How to Get On Someone’s Radar When You Don’t Have a Relationship

I’ve been having a lot of fun writing what has turned into somewhat of a mini-series on combining your relationships and skills, but there’s one piece that needs to be added before I wrap things up.

See, the method I described relies on reaching out to people who inspire you and slowly building up the relationship over time by getting on their radar.

As I mentioned previously, there are several ways to do this. You can:

• Read their book(s) and leave reviews
• Enroll in their courses
• Like, share and comment on their content
• Become their best student
• Write an amazing testimonial
• And so much more!

Plus, if they have a team around them, you might find it helpful to build relationships with those people first, as a way to kinda slip in the back door.

But what if you don’t have the relationships at all and you want to get noticed fast?

I got you covered.

Introducing Brandon Fong.

Brandon is a past podcast guest of mine and someone I now call a friend. He also happens to be one of the smartest guys I know and is still only in his early twenties.

In one of those weird moments of synchronicity, I was thinking about reaching back out to Brandon to see how things were going since we last spoke when he just happened to email me at the same time!

Side note: Any time that happens, I pay attention. 

Anyway, we hopped on a call yesterday and totally geeked out on all this stuff I’ve been talking about.

Turns out, Brandon has developed a strategy similar to the one I’ve been sharing recently, except that he’s turned it into an entire course! #ofcourse

And (here’s the best part), he launched the course in partnership with his mentor.

But here’s what I really love about all this…

The way Brandon first started working with this mentor was by sending him an email with the subject line: “I want to work for you for free.”

Yup, you heard me correctly.

When you want to get in front of someone quickly and show them that it would be a no-brainer to keep you on, working for free for an initial trial period is one of the most effective ways to do so. 

Obviously, you still need to have something of value to offer, but if you can identify something that could be of benefit to them and then over-deliver on value, you may just land yourself a dream job with one of your mentors.

Some will read this and think it’s complete suicide. But the point here is to think of this as a short-term sacrifice with a long-term reward.

And Brandon’s not the first person to do this, either. In fact, one of the first resources I read after quitting my engineering job was called The Recession-Proof Graduate by Charlie Hoehn, in which he laid out this exact strategy and ended up working with some of the biggest names in the online entrepreneurship world.

Again, this won’t be necessary for everyone. If you already have the relationships and the skills to turn into something bigger, there’s no need to work for free just for the sake of it.

But if doing so for a couple of months is the thing that tips the scales in your favor, you’d be foolish not to give yourself that chance.

At the end of the day, that time is going to pass, anyway. You can sit there wondering how you’re going to find a job, or you can do what others won’t and come out the other end smiling.