Give Far More Than You Receive: The Know-Like-Trust Networking Playbook

Richard Lowe, The Writing King, joined Mark O’Donnell on the Revenue Generating Hour, the radio show from Tampa Bay’s RGA Network, for a conversation that ranges across LinkedIn and ghostwriting but keeps coming back to the skill that built his business: networking. By his own account a painful introvert for years, he’s turned networking into a discipline, and the heart of it is a single counterintuitive rule.

Mark: How did the Writing King come about? Didn’t you work for Trader Joe’s?

Richard Lowe is The Writing King, a professional ghostwriter and author who has written 113+ books under his own name and ghostwritten 54+ more for clients.

Before writing full time he spent 33 years in enterprise IT, including two decades as Director of Computer Operations and Technical Services at Trader Joe’s.

DISCUSS YOUR BOOK

Full transcript of the conversation follows.

From Asimov to the Writing King

Mark: How did the Writing King come about? Didn’t you work for Trader Joe’s?

Richard: It started when I was a kid reading Isaac Asimov, who wrote roughly 500 books on everything from science fiction to nuclear physics, and made it all understandable, I followed his physics book at seven. I wanted to write like that. Then life happened: work, marriage, loss, and 20 years as Director of Computer Operations and Technical Services at Trader Joe’s, with the writing on the back burner. In 2013 I decided it was time, moved to Florida, and set up as a writer. Focus on LinkedIn was my third book and became a bestseller, and it grew from there into ghostwriting, blogging, and LinkedIn branding. It makes me genuinely happy.

LinkedIn, in brief

Richard has optimized 100+ executive LinkedIn profiles, and his short version of what goes wrong is familiar: don’t dump your resume onto LinkedIn in stiff third person, write it in first person about what you do and who you help; don’t be unfocused or impossible to decode; and above all, don’t use an amateur photo. A selfie, a cropped group shot, a desk picture, a bar background with beer bottles, even, once, a cemetery, all of it reads as unprofessional. Spend the $50 on a real headshot that matches your brand. And fill out the rest, the awards, the speaking, the community service, the book, because every one of those quietly builds the credibility that makes people trust you.

Networking starts with know, like, trust

Mark: Give us the wrong things and the right things in networking.

Richard: The worst mistake isn’t networking at all, because if you’re not networking you’re usually not working. After that, the worst thing is pushing yourself on people in a salesy way, hammering “buy my vitamins, buy my supplement” the moment you’ve shaken hands. It fails because networking runs on know, like, and trust, and a hard pitch skips all three, you’re asking me to trust you before you’ve even told me your name. So instead, let people know who you’re first: I’m Richard Lowe, the Writing King, and here’s the story of how I got here. They get to know you, then they start to like you because you have things in common, then they trust you because you’ve shared your background and what you’ve done. Only then, if at all, do you gently mention what you sell. You can do it too early; you can’t really do it too late.

The wrong things: pushing, card-shoving, and not listening

Richard: Don’t shove your business card into someone’s hand before they know you, that card goes straight into the back pocket. That means the trash; you want to be the person whose card goes in the front pocket. And the classic beginner mistake is talking, talking, talking, interrupting, clearly just forming your next question instead of listening. What you want to do is listen and take notes, where they’re from, their background, that funny story about the tackle box, so the next time you meet you can say “you run the tackle shop, right?” That builds likability, and once you’ve met hundreds of people, you won’t remember unless you write it down.

The right things: show up, take notes, follow up

Richard: Find one or two groups that fit your style and then attend regularly; you can’t network by floating between a different meeting every week, because no one ever gets to know you. Be predictable, so people know Richard will be there on the third meeting of the month with a referral waiting. Showing up consistently to the same room is what eventually turns into “oh, you need a writer? I know one, Richard, the Writing King.” On business cards: hold yours at arm’s length, and if you can’t read the phone and email, gray-on-gray or blue-on-blue, get new ones, because a card’s only job is to pass contact information; everything else is fluff. Then put the cards in a database and actually follow up, a quick check-in every week, month, or quarter depending on the relationship.

Give far more than you receive

Richard: The biggest tip of all came from Ron Sukenick, who’s big in the networking world, and I’ve found it dead true: give far more than you receive. The more you give, the more you get. People who only try to take, “buy my stuff, buy my stuff,” conclude networking is worthless, and they’re right, for them, because they’re not giving. Giving means information, time, listening, the occasional small favor, a good referral, positive feedback instead of criticism. The more you give, the more you create a kind of vacuum that pulls things back to you. Call it karma if you like, it’s a little metaphysical, but over time you’ll get calls out of the blue with no idea how they found you, because the word just got around. People start climbing through the walls to reach you. I’m not talking about being taken advantage of; I’m talking about giving, and being surprised by how much comes back.

What networking actually did

Richard: I learned it by example from my first boss, Steve Davis, who could work a room of 200 so smoothly that every single person felt he was talking only to them, by the end he was best buddies with the keynote speaker and the unknowns alike. I was still painfully shy, but I took it to heart. When that company folded, I called my network and had two job offers within a couple of weeks. Years later at Trader Joe’s, a computer system crashed over a holiday weekend with my whole team on vacation; I hit the network and within hours had nearly 20 people working on it, some I’d never met in person, a few I knew only from the internet. My boss couldn’t believe it. And just recently, a contact from a friend named Melissa passed through two more people and turned into two paid speaking engagements, pure referral. None of that happens if you’re not networking.

And the ghostwriting

Mark: Tell us about ghostwriting.

Richard: Say you want to write a book, about your life as an Alpine climber, but you can’t write, don’t have time, and don’t know how to make it sell. You call someone like me, I interview you and write it, you pay me, and you publish it under your name. Mine appears nowhere; as far as the world’s concerned, you wrote it. That’s classic ghostwriting, with variations toward collaboration or coaching, but the core is simple: someone else writes the book, and your name is on it.

Two truths and a lie

Richard closed with a game. The truths: he was a photographer at the first World Mermaid Convention in Las Vegas in 2011, shooting fifty mermaids and a couple of supermodels; and over eight years he shot 1,200 belly dance performances and hundreds of Renaissance fairs, a path that began when grief sent him out with a camera after his wife passed and a dancer named Marjhani walked up, said “you’re real shy, who are you?”, and pulled him into the community. The lie: that he loves lobster. He doesn’t.

Find Richard Lowe at TheWritingKing.com.

Quotable moments

Frequently Asked Questions

What’s the single most important rule of networking?

Give far more than you receive. Offer information, time, listening, referrals, and small favors freely, and over time, often unexpectedly, far more comes back than you put in.

Why doesn’t selling work at networking events?

Because it skips know, like, and trust. Pitching someone who doesn’t yet know your name asks them to trust you with nothing to go on. Build the relationship first; sell, gently, much later.

How do you make a networking group actually pay off?

Pick one or two that fit you and attend regularly and predictably, instead of floating between meetings. Consistency lets people get to know you and start sending referrals your way.

What should you do with business cards?

Make sure your own is readable at arm’s length, since its only job is passing contact information. Collect others into a database and follow up with the valuable ones on a regular cadence.