As the ASA International and Business Valuation Conference wraps up at the Marriott Marquis at Times Square in New York City, I took a couple of minutes to talk about the conference on this Valuation Video. I spoke on building strong referral networks with Jay Fishman and summarize seven key points he made and eight key points I made in the video. I also discuss a bit about the conference and folks I spent time with while there. If you weren’t there, you missed a good conference.
Who was here from a business valuation point of view? I met Johnnie White the new CEO of the ASA, and I’m excited that he’s going to be a strong force for the continuing development of the ASA. I met all of my friends, or many of my friends who are here, of course, and enjoyed that very much. Brien Jones and Jonathan Jackson from the NACVA were here, and I was able to spend a little bit of time with them. Johnnie White had just been to the NACVA conference, and so they have done a home and away to get to know a little bit about each other. That was great!
Prominent speakers in the BV area included Jay Fishman, Roger Grabowski, and Jim Hitchner. The keynote on opening day was Sir David Tweedie, who is chair of the International Valuation Standards Council. It’s been quite, quite an event.
Jay Fishman and I spoke on building a strong referral network. Jay offered seven nuggets of advice and I will share those.
- Always return phone calls or emails. Even if you’re not keen to do so.
- Inquire about clients’ non-business interests — in other words, build a relationship with your clients and your referral sources.
- Volunteer. Get involved. Get involved in the activities of the organizations that you touch.
- Write something useful in a niche you want to carve out.
- Become a mentor.
- Be yourself.
- Do quality work.
I had eight.
- Three contacts per day. Reach out and touch three clients, prospects, or referral sources. The math — you do the math. The math works.
- The Consultant’s Dilemma. Marketing is not something that we do when you’re not working because, when we’re not working we have no business. You can’t go out and hope to gain business from scratch. So you’re marketing all the time.
- Have fallback activities. Fallback activities are those things that you do when things slow down. They may be marketing, really reaching out and touching three people a day.
- Pick a niche or create one. Over the years I’ve had a number of niches where I specialized for years later at a time to become known for valuation or related services in those areas.
- My keywords are consistency, persistency, regularity, and just keep on keeping on because, there are no shortcuts on the road to success.
- Invest in your business. Invest in yourself. And invest in both because, if you don’t do that, you won’t succeed.
- Echoing Jay, do your best work always because your work is your best marketing tool.
- Be nice and helpful.
This is Chris Mercer with a Valuation Video from New York. The ASA has also introduced a “Stories of Value” podcast, and several of us were asked to do a podcast that will be broadcasted at a later time. I thought mine was fairly interesting and I was pretty excited about it. And we had “Lightning Sessions”, or “ask the expert lightning sessions” where you could just ask questions of an expert anytime you wanted.
So now, Chris Mercer saying goodbye from the Marriott Marquis as this ASA conference comes to a close. Until the next Valuation Video, good day!
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