20A – Growing Your Social Capital

Entrepreneurs can reap profound benefits from their social capital. If you know how social capital works, then you can build it! 

This is a 'networking' experience -- but unlike other 'networking' opportunities you may have had in the past, I'm going to set very clear parameters on this experience. This will help you focus your efforts on achieving exactly what you need for this experience; moreover, you can set parameters on any future networking experience, to get the most out of it. 

Here's what I want you to do for this exercise: establish contact with three new people, who will be valuable to helping you pursue your business idea.

Ray is the person who introduce me to the idea of water repelling shoes when he showed me how it worked. He is a Finish Line salesman at the Oaks Mall, and I met him while shopping in Oaks and started talking to him about the product. He knows the products that he is selling very well and is skilled at influencing their buying habits through effective pitches, which is why I bought from him. He showed me how the product works and by showing me and trying to sell it to me, taught me how to sell it to others. He would fit in the “Expert on Your Market” segment. After talking to him and discussing the product, how it works, and when to use it. He taught me how to market to my own future customers. In return, he hopes that I will refer my friends to his shop and that I will continue to shop there.

Clementine works at Shoe Carnival which sells a plethora of different types of waterproof shoes that are appealing to those who would have been interested in my product. After talking to her while looking for shoes, she hopes that I will come back to buy shoe and I hope that she can help me understand how well her sales are and whether there is an opportunity that I am not addressing that is present in the business. This is important because it is much more apparent to her if there is a something missing that customers want since she is always immerse in the business. She is an “expert on your market.”

Josh is a fellow college student that loves to collect sneakers and with that, sell some of them. Because he scouts the internet for good deal he can supply him and his friends the shoes they want at a cheaper price. He gets money from selling shoes at the original price and gets the extra money from it. He was fit in the “Important Supplier in the Market” due to him selling shoes which is a complementary item to my service. We met through mutual friends and started chatting about our love of shoes and how protective we are over them. We hope that we can collaborate one day where I can provide the spray and he can provide the shoes so that it can be a package deal for future customers. This will be able to increase both of our growth and ability to reach customers.

Finally: Reflect. This experience requires you to do a little 'targeted networking.' How will this experience shape how you participate in any future networking events? Did this experience differ from your networking experiences in the past? How?

This experience has helped me to put myself out there and it has given me more confidence to reach out to more people in the future whether it be for this product or in general. This networking experience was different because it wasn’t focused on what classes I should be taking or interacting with people in academia, but instead it was communication with people working in jobs outside of a university. That made it feel different.