Referral Card Quotes

A memory dart is your shorthand verbal business card. It is your identity implanted directly into the memory of your listener.

STEPS TO A POWER NOTE:     1.  USE UNBRANDED CARDS WITH A SYMBOL OR MONOGRAM THAT REPRESENTS YOU. IT’S A PERSONAL NOTE.     2.  USE BLUE INK. IT LOOKS ORIGINAL AND POSITIVE.     3.  WORDS - USE YOU, BUT AVOID I, ME, MY.     4.  BE SPECIFIC IN YOUR PRAISE. IDENTIFY AND ACKNOWLEDGE A CHARACTERISTIC, A TALENT, A UNIQUE QUALITY.     5.  LEVERAGE THE POWER OF POSITIVE PROJECTION. IDENTIFY A PERSONAL CHARACTERISTIC YOU WANT TO IMPROVE AND EXPRESS RESPECT FOR OTHERS WHO POSSESS THAT QUALITY (HAPPINESS, WEALTH, BALANCE, ETC.)     6.  WRITE RIGHTLY - SLOPE TEXT SLIGHTLY UPWARD FROM LEFT TO RIGHT. READ YOUR HANDWRITING CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE BY VIMALA RODGERS.7     7.  THE POWER OF THE P.S. USE A P.S. AS A CALL-TO-ACTION: ASK THE RECIPIENT TO TAKE ACTION SUCH AS E-MAILING OR CALLING. “Whom do I write these POWER Notes to?” Rick asked. “Everybody you know,” Coach answered. “Pick up a business card, look in your e-mail, look in your database—find a person,

Try to imagine that you have just turned eighteen and have been put out of your foster home. You may have amassed some savings from a part-time job and received a one-time “emancipation” grant, but you don’t have a job. You have no idea where you’ll sleep tonight, let alone next week or next month. Your belongings are packed into two plastic bags. Your family is unable to help, and may even have disappeared. Further clouding your prospects are your educational deficits and a history of trouble with the law. You read at a seventh grade level. You were held back a grade, and you have a police record.1 What kind of future would you predict for yourself? Can you cope with: • Sudden homelessness, at least temporarily, while you wander through the referral maze? • Difficulty finding a job, since you don’t have a permanent address or even the basic documents you need—like a birth certificate and a Social Security card—to fill out a job application or a W-4? • An interruption in your education, not just because of the cost, but also because of complex eligibility requirements and your inability to document your school record? • The pressure to engage in unhealthy or even illegal behaviors as a means of survival?   Whatever you are imagining as your fate, the reality is much worse for many youth who age out of foster care. Data from several studies paint a troubling picture. Within a few years of leaving foster care: • Only slightly more than half of these young people have graduated from high school, compared with 85 percent of all youth eighteen to twenty-four years old. • One-fourth have endured some period of homelessness. • Almost two-thirds have not maintained employment for a year. • Four out of ten have become parents. • Not even one in five is completely self-supporting. • One in four males and one in ten females have spent time in jail.2

At a Chamber of Commerce networking breakfast, two of my friends and I were standing in a circle talking. A stranger approached, interrupted our little reunion, and gave each of us her card. She then began talking about herself and her business without a hint of social awareness, or care about her interruption. She even had the tactless gall to ask us for referrals. When she left our small circle, we looked at each other and laughed, “What was that?

Mr. Customer, it’s been such a pleasure working with you. If you know anyone who’s in a similar situation to yourself, we’d love you to give them one of these gift cards which entitles them to $100 off their first consultation with us. One of the reasons we’re able to keep the cost of our service down is because we get a lot of our business through referrals from people like you.

This is what happened when I cofounded LinkedIn. The key business model innovations for LinkedIn, including the two-way nature of the relationships and filling professionals’ need for a business-oriented online identity, didn’t just happen organically. They were the result of much thought and reflection, and I drew on the experiences I had when founding SocialNet, one of the first online social networks, nearly a decade before the creation of LinkedIn. But life isn’t always so neat. Many companies, even famous and successful ones, have to develop their business model innovation after they have already commenced operations. PayPal didn’t have a business model when it began operations (I was a key member of the PayPal executive team). We were growing exponentially, at 5 percent per day, and we were losing money on every single transaction we processed. The funny thing is that some of our critics called us insane for paying customers bonuses to refer their friends. Those referral bonuses were actually brilliant, because their cost was so much lower than the standard cost of acquiring new financial services customers via advertising. (We’ll discuss the power and importance of this kind of viral marketing later on.) The insanity, in fact, was that we were allowing our users to accept credit card payments, sticking PayPal with the cost of paying 3 percent of each transaction to the credit card processors, while charging our users nothing. I remember once telling my old college friend and PayPal cofounder/ CEO Peter Thiel, “Peter, if you and I were standing on the roof of our office and throwing stacks of hundred-dollar bills off the edge as fast as our arms could go, we still wouldn’t be losing money as quickly as we are right now.” We ended up solving the problem by charging businesses to accept payments, much as the credit card processors did, but funding those payments using automated clearinghouse (ACH) bank transactions, which cost a fraction of the charges associated with the credit card networks. But if we had waited until we had solved this problem before blitzscaling, I suspect we wouldn’t have become the market leader.

He stared at the card and thought, “Give more in value, huh? Well, here goes nothing.” “Jim? Here, try this guy. Ed Barnes, B-A-R-N-E-S. I heard he’s pretty strong overseas. . . . Yes, he’s a competitor. I just thought he might be in a better position to help.” Joe didn’t know if he felt more like laughing or crying at the words coming out of his mouth. “No, you don’t owe me, Jim. I just hope it works out. Sorry we couldn’t help this time.” He clicked off the phone, set it on his desk and stared at it, lost in disbelief at what he’d just done. “This guy just blows me off—and I give him a referral?” he muttered. “And throw some good business at a competitor?!” He glanced up and saw Gus at his office door, gazing at him. Gus smiled and nodded.