Business Beyond Business by Paul Edwards

Author:Paul Edwards [Edwards, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781949535570
Publisher: Best Seller Publishing, LLC
Published: 2019-03-28T04:00:00+00:00

With the 2019 Miss Thurston County contestants and Brielle Bryan (wearing crown), Miss Thurston County 2019

The second year I played this role, my cohost was Samantha Styger, an executive vice president of the Line-X Corporation and co-owner of the Twin Cities Line-X franchise in Centralia. She learned of my occupation just as her current insurance relationship deteriorated. Over the next nine months, she moved a massive $100,000-premium empire under my care at Insurance Services Group. Sam became, dollar for dollar, the most valuable client I had during my six years in the business.

People’s charitable and community causes are inroads for you to deepen relationships with them. You can donate money, time, labor, or acquire resources on their behalf to simplify the ever-present difficulty of volunteer organizations. It sets you apart in the eyes of your friend who sits on the board or serves as a volunteer. As my mentor Jonathan Garrick said, “You’re either in the business of making relationships or breaking relationships.” Nonprofits provide you ample opportunity to do both, sometimes at the same time, and with no sales agenda.

Cameron’s Interview

One reason our meetups include mandatory days of participating in charitable or nonprofit events together is because of what it facilitates between attendees. In the interview, Cam was the first to put his finger on it. “Anytime I go to a business event - a conference, a retreat, etcetera,” he told me, “I never leave feeling full unless there’s opportunity for helping someone else who can’t pay it back. I go to events and I take a lot away, but nothing like what I can depart with if I leave something good behind.”

In planning our meetings, I tell my team, “There’s no point doing this if we only help ourselves and each other, who already can afford to attend. I don’t want our attendees to leave without feeling both that they were impacted by what we teach and that they made an impact by what they did.” It’s loosely parallel with Adam Smith’s law of capitalism – there’s no exchange taking place unless both parties benefit.

I told Cam the story of how I first volunteered in the community, back during my earliest days at Liberty Mutual. I got recruited by Jackie Ashley, then serving as president of Rebuilding Together Thurston County. We got assigned a repair job on a home in the declining town of Rainier, Washington. Our work for the day was to help with yard and exterior maintenance for an aging World War II veteran and his wife, who couldn’t afford the repairs the home needed.

I lugged my personal gardening tools, shovels, weed eater and old pickup truck down to their home. It was tidy, as you’d expect from that generation, but clearly falling into disrepair. Our group of loan officers, insurance agents, contractors and realtors spread out over the property. I did mainly weed eating until the call went out for some fresh gravel in the driveway. The elderly husband was confined to a go-kart, like you’d see for disabled customers in grocery stores.

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