David Shriner-Cahn

This is the number one source of business opportunity…And a secret weapon for any new entrepreneur…Relationships.When you form a community with other business owners, scaling comes naturally…You don’t have to seek opportunities--people come to you.But how do you form a community when you’re a new entrepreneur fresh from the corporate world?My guest David Shriner-Cahn founded the Smashing the Plateau Community to help new entrepreneurs do what they love and get paid what they’re worth. In this episode, he’ll share how to build lasting human relationships with other entrepreneurs so you don’t have to grow your business alone. 

If you're coming off a long career as an employee, David Shriner-Cahn is sharing the ins and outs of stepping out on your own. While wanting more control over his destiny after losing his longtime job, the thought of running a business was far-fetched. But taking time to set himself up financially, self-reflect, and surround himself with the right people, he soon found himself exactly where he wanted to be. And he's sharing all the strategies he used to successfully live life on his terms.

Listen to a new episode of Your Next Stop recorded live on Fireside with host Juliet Hahn featuring community builder, podcaster, and consultant David Shriner-Cahn. “I learned early on in my career how important it is to always have a Plan B because you never know when things may change.” After 28 years as a highly-skilled employee, David was told that his job was over. In spite of the immediate trauma and fear, he knew that as his next step, he’d rather work for himself and have more control over his destiny. That was in 2006. Today, David is a thriving community builder, podcaster, and speaker. He helps high-achieving professionals, with a late-career job loss, build their consulting business, so they can do what they love and get paid what they’re worth. Learn more about David at SmashingThePlateau.com. Follow him on LinkedIn. Sponsors Today’s episode is sponsored by: Together Women Rise is dedicated to ensuring that every woman and girl has the opportunity to live freely, pursue her dreams, and reach her full potential. We are a powerful community of women and allies engaged in learning, giving, and community building. Visit TogetherWomenRise.org to learn more and join us! Picked Cherries‘ social podcasting app is the destination for the best podcast listening experience for all listeners. Download the app for FREE on Google Play and the App Store. Share podcasts like never before with Picked Cherries. Learn more at PickedCherries.com. Find Us Online! Fireside: Juliet Hahn Instagram: @iamjuliethahn LinkedIn: Juliet Hahn FB: Juliet Hahn Clubhouse: @iamjuliethahn YouTube: Juliet Hahn Twitter: @iamjuliethahn

Opening a coaching or consulting business presents unseen challenges. David Shriner-Cahn offers tips to overcome the challenges.

"I firmly believe every individual has gifts, every team has gifts, every organization has gifts. When we share our gifts the world prospers."After 28 years as a highly-skilled employee, David was told that his job was over. In spite of the immediate trauma and fear, he seized the opportunity to transition into entrepreneurship. In this episode, we dive into the challenges of starting a new business, and how to navigate them by finding your purpose, people, and voice. David is passionate about helping high-achieving professionals build their business following a late-career job loss, so they can do what they love and get paid what they’re worth.  Links mentioned in Episode:Campfire KinshipSmashing the Plateau Going Solo 

Today's guest is David Shriner-Cahn, host of two great podcasts, "Smashing The Plateau", and, "Going Solo". During our discussion David shares his years of experience as a podcast host and what he has learned from his guests. We chat about: Career Planning Smashing The Plateau Going Solo Four Common Themes And much more... Find out more at smashingtheplateau.com and connect on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/davidshrinercahn/--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/responsible-leadership/messageSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/responsible-leadership/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Shriner-Cahn, Community Builder, Podcaster, ConsultantAfter 28 years as a highly skilled employee, David was told that his job was over. In spite of the immediate trauma and fear, he knew that as his next step, he’d rather work for himself and have more control over his destiny. That was in 2006.Today, David is a thriving community builder, podcaster and speaker. He helps high-achieving professionals, with a late-career job loss, build their consulting business, so they can do what they love and get paid what they’re worth.https://SmashingThePlateau.comhttps://linkedin.com/in/davidshrinercahnhttps://facebook.com/davidshrinercahnhttps://twitter.com/smashingplateauhttps://smashingtheplateau.com/community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Shriner-Cahn is the host of  the Smashing the Plateau podcast where he shares the stories, experiences and strategies of entrepreneurs that strive for long-term success.In this episode of Career Club's LinkedIn Live series, join Bob Goodwin, Founder of Career Club, as we explore his other project, Going Solo,  where he offers strategies for highly-skilled professionals to build their own business following a late career job loss.  If you have left or are thinking of leaving you're corporate job to strike out on your own, this is a must-listen episode.#goingsolo, @career, #careeradvice, #jobsearch, #entrepreneur, #careerclub

Meet David After 28 years as a highly-skilled employee, David was told that his job was over. Despite the immediate trauma and fear, he knew that as his next step, he’d rather work for himself and have more control over his destiny. That was in 2006. Today, David is a thriving community builder, podcaster, and speaker. He helps high-achieving professionals, who have had a late-career job loss, build their consulting or coaching business, so they can do what they love and get paid what they’re worth. How did you learn to network and develop business relationships? As I was thinking about our discussion today, I reflected on the 28 years in my career that I was an employee, before I started my own business in 2006. I always was involved in building relationships outside of my job and outside of my organization so I would always find opportunities to network with colleagues. I would join associations of people that were doing something similar to what I was doing, I would take advantage of opportunities to learn and to get some professional development. When I started my business, one of the things that I realized within the first year is that the network that I had, as an employee, was not necessarily the network that was going to help me build my business. And, although I did maintain the relationships that I had, with, with colleagues and friends that I had built up over the years as an employee, and in fact, those relationships helped me get some of my first consulting clients. I had kind of an eye-opening experience, with a friend of mine, who also went from being a longtime employee to being self-employed. About a year before, I was having dinner one night, and she said to me, "I'm part of this organization and I think you might find it interesting to come to a meeting." It was a BNI meeting, and I'd never heard of BNI or knew anything about business networking. I immediately realized the power of being in a room with other entrepreneurs, not just with professional colleagues and so I ended up joining. I have to say that not only do you get to network in networking organizations like BNI, but they also teach you networking. That's one of their goals as an organization is to try to help everybody do better at business networking, as well as build relationships as they do that. Even though I'm not currently a BNI member, I have relationships and still have clients that emerged from BNI. Some of my best friends as entrepreneurs also came out of that BNI experience and so that was sort of my first foray into business networking, and I got to be pretty good at it. I would not only do networking in my chapter, but I got to know a lot of people in other BNI chapters. The next thing for me in terms of networking, and building relationships, as an entrepreneur emerged from content creation, and in particular podcasting. I'm sure you know, as a podcaster that if you're doing interview-based shows, you get this opportunity to have in-depth conversations. Often they feel like intimate conversations with someone new on a regular basis and you get to build relationships with those people and you get to share your mutual knowledge with your audiences. I found that since I started podcasting seven years ago, it has enabled me to build relationships with new groups of people that I didn't know before. And I'm based in New York and even though I'm pretty well networked in the New York metropolitan area, podcasting enabled me to develop a whole new network that was international, which is great. What is the connection between your relationships and the evolution of your business? Well, for one thing, as far as the relationships themselves are concerned. One of the things that I've learned to do over the years, and I encourage other people to do when they're trying to build relationships, is focus on the relationship. So that means being curious, asking open-ended questions and I recently learned a framework for questions that I love from a podcast guest, Rock Robinson which he calls his Fab Five. The first one is about geography so asking where someone is from because it's not a threatening question so people automatically will start to think of who they might know in common based on geography. The second one is family, which is just asking someone to tell you about your family and that will allow you to learn something about that person. The same thing with school because pretty much everybody has some kind of school experience and there's usually something interesting to share about that. I like to ask people about their career journey because no matter where you are in the stage of your career, everybody's career is different. Then the last question is what excites you which then can start to get to something that may be closer to what it is you do in your business. So being curious and asking open-ended questions is key. The other thing is in the world, there are givers, there are takers, and there are exchangers and people that are best at relationship building are exchangers. I like to ask how I can help somebody else first. I try to be a generous person, I think that kind of sets the stage for how I like to be known, and then the last thing that I will usually end with, particularly if it's been a fruitful conversation, is asking if there is anyone else I should talk to and maybe for an introduction. If you get an introduction to somebody, they're much more likely to respond. The most important thing is also when there's some call to action or some action plan that you have as a result of a discussion with somebody else, make sure you follow up. So I try to be systematic about following up and make sure that I do if I offer to help somebody in some way. Relationships do take time and the good relationships are what has led to most of my long term clients, which is great and also opportunities.  How is social capital integral to the impact you are trying to have in the world? So there's one thing that I have noticed with high achieving professionals when they go from being in an organization to being independent, is that the social infrastructure has vanished. So you have this formal structure that when you're part of an organization, that of course disappears when you walk out the door. But also, the informal structure follows it often. It may not disappear completely, but all of a sudden, your quote-unquote friends from work, you may find that they're they've ghosted you for a whole variety of reasons and you spend a lot of time alone, and the loneliness and the isolation, combined with the fear of doing all these new things. If you have gone from being an employee to being a consultant, when your job was terminated then there can also be shame associated with the job loss. It's not something people talk about a whole lot and so being able to connect with other people that have some of these similar challenges, that you're facing similar issues, people that are also building a consulting business. You don't need to reinvent the wheel, but if you connect with other people you'll learn things from them and they'll learn things from you. Connecting with other people, I think is important to be being to your ability to be able to overcome that and for me, I like to be a connector and so for me, yes, I do know a lot about how to build a successful consulting business, but I feel great when I'm able to connect people. Can you share with our listeners your most successful or favorite networking experience that you've had? I'm going to reflect back on my first visit to a BNI meeting when I was terrified about the idea of getting up and giving a 60 second commercial about myself, and my business was pretty new at that time. I did have clients, but didn't have a huge track record so I was pretty insecure about what I was selling, and to be able to get up in front of 30 plus strangers at seven o'clock in the morning and to give a coherent 60 second commercial was pretty terrifying. I have to say, the people in the room couldn't have been nicer to me and more supportive and people came up to me afterwards and just tried to be nice and helpful. When you're with people, I had a podcast guest who actually is an expert on networking, and one of the things he said was that we all know this the phrase, people do business with people they know, like and trust and he added another line to that, which is people do business with people they know, like, trust and care about them and at that meeting I felt like there there was genuine caring in the room and it made a huge difference. How do you stay in front of and best nurture your network in your community? I think it's important to actually have a process for keeping track of who you're connecting with, and having a process for follow up. So one of the things that I do is, I make notes after I speak to people and I keep the notes and I keep them organized. I also make notes on my calendar of when I'm supposed to follow up with somebody. So if you and I are speaking today and we decide to keep in touch, three months from now, I'll make a note in my calendar three months from now to reach out and add notes in my calendar as to some of my notes from our conversation so I can go back and look at it in case I don't remember all the details. If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of or differently with regards to your professional career? Follow your heart. I studied engineering for 7 years and I worked as an engineer for 4 years, and then I went into the nonprofit sector. And honestly, when I was in school, I had thought about whether this was really the right thing to study. I did well in school and in my career, but my heart wasn't really in it. So for every pivot I've made, mtt career has ended up moving me in a direction where I'm actually doing things that I'm happier doing. I will admit that each of the pivots usually came with not just me moving forward, but somebody pushing me to do it! What final word do you have to share with our listeners with regards to growing and supporting your network? If you're feeling uncomfortable in anything you're doing with regard to relationship building. Pay attention to the discomfort and if you believe that the step that you are about to take, which is making you uncomfortable, is a good step, take it. Because if you're feeling uncomfortable means you're probably in a state of growth and that you're doing something that's going to help you grow and relationship building can really help you grow quite a bit, as you've heard from our conversation today so take that step. Connect with David Website: https://smashingtheplateau.com/ Smashing The Plateau Podcast: https://smashingtheplateau.com/episodes/ Going Solo Podcast: https://smashingtheplateau.com/goingsolo/ 

Join us on Be Brave at Work as we speak with David Shriner-Cahn. After 28 years as a highly skilled employee, David was told that his job was over. In spite of the immediate trauma and fear, he knew that as his next step, he’d rather work for himself and have more control over his destiny. That was in 2006. Today, David is a thriving community builder, podcaster and speaker. He helps high-achieving professionals, who have had a late-career job loss, build their consulting or coaching business, so they can do what they love and get paid what they’re worth. Links of Interest LinkedIn Twitter Facebook Website A special thank you to our sponsor, Cabot Risk Strategies. For more information, please visit them at CabotRisk.com Please click the like button above and leave a review if your favorite podcast app has that ability. Thank you! More information about Ed, visit Excellius.com © 2021 Ed Evarts