If you find yourself networking or constantly hustling for your next prospect or sale, this article is for you. If you want to prosper and expand and are having difficulty accomplishing your ends to the magnitude and degree you consider successful, this article should become your mantra. But I am not writing it for any of those reasons.

I am writing this article because, in networking and hustling, we are just coping with a bypass and ignorance of one of our most innate instincts: our sense of community.

And that sense of community is (and at one time was) key to our prosperity not only as a community in its entirety, but as individuals surviving within it. Our businesses depend on this whether we acknowledge and practice it or not.

Every day I hear of “hustlers” who are “networking and crushing” their sales, concerning themselves with, monitoring and “hacking” their “competitors” and otherwise looking for “opportunities” to “cash in on” from any possible source of prosperity on whom they can insinuate their products and extort some booty for themselves. And I use the word “booty” intentionally because this is tantamount to piracy!

Now, don’t get me wrong. I recently experienced a surge of admiration for pirates. Pirates have a long-standing and infamous reputation for being ruthless, cruel and destructive; barbaric, even. But there is their reputation versus the reality of their history and how they came about. And, if you really dig deep, you will find they are likeable characters, as likable as any revolutionary of ages past who found a way to break the yoke of abuse and oppression and create a new world in the face of tyrannical sovereignties who control the very whips they narrowly escaped. But I digress…

It’s built into who I am. Having a sense of community that is; not being a pirate!

It’s this piracy of community that destroyed community in the first place. You see revivals of Main Street USA coming around in the last couple of decades, but only after Main Streets and downtowns were killed by the Miracle Miles and Shopping Malls of a “new (and ‘improved’),” more progressive era in the first place, would they need such a revivification.

And there you sit, reading this article, with your own business struggles or challenges, happy in your pursuit of what you really want to do and with some passion and purpose burning inside, with apparent barriers slowing you down at every “marketing expenditure” turn!

It is for this reason I had no choice but to write this article. And it is with the ultimate goal of convincing you that, if you need to network or hustle, you’re not only “doing it wrong” in business, but you’re trying to do, with effort and struggle externally, something that is native internally and is the ultimate key to your prosperity.

And this is doing it, to be cliché for just a moment, “with both hands tied behind your back” VOLUNTARILY! It isn’t necessary at all because community is within you and can be achieved (recovered, actually) by a few simple understandings and means.

You Can’t Fake It to Make It

Interest must be genuine and is what drives the very basic essence of a real community.

Communities are not born; they are created. And when they are created, they have to be sustained. That’s in a literal sense. They must be continually maintained and sustained over time, or they die. And when they die, each member of a community dies a little (or a lot) themselves in their own enterprise. This is regardless of any rhetoric of creating a “sustainable” community. Only you make it so; nothing has that built in and automatic, no matter what “they” tell you.

And it can’t be faked or shortcutted, no matter what the “bulldozer” sales types say.

Ultimately, your prosperity, as it turns out, especially to the order of magnitude you wish it to be, is regulated by and is proportional to the amount of community, not that you enter or join, but that you create and assist to expand and sustain. It is a genuine sense of community that YOU form and is primary and primal to any process of the exchange of goods.

And let that sink in: an EXCHANGE of goods in a community!

This fundamental MUST be practiced. You’re trying to peddle wares to your community. Well, you have to create that community first, and support it and give it substance. Yes, SUSTAIN it. Do you patronize and know the other business owners in town? Are you friends? You always start with that; never extract from it.

It can’t be learned because you already had it. Even the most “hustly” hustler has it. And that is the most tragic view; I feel a little sense of pity for it. This is not to knock the almighty hustle. But how do YOU define hustle? Just as “bad salesman” give sales a bad name, so do uninformed, piratical hustlers give a good hustle the reputation it has.

What Distinguishes a Hustle as Beneficial?

In a word: when it’s FUN!

And I don’t mean fun for you. I mean fun for all!

Hustling isn’t evil. In fact, nothing is pure evil. Things are degrees of evil, which also makes them degrees of good at the same time when you think about it.

Hear me out on this…

Some things can be more evil than others, and as it slides more and more evil, it also slides less and less good. So plus degrees of good are minus degrees of evil, and vice versa. As regards any hustle, it should be done with intentions of creating community and connecting and exchanging with and helping and assisting one another; that could be considered a good hustle.

Whereas, conversely, networking and “Winning Friends and Influencing People” by the methods of an age-old charlatan named “Dale” (who only managed to give sales a bad name) could indeed be considered a more or less BAD hustle. (the source of gutted communities to fuel big-box mentality profiting the few).

It’s a sort of Scale of Hustle with degrees of “siphon” going to the left and “community” to the right, and the needle moving progressively in either direction. And it can always be pushed positive and increased; hypnotic “winning of friends” be damned! 

The intention and purpose of the hustling and how much benefit occurs on both sides determines, ultimately, the value and integrity of the hustle itself. This is not dependent on “Key Performance Indicators” (KPI’s, an acronym carelessly thrown about these days) unless you define them as community-building actions with lesser priority motivation for personal gain.

And when it leads to more community, it’s more fun, more beneficial for all, and certainly more remunerative in terms of business and personal prosperity dividends. So this is no campaign to starve or work solely for others. Prosperity and profitability NATURALLY follows this. You just have to trust it. You WILL find it works.

But it must be created nonetheless.

I Am a Creator

Okay, I didn’t say THE creator if you thought I was a megalomaniac from this subheading. But I do create, constantly and incessantly and creating community is something of an innate ability and urge that I have been quite aware of, free in expressing and intentional about.

And it’s driven by the knowledge that I know everyone has it. They just need to be inspired back to it, not into it.

For whatever reasons people have been forsaken and disabused of the idea that this is innate instinct and a good one at that, to say nothing of its value in expanded business operations. And they are left there, on their own, all alone in their pursuit of sales, with between them and their community only would-be (in their mind, not in actuality) opposition. That’s not creating community at all.

It is interest that drives community. That interest is always there, but it needs to be reignited. And did I mention that can’t be faked or shortcutted?

This is what I do. I not only create community, but I inspire and ignite and reignite it in others. How, you ask?

I love to be part of my community. Yes, I volunteer and engage in and spearhead lots of humanitarian activities. But this is not the community I’m talking about.

I am aware of my community, its economy and, most especially a point of interest, it’s PEOPLE! And many of those people are business owners and employees and working people who operate businesses and services I use and enjoy using. And I am fascinated with them and consider them an extended family of sorts.

Interest In Things I Like… and I Like EVERYTHING!

On any given day, you will find me in any number of widely varied coffee shops, cafes, bakeries, restaurants, eateries (are you getting the idea I’m a foodie and coffeephile?) and use services such as car washes, banks, retail stores. But then again, so do most people.

Except that isn’t enough for me. I am super interested in people. People who work there. People who own and operate the businesses. People who hang out there.

One of my claims to fame is loving a good backstory or origin story, and I insist on a life full of these. Consequently, I end up knowing the full stories of those I meet, and they, in turn, know mine, quite a bit about me, what I do, what my interests are, as well as a wide variety of things that I hold in common specifically with each person I know.

There is Amanda, who is a barista, and she and I have a shared affinity for “DM’s” (Doc Martens), and we’re always checking out each other’s bootwear and talking about our latest finds.

There is Jeff, who owns a diner with his wife, who moved from the financial industry in Philly to run a restaurant and be on the beach daily by 4. He and I share an affinity for music, and he is interested in songwriting and really loves to talk about that with me, a songwriter and producer. And there is Bradley, another barista who I just like to shoot the shit with about speculating about the vast universe surrounding us and Homestead Rescue and Shark Week that he plays on the Discovery Channel in the shop.

I like being a regular, but really in the fullest sense you could mean it, way beyond people yelling my name when I walk in the door like Norm from Cheers, though I do feel like him a little wherever I go and hang out.

Connecting Not Just ME With People

I have a really close friend named Jennifer who I only realized, as I started writing this article, that, having been a SiriusXM radio show host for more than a decade, being on television, and being at the top of the real estate field game, is a fine example of this and why I get along so well with her.

She has a mega brand, and people love her way and her nature. But Jennifer has something else that I think she is as unaware of as I had been of this sense of community. Jennifer introduces people to others constantly and in the same “there is someone you absolutely need to know” manner of connecting people we know with others we know who have something in common. Something I have always naturally done myself. She has even introduced me to countless people and businesses I cherish.

For me, all over town, it’s coffee shops and restaurants and their owners. I have met some of the best people I know this way and become friends with the lot of them. And, in constantly meeting and making new friends (not for personal gain but because I love having unlimited friends), I have introduced them (a common practice I do constantly and to this day) to the other business owners I know.

What Competition?

Many people think this is violating some law of competition. Why would I introduce one restaurant owner to another? All I can say in answer to that is that each of these restaurants does better to the degree they do know the others in their vicinity and are friends of them. And I have been introducing people to these places and these owners to one another all over town!

But it goes far beyond owners meeting other owners. It’s customers and owners. There is a new place right on my block that I found to be amazing, and the owner is one of the best people I know. He is not only talented, but he exudes help for others and friendship, especially customers in his restaurant. I have personally filled his place several times with all the live talking I’ve done to others and invitations I’ve extended that people have accepted to go there and experience it. Yet I never wrote him a single review. Digitally, it didn’t even matter. I worked with him on a few principles I talk about here, and he is one of the reasons why I started the Free Business Marketing Coaching Center.

There was even one Starbucks store manager way back, at a location I used to spend hours a day in up by my hometown, and she told me one day (we had become good friends) that she was so inspired and almost envious of me, the way I lived my life and ran my business, so free in what I did, having even closed a major deal with a business person within 24 hours of starting a conversation with him there at that very store. She, as a result, ended up quitting her job to make her side hustle into a hustle-hhustle, an aesthetic balloon sculpture and display company that has corporate accounts with some major companies. She prospers far beyond her previous career.

I’m proud of that fact.

Dale Carnegie Was Wrong

How to win friends and influence people? Why didn’t he just say, “How to use people’s trust and sense of good to convince them you’re their friend, hypnotize them into trusting you and doing whatever you say?” Isn’t that what dear old Dale was talking about?

Does that sound or feel natural to you?

Remember, you can’t fake interest or friendship, but it IS natural and within you. So to do otherwise than be interested in people and make them your friends (while ignoring the fact of selling them anything and being willing not to) is to engage in an unnatural process. That would be the bad-hustle hustle I spoke of before.

If I were to write a book in place of his, I would call it, “How to Make, Support and Assist Friends,” and I would detail how recompense, when not expected as part of it, naturally occurs anyway and flows back to one a hundredfold or more! So much it can’t really be measured. And there is a metric or KPI to end all others: “can’t be measured!”

Stop Pitching and Make Way More Sales

This isn’t just an audiobook title of one of my most intentional and purpose-driven works, supporting interest in people and creating community over “winning” friends and “influencing” people to YOUR benefit. I only wrote the book because of a similar purpose to this article. I was tired of standing by and watching people pitch-pitch-pitch from the moment they meet someone, to the last vestiges of alienating them, and all moments in between hitting the pillow and rising again to face another pitching day.

“Pitch” has become a four-letter word. And now it is labelled for elevator rides, which I feel don’t elevate at all but rather plummet at the push of any given floor. People show no interest except in themselves, in their own product or even passion, and their own survival, especially when it comes to income. Who in their right mind would want to have this kind of relationship, let alone purchase anything or give funding to such disinterested people?

I know it sounds harsh, but only in the face of the “shoplifting” (as a group of my community-based friends has dubbed it) that goes on, tragically and ironically, by the very people who already have community built into their basic nature, buried and confused and lost though it may have become. And it’s a shame, because community for all lies just on their other side, and prosperity as PART OF a community is there in the light with a big win for all.

Community Wins the Day, and the Sale!

It’s true.

In a span from 1888 to 1955, family and community were part of a more civilized form of humanity than in centuries and millennia past. Communities thrived, and early America was no stranger to this phenomenon. But Dale Carnegie’s life spanned this stretch too, and you could see a deterioration right alongside it. I have no personal axe to grind. But his manifesto stands as a textbook (pardon the pun) example of the deterioration of the community by a mindset of capitalizing on an established one rather than merely establishing one.

He got it very right for himself, maybe. Or did he? For everyone else, he got it very wrong indeed.

The reason “Stop Pitching and Make Way More Sales” is not just a title but an effective approach to selling and prospering in your business is that it is predicated on interest in people. And that itself IS the creation of, active participation in and sustenance of community. Shoplifting doesn’t even qualify as networking but hustling (in one of its more degraded definitions) perhaps does. Don’t you feel like you’re being hustled when all someone does is pitch and shows no apparent interest in you?

It can’t be faked. It can’t be shortcutted. It can’t be substituted for. It must be genuine, and it must be real. And it comes from you. But only if you create it. It’s not out there waiting to be tapped. We create our own interest, our own communities, our own friends. And we are better for it, and our communities exist, continue to exist, and thrive and prosper as a result of it.

Now let’s go create one. How about it? Are you in?

Check out Stop Pitching and Make Way More Sales in the FBMCC Bookstore here.