Give to Grow with Mo Bunnell

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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Ann Morrissey: Hey there. Thanks for tuning into the Food Blogger Pro podcast. My name is Ann. In today’s episode, Bjork is sitting down with Mo Bunnell who just released a new book called Give to Grow. They’ll kick things off by discussing how Mo went from crunching numbers as an actuary to diving headfirst into entrepreneurship. Along the way, he discovered the magic of reciprocity in fostering meaningful relationships and how relationships can be key ingredients for success. He also shares practical tips for making clear trustworthy offers that can open doors to high value connections, even if you’re just starting from scratch, whether you have a long list of contacts or you’re just starting out, most advice on tracking opportunities and nurturing relationships will inspire you to take proactive steps toward collaboration and growth. If you enjoy this episode, we really appreciate it if you would leave a review anywhere you listen to podcasts or share episode with your community. And now without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Mo, welcome to the podcast.

Mo Bunnell: Hey, Bjork. I’m excited. We’ve known each other for a long time and we’ve got this cool collaboration. We’re going to add a lot of value. I can’t wait.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, long time coming. So you, we know each other through. It’s one of those rare connections where we’ve had multiple conversations that haven’t been recorded or digital. It’s like you’re one of the weird real life in-person friendships that I have in the business world. But now we’re actually going to record it. We’re going to document some of these conversations. What I love about you, and just to build you up a little bit, you and your story is you have followed this path of entrepreneurship where in the positions you’ve been in, you’ve approached them creatively and looked for opportunities. And if I remember right from your story of entrepreneurship, the door opened because of when you were at a W2 job, you started to think creatively around how can I add value here? How can I make the work that I’m doing more impactful? You created a little bit of a system or a playbook, and that grew into a consultancy where now you’re consulting the smartest consultants in the world. It’s really this incredible thing, but it all started with your work within a company, and I think that sometimes what we think about is, I want to get out of my job, I want to become an entrepreneur. But so often it starts with, and I think of conversation I had with John Acuff, another author, and he talked about how it starts with doing that within where you are within your job and thinking like an entrepreneur within your current position. Can you give us a little elevator pitch of what your journey has been like into entrepreneurship? And then we’re going to be talking about this idea of relationships and why those are so important in business.

Mo Bunnell: Well, any shout out to John. He’s a good friend too, and good vibes happen when you just mention, if you just say the words, John Acuff, you have a better life, I think.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Mo Bunnell: It’s so true. Yeah. So I was sort of an accidental entrepreneur in the sense that I build a thing for me that would be helpful to me. Turned out other people just around me wanted the thing and I realized, oh, this could be something I could charge for and create a business out of. But I had no idea that was the beginning. The metamorphosis or the change in me was I had been an actuary. I think you remember that we bond on the, you and I bond on numbers and logic and all that, and I took all the exams to be an actuary. It took 24 exams back in the eighties and nineties, like a 35% pass rate on these things. So two thirds of the people are failing, and it took 6, 8, 10 years to get through all of it. It was so hard. Well, you almost can’t do anything else but study and try to keep your marriage together, which I was able to pass the exams and keep my marriage together. So

Mo Bunnell: So, when that system spit me out on the other side, the very month I passed the last exam to be a fellow society of actuaries, my firm moved me to a relationship development role. Well, I’m like 29 or 30 years old. I’m calling on people that are 50, 60, 65. They’ve got 20, 30 years experience on me. I can’t now lead with expertise in content because my little one inch wide mile deep actuarial expertise doesn’t work when I’m calling on chief human resource officers at Fortune 50 companies, which is who I was calling. So my only real move was generosity, which is how can I learn their priorities? How can I connect them with people internally at my big multinational consultancy? How can I work with the internal folks to figure out what they could give to these high level people so that they win as well and can start relationships and new topics off? And basically through that developed a science-based system based on peer-reviewed science that I just hammered out in Word documents that I would find out, experimenting on myself. That’s what turned into a playbook that at one point had a big huge percentage of the global revenue of the firm running through the teams that I was able to lead with hundreds of consultants and people underneath. And that people started asking like, gosh, how are you doing it? And it was through that I sort of fell in love with not just relationship development, but teaching other people relationship development. And that’s when I got the guts to leave and start my own thing, and that was, gosh, it’ll be almost 20 years ago.

Bjork Ostrom: So you went through this process of getting these really specific skills. You acquired those skills, you verified that through these tests, and then you were put in a position where maybe it was valuable to have some of those skills, but really it was like you almost had to develop a new skillset. Is that right? In that new relationship development position, was that hard to let go of what felt like, Hey, I’ve done all this work to get here and now I’m kind of having to reinvent myself?

Mo Bunnell: It all came down to one moment, Bjork. So I had been leading these big healthcare consulting projects with a actuarial bent to them. Imagine the largest companies on the planet could spend at that time easily a billion dollars on their health and welfare benefits. Well, they’re hiring consultants and actuaries to figure out how should they optimize that, and it’s ridiculously complex. And I had been doing things like that. So to get ready for this new role, I wanted to be ahead of the game. So I handed off all my projects to my peers in the healthcare consulting practice. They were awesome, and curing me on to take on this new challenge. Moved offices over the weekend and got in early that Monday morning, and it was like the only time I remember in my life, I don’t have emails, I don’t have things to do. I don’t even know what I’m doing. And my boss walked in. I got there early and I did not do my due diligence even though we worked on this for a year. I made the transition thinking he would hand me sort of a playbook to learn this. If you can imagine an actuary trying to pass these 24 exams, you’re taking a couple exams every six months. Well, you click the button on which one you’re going to take, you get all these materials delivered. It’s like a foot study, you memorize it, and every six months you take a test. I thought he would give me the playbook and there was no playbook. He just sort of chuckled what I asked for and said, well, treat the client right. You’ll do great. You’ve got a good mentor, which thank God I did. But it was then through my brain was used to these six month learning cycles to pass the exams. So for some reason I put the pressure on myself. I don’t think my firm did this, but I put pressure on myself to become great at relationship development in six months. Those are the cycles of learning I was in. And instead of taking 30 years, it usually takes, so it was through that pain and pressure that pushed me to nights and weekends, build the system out or start it and then get better, better, better and better. So that paid off really well for me long term. I don’t know quite how I made it through that time period, but it worked.

Bjork Ostrom: So you had this position, the position didn’t have any documentation around like, Hey, here’s the process you should follow when you’re doing relationship development. So you took that on, you start to document it. This is a really specific question. Were you able to take that with you and did you have to negotiate that you had built this thing within the context of the company? Did you have to negotiate being able to own the IP of that? What did that look like?

Mo Bunnell: No, because I didn’t. I was anecdotally teaching it to people, but it wasn’t like there were material.

Bjork Ostrom: It wasn’t like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

Mo Bunnell: So if you can imagine me starting out at a Starbucks that I was worried about a meeting the next week, I remember this specifically, the first time I started writing stuff down is I had the super high stakes meeting. I had to make it go, well, I’ll skip over the story, but I had one shot and it was very clear I had one shot. And so I wrote down, I started digging into the science of reciprocity and how do you give things away? How do you size it, how do you communicate it, how do you offer it? And it was some of that really early on research that ended up being like a three page word document that I hammered out at a Starbucks that turned a meeting that when it actually happened, started with literally the CHR at this huge company, said, I don’t know how you got this meeting, long story behind that, but I don’t need you. I forgot. I’ve been at this for 30 year. I’ve got every advisor I need. And by having a list of gifts to give her, she basically said, get out. I said, don’t you want to see? I worked for 20 hours coming up with things that we can offer you to invest in your success. Don’t you at least want to see the first one? And she said, well, what is it? And Bjork, she loved it. And then she loved the second one. She loved the third one. I had 11 offers that each were, and remember this is 25 years ago. In total it was probably $300,000 of free work or something. It’d be worth a lot more. But I had gone to all of our practice leaders and found ways that they would be willing to offer her success. And ended up, she liked 10 out of 11 ideas or whatever. I left that meeting with 10 follow-ups and it started with get out, and that’s why I drove home that day and I thought, aha, generosity is the way to go. And then of course 20 years later, we’ve trained 50,000 people. And that was sort of the beginning of when I realized giving is the way and thus the title of the new book, Give to Grow and all the things we’ll talk about today.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. And one of the things that I love about it, and we talked about this a little bit before, is this idea of it’s grounded in relationships. And I think the connection here into our world is we’ve talked a lot about how as creators, publishers, one of the focuses that a lot of people have is, Hey, I want to figure out how to get more traffic to my website and by get more traffic to my website, that means that I’ll be able to earn more from ads. And that is a system that works until it doesn’t. And a lot of people have felt that recently where there’s a Google algorithm update or a Pinterest update and suddenly you have this traffic and it goes away. So does that mean that you can’t create online, that you can’t publish online, that you can’t be a content creator? No. It just means that you have to approach things differently. And one of the things that we’re thinking a lot about and we’re talking a lot about is the importance of connecting with brands with companies and also the importance of figuring out the process of sales. But oftentimes, I think when people think about sales, what they think about is it’s all of the things that people don’t like about sales, which is pitching. It’s trying to convince somebody to buy a thing. It’s the extreme of you need to buy a used car. And what does that process feel like? You feel pressured. You feel like it’s maybe manipulative, but what I love about what you teach as it relates to relationships, sales, the kind of core business considerations is what business at its best sales at its best relationship development at its best is you giving, and it’s in the title of your book, give to Grow. It’s you thinking about and trying to find ways to help somebody else. And I love that. It is one of the things that I’ve tried to think about as I’ve started to have some of these calls with brands as I’ve taken those on more is approaching those from the perspective of how can I help? What is it that you’re after? What is it that we can do? But there is a system that you have and that you can follow within that, and I think that’s what I’m trying to figure out now and refining is like, okay, I know the spirit of what I’m trying to do, which is like help brands be successful. I think we can do that, but how do I as a salesperson now for Pinch of Yum, how do I create a system around that? And you talk about the difference between winning the work and doing the work. Can you talk about what are those two things and how are those different? Because they maybe sound a little similar, but they’re actually very different.

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, massively different. You just nailed it. And just to put a headline on this topic, we’re going to give your audience exactly how to do this stuff and do it well and do in a way that they don’t feel weird like a weirdo and they have to take a shower afterwards. If you do this the right way, it feels great. You can literally talk about what you’re doing to the other side and say, I’m giving in for these reasons and it feels awesome. And I think that hints at the idea that almost everything that’s taught about sales is wrong. It’s that used car sale thing that you were talking about. It feels awful. It feels like it’s just not how it has to be. So to your answer, your question, doing the work versus winning the work, there’s a facing set of pages in the workbook give to Grow whether, and I know you saw it, it’s the little table and it says, these are the things that are true for doing the work. The definition of that is after you’ve got the yes, so after you’ve got the mandate, the brand has come to you, they’ve signed the contracts, you’re going to do X, Y, and Z, the mindset and moves that you need to deliver on that contract or even get the website humming in the way you want to. Anyway, that’s doing of the work stuff. And that is not just different than the winning of the work stuff. It’s the exact opposites. The mindsets you need are opposites and the moves you need to make are opposites. A couple examples, do you want me to go a little deeper?

Bjork Ostrom: Great. Yep.

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, so a couple examples. One is when we’re doing the work, we should expect that branded ambassador or that agency or whoever we’re working on, they’re going to respond a hundred percent of the time. They got to get the files right. You got to get the copyright, whatever you’re doing, winning of the work, we should expect people to answer one out of 10 times. We should think 10 x not one X. We should say, I’m going to try to add value to this person. I’m deep in the relationship 10 times over the next X many months, and I’m just hoping one of these offers of healthiness will stick. So just our expectations have to be totally different. Another example is the length of emails. I know this is ridiculously simple, but emails should be long and have everything in one place when you’re doing the work. These are the seven things I need before we can get the ad up. When winning the work, our rule of thumb is 50 words or less. Why is that? That’s because that’s one screen on an email platform or client on your iPhone.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great.

Mo Bunnell: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, even as you’re talking about it, I think of my interactions with some brands and I see myself doing the work communication in winning the work. And what happens a lot of times, and I’d be interested if this is the reason why is we might not get a response because it feels like I probably put too much in there and it needs to be quick and fluid. Whereas opposed to that or doing the work, suddenly it’s like you need to get, in our case, it’s like you need to figure out what the deliverables are going to be. You need to communicate to Instagram reels and here’s how long they’re going to be, and here’s the basic premise for it. Suddenly your expertise has to be in communicating information, clearly, concisely, still, but kind of all in one package. Whereas opposed to winning the work would be like, Hey, let’s just keep this conversation going. The purpose is to get a response as opposed to communicate all the things I need to communicate. Does that feel accurate?

Mo Bunnell: You nailed it. You nailed it. If we had to get it down to one word for each of the columns, doing the work drives certainty. Certainty being the keyword, winning the work.

Bjork Ostrom: Trust is the importance of certainty. Certainty equals trust. And you were saying winning the work is

Mo Bunnell: Possibility. And what’s underneath that is if we go step farther down the road is when we’re driving possibility, what we need is momentum. We have no momentum. This particular because literally our definition is winning the work. We haven’t won it yet. We have no momentum. So we want to choose our very best offer, make it very concisely and have our call to action be the last sentence. Hey, I’m headed up to Minneapolis to work with another brand sometimes in October, little flexible on dates. Can we get together and talk about some of your priorities and see if I can find a way to be helpful? What do you think? Question done? But what we don’t want to do is like, Hey, I got this idea and that idea and do you want to join this webinar we’re having and we could come up to Minneapolis and hey, here’s a thought piece on advertising in the new world order after Google rejiggered their algorithm. And as soon as we have even more than one decision that drives pausing, not responding, I’ll handle this next week. Next week never comes. You’re just not the point of winning the work emails. I know we’re being really specific here, but it’s just to drive momentum. And so we want one thing, we want to choose our best thing and we might want to make it really easy to respond.

Bjork Ostrom: What else helps drive momentum? What are the other things along with, we talked about email as a specific thing, but how else can you keep momentum going?

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, so generally if somebody is not responding, then either our value that we’re proposing isn’t high enough or they don’t trust the value. Somebody might be offering you 500 hours of free prototyping and coding, but if it comes in a cold email from another country, you’re like, oh, this is spam. So you need value and they need to trust the value. Real simple. So around momentum, we want to do a couple things. There’s a bunch of this in the four gifts section of the book that the gifts we can give our clients. We want to prioritize the organizations that we can do the most business with and help the most. In other words, we want to think of very high value things that we can offer them so that they want to get in the room with us. In general, live sessions are going to have a lot more and in person even is going to have a lot more momentum building than on Zoom, which is going to be a lot more than say on email To have a half day workshop on what other brands are doing on our website and beyond to really drive traction, whatever. And then we want to make those offers in as trustworthy way as possible. So finding a referral in from somebody they trust that also knows us might be worth waiting a month in a cold email if we can find that way in. So that little three-step process is getting really clear on who are we for? What can we offer and how can we make that offer in a real trustworthy way? And just treating that a project you manage, that’s a winning of the work project. If you had 10 organizations and you’re trying to find out those three things, you can manage that like a project and then it becomes something that’s like random ideas popping in your head while you’re on a run versus, no, I’m going to drive growth and it’s going to be reliable and here’s how I’m going to do it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, let’s go one step before that. We talked a little bit about what it looks like to communicate with a client. In our case, a brand might reach out. I can imagine really clearly what winning the work might look like in that situation. It’s us following up. It’s probably timely. We follow up quickly. For me, it’s as often as possible. I’m trying to get on a call if it’s local. We just did this yesterday, we did a tour of a factory and met with somebody on site, which was great. To your point, so much better than getting on a Zoom call. But if they’re not local, trying to get on a call as quickly as possible, asking those questions, how can we help? What does success look like for you? But let’s go to the step before that. What if you don’t have a connection? What if it’s not somebody reaching out? Is that still in the bucket of winning the work where you’re kind of doing what I would consider to be the hard part of sales, which is trying to get that initial connection, that initial, yes, that initial response you talked about one out of 10 of those emails are going to get a response, but how do you even cultivate that pool of really early connections, contacts, leads? It’s probably industry dependent, but do you have any advice?

Mo Bunnell: Oh, I do. This is fun because Bjork, you and I are four wheeling off the main path. We’re going into the deep stuff. Great. So one of the things that we actually didn’t have room for in Gift to Grow, at one point the manuscript was 96,000 words and we had to give it to 40. So only the best stuff could be in there. And also the best stuff that’s broadly applicable. So the idea of generating leads, it was on the cutting room floor. So what we did though is we knew a lot of people would want that. So we created a train, 50,000 high end experts all over the world. Over 20 years we’ve developed the top 16 ways that people generate leads with value. How do you get the first meeting the very first time and we created an extra download. People can get for free to get that, but I can give you a quick overview now and it augments the book, it aligns with it, all that stuff. It’s just sort of alongside the book. It’s not in the book, but you can download it right away. Anyway, the top 16 ways, some of the ways that we probably don’t have time to go through all 16, but a couple, one way you can get in is to create a group of people trying to accomplish the same goals. That’s called a value group. It’s a method I think we invented. It was probably out there before, but I’ve never seen it in anywhere, didn’t have a name for it, so we had to invent it. But that is imagine if you had a group of 12 people that were non-competitive brands, but that were in charge of expanding brand marketing, whatever we would call it. And if you had 12 people, you might invite seven of your best advertisers and clients and invite five people that you’ve never met before but would love to work together. And three times a year you get on a 90 minute zoom call and you share what’s working. What’s everybody going to ask? The first time they get to the call they’re like, Hey, how do you know Bjork? Oh man, we’re having tons of success with Pinch of Yum. Here’s So you’ve literally are building included reference checks and you can pick who you include in the group. So that’s the idea.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. No, that’s great. One of the things I’ve thought about is what if we had, we talked to publishers, we to creators, how do you grow your business? What if we had an adjacent podcast or community or group all around brands and companies? How do you work with creators? How do you work with publishers? Because a lot of times I’m getting on these calls, we’re meeting up in person and these really successful companies are just starting to get into partnering with creators or influencers and they’re like, how does it work? And we’re not super confident around it and there’s an opportunity there. But also selfishly it feels like then you are the connection point. You are the center point for so many of those people. Naturally what happens, you talk about this in the book, you have these relationships and you say relationships are the biggest predictor of success, but it takes effort and you have to be intentional about it. And I think some people would look at it and be like, oh, that feels like a lot of work. And it’s like, well, it is. But the outcome of that could be pretty significant. You could get a brand deal, you could have these recurring relationships over time. Yeah. Can you share maybe one or two more that you think are kind of top of the list when you think through that list of 16,

Mo Bunnell: And I actually want to circle after that. Let’s circle back. I have a thing that I’m going to do some YouTube videos on, but I haven’t shared yet. I want to share with you. I think you’ll love it and it pinpoints the value of relationships, but let’s circle back to that later. So a couple other examples. You gave one, another one of the 16 is interviewing others. Incredibly powerful. So whether it’s a podcast or for a quote or for a thought piece, people love being interviewed, so you got to have the goods behind it. You can’t fake this or else it’ll backfire. But let’s say starting up a podcast, just like you mentioned, gosh, you might be able to just do one episode a month. You, it’s not have lift, but that’s 12 new people you get to meet per year and like us, you bond. When you’re on a podcast with somebody, you’re creating content. You have a prep call before you record it, you get a follow up later. You’re fast friends when you invite people to podcasts, even if you’d never met them before. That’s another one. A third is the multi millennia old method referrals, which we’ve hidden on before. That’s maybe going into LinkedIn, Facebook, other things and finding what are my points of connection between the people I know and the people I’d like to meet. Here’s the way to do a referral. Most people think of them as the cheesy life insurance agent version where the person leans on you and says, Hey, I put,

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it just happened to me.

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, it’s the worst. I actually fired an agent and

Bjork Ostrom: I was like, no. I was like, sorry. I was like, I’ll introduce you if I feel like there’s an opportunity, but I’m not going to cold introduce you to somebody.

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, we’re not going to disclose who the company is, but I guarantee I know who it is. It happened to me and I think they train people. They literally slide a three by five card across a table. I put my food on the table for my kids. It’s so ridiculous. The better way to do a referral though is to flush that. We’re not going to do that. It’s to offer what we call a gift to get through the referring party, to the person they’re introducing to. Maybe it’s a half day workshop, an analysis of what you see around their brand, running some numbers, a project plan for how you do a certain thing really well. The idea is you go to the person that knows both parties and say, Hey, Joe, I see Janine CMO over at X, Y, Z corp. Gosh, I think I could help her a lot because we’ve really specialized in her industry, but I want to make this a win for everybody. I was thinking we’d be willing to do X, Y, and Z for Janine. What do you think about that? I mean her, do you think that would land really well? If not that, what would work? I’d like to come up with something with you that would be really valuable that you’d feel really excited to offer her, and then you get credit for the offer. Anyway, engaging in that conversation where everybody’s going to win at every turn is really valuable. It engages a mental heuristic called the IKEA effect. People buy into what they help create. So as it’s sort of a slow down to speed up referral move, instead of leaning on the relationship like the bad version we talked about, you actually gauge in the importance of making this introduction. You get the referring partners advice and you start the whole thing off with a gift they can offer to their friend. And then I mean those have a hit rate or success rate of like 90, 95% when you slow down a little bit. Do it the right way.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. So here’s a funny thing on the Food Blogger Pro podcast, I don’t often talk about Food Blogger Pro membership. It’s a huge part of what we do and the reality is the majority of our time as a team is spent thinking about and working with the Food Blogger Pro members. So we wanted to take some time to remind people that if you want to take the next step, like go beyond just this podcast, you can join Food Blogger Pro if you’re interested, all you need to do is go to foodbloggerpro.com. We’re going to tell you more about what a membership entails, and if you’re interested in signing up, you can just hit the join now button. What does that mean? Well, we have a community forum where there’s the Food Blogger Pro industry experts, many names from which you probably recognize from this podcast. We also have deals and discounts on some of the most popular and important tools for food creators and food bloggers. We have courses that dive deep on photography and video and social media applications. We do live Q&As with industry experts. Like recently, we had a conversation with an SEO expert named Eddie from Raptive where he talked about republishing and how to be strategic with your approach to republishing and why that’s important. We do these coaching calls where I jump on with a creator and we talk about how we can look at their business and grow their business. And the cool thing is for those of you who listen to this podcast, we actually have a members only podcast called FBP on the Go where we take some of these video lessons that we’re doing, like these coaching calls or these Live Q&A with experts and we roll those up into a podcast. So if you don’t have time to sit down and watch those, you can actually just listen to them like you do this podcast, but it’s a members only podcast. So if you’re interested, again, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com and check it out. It’s a great next step for anybody who’s been listening to the podcast for a long time and wants to dive deeper into growing and building and scaling their business. So how about when it comes to, let’s say you are starting to be intentional about this. You’re thinking about, okay, we want to think about relationships strategically. We want to think about helping people strategically, but how do you start to build a system around that? Even for myself, I think about for pinch yum, we have these brands. Some of ’em are cold outreach or some of ’em are inbound. A lot of most of them are inbound now, but we also have some brands that we’d want to work with that we’d want to reach out to. We start to want to be strategic about that. But right now it’s kind of like in my head, it’s in Lindsay’s head, it’s in my inbox. I’ll think probably daily, Hey, this would be a cool thing to connect with somebody on, but I don’t have a system or a process or a tool that I’m really using to manage all of that. Do you have recommendations for people who are wanting to do this well and wanting to do it strategically around building something that keeps them accountable but also is almost like a second brain for all of their relationships?

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, I love Tia’s second brain stuff, by the way. I’m such a fan. Yes, there is. And to put a bow on something I mentioned before because it feeds right into this is what most people don’t understand, is how fast relationships grow. So if we start investing in the right people, and it’s not random, we’re not being reactive, we’re proactively investing in the right people and we’re doing that consistently over time, that’s like dollar cost averaging in the stock market. It grows exponentially. So our relationship, equity and power and trust being sort of the element of that, it can grow exponentially, not linearly. What’s interesting about relationships though, unlike the stock market, is people talk to each other. So there’s a second compounding exponential growth curve of the network effect that sits on top of all the people we’re investing in. So the reason people would want to do what I’m about to share the system part is that, but most people don’t understand is that relationship capital trust grows exponentially, not linearly with each person we invest in, but the more people we help, the more people are talking to others that could need our help or that are reinforcing it. So the benefits of this are like a double exponential curve stacked on top of each other. Here’s how you do it. So it’s ridiculously simple and there’s some worksheets that accompany the book that we can give people a link to, but all you have to do is pen and paper. You can use a CRM if you want, but pen and paper works fine and you write down two lists. One list is your list of opportunities. What are the brands I would like to work for? We think of opportunities broadly. So it can be, it’s basically any place another person or group of people needs to say yes. So if you want to speak at ConvertKit’s conference, that is an opportunity and you want other people have to say yes to that. So no matter what an opportunity is, whether somebody can pay you money or if they just have to approve a thing that you think would be helpful, you write those down really proactively. These are dreams, these there may be no momentum at all. The second thing you write down is who are the 10 or so relationships that are the most important to your future success? Notice that lens is really interesting. It’s not in really any sales book ever. All sales books are like, here are the things you want to sell, get them, do a demo, get in front of them. It’s more of a case approach, but we don’t want to have that. We want to have our list of opportunities. Then we want to have a different lens where we look at relationships and usually the number that’s perfect is 10 to 20, no more than that. If people just take, it usually takes 90 seconds or so. Just take out that pen and paper and say, who are the 10 relationships most important to my success over the next couple of years? It doesn’t take long. Those are the first two steps. You just write those down. The third step rock simple. You manage the advancement of the opportunities, relationships like a project 15 minutes, recurring calendar entry on Friday at three o’clock. People can choose Saturday morning, Thursday morning, Monday afternoon, whatever works. And in 15 minutes you just take a look at your list of opportunities. You take a look at your list at most important relationships, and for the next week you pick the three moves you’re going to make. It’s always your move. It’s always a chance to be helpful. You pick the three moves you’re going to make the next week that are going to either advance an opportunity or advance a relationship, and you do those three and that’s it. And you don’t actually do the things Friday at three o’clock.

Bjork Ostrom: You just think about ’em

Mo Bunnell: And then the next week you find time to do it. You block it off and time block and all that crazy stuff. But you want to separate the choosing from the doing because if you try to say, Hey, I’ve got two hours to do relationship develop, your mind gets all in muddy and you have to, so you want to have one block is the choosing takes 15 minutes and then your other blocks are the doing.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. So you have this time, it’s blocked off for you. Let’s say it’s Friday morning, 15 minutes, you’re looking at that list. Here’s opportunities, here are the people that are most important for me. And you are coming up with the three things from that entire list of, Hey, what can I do to be of value to this person? Is that more or less what you’re trying to think about?

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, if it was an opportunity advancement, it might be calling up the person and say, Hey, I was thinking about you. I know you’ve been thinking about doing some work with us on our website. I just was thinking, I’d like to run a pilot and I’d like to do it at no charge, like to do it over six weeks. Give me a call if you want to learn more. That might be the move. A relationship move might mean just letting ’em know you’re thinking about them. Hey, it’s been six months since we talked. I remember you had X, Y, and Z as priorities. Gosh, I’d love to get together sometime on Zoom and talk and just refresh those, see if there’s some ways I can be helpful. That might be there.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you have, oh, go ahead.

Mo Bunnell: That’s it.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you have personal non-work relationships on there as well? I know this is within the context of work sales business, but do you also have personal connections on there? Yeah,

Mo Bunnell: Yeah. We recommend four types of people. One are folks who can buy directly from you. So these would, they can actually pay you money. The next group are people inside client, potential client organizations that influence, you might call those influencers. The third group we call strategic partners. Now that’s really interesting. These are people who generally can’t usually pay you money, but they know who should. It might be somebody in an agency, it might be another person with an adjacent, but different type of website. The kind of people who know the kind of people who need you. So sometimes those relationships are more important than clients. They might be able to send you five clients a year or something. So we call those strategic partners. Definitely want to double down on those. And then the fourth group, we just have a bucket we call interesting people. Well, my nephew Spencer is on my list. I just love the kid. I say kid, he’s in his late twenties, but he’s sort of like the son I never had. I have two great daughters, but I just love Spencer and all he does. And this morning he’s on my pro to my list. A Greek word that means first among equals my closest relationships and they’re about having their first baby. And I just want to remember Spencer’s key to me. I want to text like, Hey, I did my workout today. Did you yours, by the way, any news on dilation? How’s it going? How’s Haley feeling? And he’s a priority for me more so than others, first among equals. So I think having a nice mix of all four of those types is really nice and it honestly makes it fun to have some like that.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. It reminds me a little bit, so when I was younger, I was really into cards, sports cards, I’d go and buy all these random cards at the card shop. But then I got really into sending the cards to the players at the local library. And this, it wasn’t technically pre-internet, but it’s before we had internet. I went and I photocopied all of the addresses of the different stadiums. And so I would do a self-addressed stamped envelope, take another envelope and ship these cards out to get autographs. And what was really fun was I would do it every day, 2, 3, 4 letters. I’d ask for stamps for my birthday and for Christmas. But then what started to happen was three, six months in you’d start to get back two or three of these autographs in the mail every day. And that was really fun to have a little bit of this system going where, and it kind of created this loop where it motivated me to continue doing this where you’d get home, you’d have some of this inbound mail coming in, you’d send mail out, but I imagine it to be a similar thing where you have these people that you really care about, that you’re excited to connect with, that you want to be in your inner circle and you create the system to make sure that you are connecting with them and sending an email, sending a text, whatever it might be. And then what happens is you start to open up those channels of communication and that’s just a really fun thing, but you have to have the system in place in order to keep you accountable. Do you do that? And it sounds like for you what that is is that calendar item where you brainstorm who it’s going to be, you block that out moving forward if it needs to be blocked out, if it’s more than just a simple text message and then you repeat that each week. Do you keep track of conversations or this is again maybe kind of in the weeds conversation or topic, but do you keep track within for work stuff like a CRM of where things are at and technically what does that look like?

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, there’s sort of two levels of tracking. Well, first I just have to say that story was awesome.

Bjork Ostrom: I still have the huge book of all the autographs that I had bust out.

Mo Bunnell: I’ll bet you do all that work that went into it. Look, you were a relationship developer. How old were you?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. I don’t know, 10 probably.

Mo Bunnell: You were like a world-class relationship developer at the age of 10.

Bjork Ostrom: There we go.

Mo Bunnell: No wonder you’re so successful. And as somebody who has boxes of baseball cards, I’m right there with you. So yeah, there’s two types of systems really for people to lean into. One isn’t a system of accountability that’s a little different. Then the other system is a system of information, sort of second brain if you will, accountability and then we’ll talk about information. Accountability is so darn important because your story is so good At the age of 10, somehow you had what scientists call trade self-control to such a lats, C to such a level. You were able to plow through those first 2, 3, 4 months where you’re getting no feedback and you kept going. Very few people can do that. So that happens in this world too, where fear of rejection comes in. I didn’t get a response to my email. It can be really the five, well, you saw in the book we have five lies. People have to get over in this the system.

Bjork Ostrom: And we talk about that in the context of reps. That’s the word that we use is like it’s guitar, it’s weightlifting, it’s basketball. You need to get the reps in before you get the value of whatever it is you’re trying to do.

Mo Bunnell: That’s exactly it. So we need a system of accountability. So different ways to do it. I have a spreadsheet that I track my hours that I work on the business and five buckets if how many MITs I got done from the week of before, tip on MITs most important things, the three things you choose each week, write them so they’re a hundred percent in your control. I share that to the audience, not you obviously, but that by saying, offer dinner to Jane instead of have dinner with Jane.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah, right.

Mo Bunnell: That lets us get three out of three every week. It disconnects us from worrying about the outcome we move to action faster, all that. So anyway, whether it’s a spreadsheet like I use or James clears paperclip method where you have a jar of the thing, how many of the reps you want to do of the thing, and you have an empty jar and you literally just move the paperclips over. That is that tactile nature can be good. Dry erase boards with tally marks, accountability partner, whatever it takes. But having something that will push people through those first 2, 3, 4 months where you’re not getting the intrinsic motivation yet. You’re not getting the baseball cards back, the business isn’t growing. You need that. And then the other system is a system of information, and that’s just second brain stuff. Watch tia’s videos. I had Tiago and my podcast where we talked about second brain for BD that we could put in the show notes if you want. But the idea there is whether you use a notion database, an Apple note, pen and paper, somehow marking down what in writing down, what people’s priorities are, the details about how old their kids are, what they’re focused on at work. I feel like my guess is for every half hour interval where we’re with somebody, I think there’s six or eight really good things to document. They’re a 49 ERs fan. They’re headed to Africa to take their family on Safari. Their boss just asked ’em for X, Y, and Z in the marketing department. Writing those things down, even if we never look at ’em again, there’s a higher likelihood we’ll remember them and we have the ability to look at them again before our next call. Quick refresh. It’s just really powerful unlock, I think.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. So Give to Grow – the book, talk to a creator, a publisher, somebody who’s listening to this podcast. They want to understand how to do you say bd business development. In our world, it would be like partnering with brands, partnering with companies, they want to get better at it. What is the transformation that happens as you read through Give to Grow? Because I think it’s an important book for people to pick up. It’s available now. I have, this is the original copy. I was also lucky enough to get the advanced copy. We’ll save it for years, but talk to somebody who’s listening and what is the transformation they’ll go through that they can then apply to their business. And we’ll use that as kind of a last thought to share.

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, that sounds great. And we can tie back to that doing of the work, winning of the work table and mindset. So in the doing of the work we’re already hired to do, there’s almost always systems to get better and better. We’re probably in peer groups, there’s articles we’re reading. I mean, heck, just doing the work and getting feedback makes us better at doing the work. But when it comes to winning the work relationship, business development, there are not systems to get better. In fact, most people, we’ve trained 50,000 plus experts, some of the top management consulting firms, law firms, people in the world, marketing experts, agencies. There’s almost never a system for teaching how to win work at a company. You’re left to your own devices, sink or swim. Good luck. And that is crazy to me because it’s the most important thing for most people in their career is growth. So what the transformation people go through is if you read Give to Grow, you learn the best in class methods for how to think about it, how to move past the lies and the traps that will get in your way. That’s a big chunk of the book. What are the gifts and the methods you give those to the various relationships that are most important. And then the last section of the book is how do you succeed in the moment, the short term and the long term? How do you think about this over the arc of your career so that you’d be successful? So if we get all the way to the transformation, if somebody has great expertise, but they’re not good at winning work or relationship development, they’re sort of a jerk and nobody knows about ’em. Somebody’s great at relationship development, but they don’t have any core expertise fun to go to the ball game with. But that’s getting harder and harder to find time to do that these days. It’s when somebody can do both that, who are wickedly good at what they do and they’re incredibly good at making it easy for people to find them and purchase from them. Those are the people that change the world.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. And so often we hear as we have conversations with people, the questions they have isn’t, the questions aren’t around doing the work, it’s almost always around winning the work. And it’s so hard to know how to coach people through that because there isn’t really a good system for it. And I think you cover so much of that here, even in our own story. It was interesting as I was reflecting on, I talked about, hey, a lot of the stuff is inbound. When I actually paused and thought about it, it’s actually people who have noticed Lindsay talking about their brand, including the brand, saying something about the brand, it’s give to grow. It is. That’s what’s happening there without us quantifying it. Lindsay’s naturally talking about products she loves and that’s the thing that opens the door to these conversations. It’s not like, and this occasionally happens, brands will just kind of reach out randomly. But almost all the conversations I’m having now have to do with somebody being like, oh my gosh, you shared this thing on a Costco run. You did. It’s so awesome. Thank you. My response, Hey, thanks so much for reaching out. Can we jump on a call? Would love to hear about what you’re doing, the initiatives that you have, how we might be able to help. And it’s so interesting to see you talking about that and me starting to realize like, oh, maybe there’s something there and you know that because you’ve been in this world for so long. So I think for anybody who’s interested in starting to do that more intentionally, be sure to pick that up. One of the things that you had mentioned was a couple of resources. Can you talk about where people can pick those up and then also talk about where people can find the book?

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, that sounds good. Well, I can make a joke out of the resources in a way, because Bjork, if you could imagine the pressure an author feels to give things away when they write a book called, yeah, totally. It’s over the top. We gave a ton of stuff out for free with our first book and this is like 10 x that. So all the resources, we talked about the 16 lead gen methods, we’ve got the top 50 discovery questions we’ve ever heard of that are the best. We have a team launch guide to scale the resource across the team. There’s training videos, there’s just the doing of the winning is a download chart. People are printing out and sticking on their wall. Anyway, all that stuff is at Give to Grow info. I nfo and it’s all free. We made it so valuable. Unlike most book resources, we made it so valuable it could actually live on their own. So if somebody doesn’t have 20 bucks to buy give to grow the book, they could actually learn a lot at Give to Grow info and it’ll all stand on its own. That said, it’s better if you buy the book.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. That said, buy the book.

Mo Bunnell: People can get it everywhere. So Amazon’s where most people buy business books, but it’s at every single major bookstore. We landed deals in all four major airport bookstores. So if you can go through an grab a copy, indigo up in Canada is doing a huge thing at the front of their doors. They liked the book so much, and if people like audiobooks, it took me a week and 44 green teas to read the audiobook if you’re interested in that data. So it was fun as an author to read the book too. So audiobook, kindle, everything.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Thanks for coming on. Really appreciate your insights and just appreciate you as a person. So thanks for coming on.

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, you too. I was really looking forward to this and we’ll see each other in a couple weeks, which I can’t.

Bjork Ostrom: It’ll be awesome. Yep. Thanks Mo.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I wanted to take a minute and just ask that if you enjoyed this episode or any of our other many episodes of the Food Blogger Pro podcast that you share it. It means so much to us as a podcast if you share episodes with your friends and family, or if you are a food blogger or entrepreneur, if you could share ’em on social media or even in your email newsletters. It really helps us get the word out about our podcast and reach more listeners. Thanks again for listening. We really hope you enjoyed this episode, and we’ll see you back here next week.