Finding Similar-Minded People Outside Of Your Specialty In Order To Achieve Your Goals
A new friend I’ve made is a guy who has been working on his own business ideas in the past, has an aerospace engineering doctorate and is specializing in optimizing businesses, taking them from mediocre to stellar.
The reason I’m mentioning him is because he is now finding himself in a very similar situation as myself. After successfully marketing and selling a business which he developed with a partner he started doing consultation work for another company. This has left him feeling disenfranchised, with decreased autonomy, having to kiss ass to get ahead.
This post is about partnering up with someone else with different skills than yourself in order to achieve similar goals.
I met him through another friend and noticed he was talking about some of the same things I always talk/think about. He asked me to go hang out at a coffee shop to get some work done, instead we talked shop for the entire time. Those 5 hours were some of the most fruitful, thought provoking hours I spent at a coffee shop.
I came away learning a lot about how to build up a business, how marketing works, how to incorporate technology into a business and how to think beyond a single-office model in retail medicine. We even took the time to write out an outline for an urgent care business touching up on concepts which I never even thought about.
He hasn’t done as much self-branding as a business consultant like he should due to the demands by his current employer. I was able to give him some suggestions from the things I’ve learned thus far. I am a doctor trying to pursue something outside of medicine or peripherally related to medicine. I have to re-brand myself so I have spent a lot of time thinking about how I can learn the skills I need to be this whole new entity and how to make those talents comes across to potential future clients.
Buddying up with another person on a similar pursuit makes perfect sense to me. I admit it’s not easy, I have looked for someone like this in the past and from our single interaction I don’t know if him and I will continue this collaboration or not. What’s important to me is that people like this are out there, if I continue looking I’ll come across them.
I have looked for meetup groups in my city but found nothing along the line of entrepreneurs; I encouraged my new friend to start one, perhaps we’ll do it together. I have never reached out on online forums to anyone to see if they would be interested in partnering up and I’m sure there are other online platforms that I could use to network a little better.
Reinventing the wheel is always a waste of time unless you have a very unique and specific vision. I know certain things that someone else doesn’t, while the other person(s) has skills which I don’t possess – it would make sense to help each other out while serving as each other’s coaches and motivators instead of trying to learn everything from scratch.
This book which I recently reviewed on this blog taught me that it’s much more important to help another person with your skills than it is to make money doing the same thing consulting for a company. This is how connections and networking leads are created organically, without handing out a bunch of shitty business cards to random people or kissing someone’s ass or name-dropping; help one person with their project and they in turn will help you out or put you in touch with someone who can.