incorporating as a regular corporation or a limited liability company (LLC). You might get some advantages from an LLC structure if you’re holding real estate or other large assets in your company, but you’ll probably save setup fees and overall complexity with a regular corporation, particularly if you’re the only person in the company.

3. Get an employer ID number (EIN) from the IRS. Even if you’re the only employee, you’ll need an EIN to open a bank account and to set up accounts with customers.

4. Talk to your accountant about filing an “S-election” application with the IRS. If you elect to be taxed as an S corporation, your business income will flow through to your personal taxes and your year-end tax filing obligations will be easier to handle.
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5. Keep records and receipts. You can charge your business expenses against its income and reduce your tax burden. You’ll need records and receipts to prove those expenses if the IRS challenges any deductions.

After you establish your company and you’ve started selling your products or services, you’ll probably be too busy to think of or handle these startup steps. If you take care of them early in your business planning, you’ll be ahead of the curve and your business will operate on a solid corporate foundation.

When you’re starting a business, you’ll get a lot of conflicting advice both from well-meaning advisors and from people who just want your money. Much of that advice is offered on a one-size-fits-all basis. Find a business startup strategy that feels natural and not one that you feel sold on.

Work with companies that provide you value without trying to sell you without learning about you. Here’s a link to my e-book where you can download it for free for taking an interest in my post.

3 Highly Effective Entrepreneur Tips

Whether you are an entrepreneur already or just thinking about becoming one, you probably know that you are going to have to find a business that you love. You know that you are going to have to work hard to make your business succeed. You know that you are going to have to sacrifice some things to do well. ​

However, you know that, in the end, it will be well worth it.

​Here are some super power entrepreneur tips.
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• Watch your money carefully. Be frugal. Watch every penny that you spend. Be careful with what you buy. Don’t keep a lot of overhead, unless you really need to have it on hand. You can always stock your shelves once you realize what sells and what does not. Lean startup. Eric Ries.
• Take care of yourself. You are going to be very busy but it is very important to take care of your health. Make sure that you eat right and exercise. You need to get enough sleep or you won’t be able to run your business the way that you need to. I stayed up for 50 hours two weekends ago breaking a world record. After 24 hours it was taking a serious toll on me. Get your rest, trust me. Sleep in when you can. You’ll have plenty of mornings to wake up early when you actually hire full-time employees on payroll.
• Learn to delegate. You are not going to be able to do everything that you need to do in your business so you are going to have to learn how to delegate certain tasks. You may want to hire a bookkeeper or a virtual assistant to help you with some of your work. I know it’s hard. It’s scary giving people your passwords. Sometimes they don’t do things the same way you would have. But let them run with it. People should have aligned visions, not identical. Let the difference be perfection instead of imperfection.

It is important that you watch your money carefully when you are an entrepreneur. If you overspend, you won’t have a business in a few months. You also need to take care of your health or you won’t be able to do your job! You need to learn to delegate some tasks. Even though you own the business, you don’t have to do everything!

Check out my book for more helpful entrepreneur tips!

Lessons Learned from a 46 Hour Handshake

My Experience of Breaking a Guinness World Record:

The existing record was a 42.5 hour handshake. Wow. That’s a long time.

I had never shaken someone’s hand for more than the 4 hours while training two weeks prior. I created a landing page for volunteers and started calling venues.

First, Why?

To celebrate and bring exposure to the Colorado startup scene that has given us a ton of free help on our startups. We wore t-shirts of our favorite startups (like Galvanize, GoSpotCheck, Parkifi, Bowtie, Cloud Elements, and more) in hopes of giving them free press.

Donate to the CO startup scene

A little closer to the date of the attempt, I ran into some bad news…

Two days before Friday, my partner wanted to push the event back and I wasn’t willing to cancel or reschedule it. I posted this post/video to try to find another friend to shake my hand for 42.5+ hours. Juan Diaz de Leon, who I met from speaking at Ignite Denver, stepped up to the challenge.

That wasn’t the last hardship, though. ​We already had Zephyr Brewing (One of the Founders Rich Wisniewski pictured with us) providing beer for volunteers, had dozens of volunteers/witnesses lined up, and thought we had University of Denver as venue. After all, they are my alma-mater, and I donate to them each year.

WHEN SUDDENLY, the venue fell through the day before.

And my plan B also fell through…

Guinness World Records requires it to be a public venue, and that in combination with the attempt lasting through two nights means it’s not easy to just find just any venue. Plan B was my company’s office, Handshakin Video Series, (where I pay rent!) and the property manager notified me of a major maintenance issue. Are you f*cking kidding me?

I told myself that maybe it wasn’t meant to happen… there were so many moving parts and right when I got one planned, it would either fall through or something else would come up. I was hours away from cancelling the entire attempt.

But that all changed when I walked into Redford’s Tavern to give one last effort to finish planning the attempt when ran into my friend Stephanie Short who saved the day and found a way for us to use their unopened upstairs bar. Like their Facebook page if you like the University of Denver area because they allowed this to happen.

Finally, the day of, we had a late start from our planned start time of 10:00AM on Friday, 1/29. We started shaking hands with the cameras rolling at 11:20AM MST.

After we shook hands for 8 hours, it was very hard to swallow the fact that we wanted to go for 40 more hours. We had already eaten meals, had several volunteers come in and out, and also tweeted individual reporters and emailed news channels. Whew, what the heck were we going to do to get through the next dozens and dozens of hours? Especially after we start suffering from fatigue?

When suddenly, 9NEWS showed up during our celebration party Friday evening! They brought in huge cameras and interviewed us, my intern Annie, and many of our volunteers/witnesses.

Check out 9NEWS Video Interview

That changed the entire energy level for us and all the volunteers and the entire night went by pretty quickly. Big shout out to our volunteers that stayed up the first night with us!

Around 6 or 7am the second day (Saturday, 1/30), we started seeing a few of our witnesses and volunteers showing back up to entertain us, see if we needed anything, and cheer us on. In fact the second day we had significantly more people around than the first day now that word had spread. It was going by pretty fast and we were actually having a fun time despite the cramps our hands were having. Heck, my hand hurts a little right now typing this blog post.

We got into Periscoping to livestream what was happening and probably had 20–30 online fans that were super engaged each time we’d turn it on. One of my friends even purchased the domain name handshake.party and created a landing page when he wasn’t hosting the livestream. It’s amazing to see what just a few people can do when they’re dedicated to fighting towards a single cause. Also, here’s a video 8 hours into it:

Article on NameTalent.com

I could go on to tell you way more about the entire 46 hours before the timer stopped, but will keep this post short. Tweet me if you want to hear more or interview me about it.

PS we didn’t have time to plan donations due to the venue change, so if you want to support the Colorado startup scene please donate $20 here. Money collected before Tuesday will be rewarded to startups that win Startup Denver’s Pitch Battles each month.

Donate to the CO startup scene

When Your Partner Bails on Your World Record Attempt

If you love the Colorado Startup scene, please watch this 1 min video. Or, if you want to become a world record holder within 6 days of this post. 

View this today or x this video out forever:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZkk45P36ns

Tweet me if you're interested

Tip of the Week for Single Founders

I’m talking about the entrepreneurs that don’t have co-founders, not ones without a significant other. Nor am I promising a tip every single week.

Maintaining a killer personal brand separate from your business brand is essential for those looking to networking both on and offline.

​So if posting content consistently isn’t your problem, I’m going share what I did to keep my personal brand and business brand separate.

-With different profiles and passwords on both laptop & mobile, a growing problem for me was staying logged in and consistent with my business while maintaining my personal brand.

Tip of the Week: Buy a used iPod Touch or a dedicated smartphone that is exclusively for business accounts (Instagram, Twitter, and more).

Here’s why you need a dedicated device:

1. It holds you accountable for your business’s brand to be independent when your startup is at a young age.

2. It’s an easy device to pass off to a friend or part-time team member when you’re busy but want to be socially active (like when I was hosting Startup Denver).

3. When I hire another full-time employee, it’s cool that they get electronics with the new job. In fact, startups should just include cell phone accounts for their team members anyway.

Hope this helps! If you’re a first-time entrepreneur, ask me questions at Matt Holmes (@handshakin) | Twitter

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4 Things To Do After a Networking Event

Networking events are great for entrepreneurs and startups to get together. You can meet all kinds of new people that can advise or turn into clients. You can bounce ideas off of others. You can learn new things, increasing your bottom line.

Here are some action items you should do after a networking event when you are pumped up and excited about your business and all of the people that you have met.

• Write down all of the things that you learned at the event. It is important that you write down things that are important to you so you don’t forget anything that you wanted to remember. I prefer to step aside and tell Siri things like, “Remind me to research Online Jobs dot Ph for virtual assistants.”
  
• Write down information about all of the people that you met at the event. You can even do this on their business cards if that helps you to keep them straight. Even if it’s just one word.
  
• Send an email to everyone who you met at the event. However, it is important that you do this in the next day or two. Otherwise, you will forget to do this. It can be a simple email telling them that you were glad to meet them.
  
  Pro Tip: Ask people you talk to if they’re on LinkedIn, and then tell them you’ll find them. This is particularly powerful if you post a blog every week as it will ping all of them.
  
• Make sure that you are ready for your next event. Make sure that you have refuel your business card holder for your next networking event.

It is important to come home from a networking event and write down everything so you don’t forget it. You should also write down information about the people that you met! Then, email or add everyone in the next day or two so that they don’t forget you!
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Contact us to help you with your networking, both online and off!