Building Referral Capital

In the past two days, I’ve received emails out of the blue from three people I have not communicated with in several years. They all have two things in common.

First, I haven’t communicated with them for one simple reason: some years past I was the one trying to get in touch with them to talk about training opportunities. These were not cold calls; I had established relationships with all of them and had done good work for them in the past. In at least one of the cases, they had initiated the conversation. Yet all three went dark on me, not even bothering to tell me that they were not interested—they simply stopped replying.

The second thing they all have in common is that now they are asking for my help. Two of them are looking for jobs and want to tap into my contacts, and the third is now selling financial services and wants me for a client.

In each case, there are three possible ways I’ve thought of to respond:

1. Ignore them entirely
2. Try to help them, but remind them how they’ve acted towards me in the past
3. Shut up and try to help

I admit that the first two are what I want to do, but the third option is what I will do. Actually, that’s not totally true. I’m going to try to help them, but if they read this post, then I guess I’ve accomplished number 2. So, Mike, Joe and Pat—and those are their real names—I’ve got one piece of advice for you: as Harvey McKay says: dig your well before you’re thirsty.

Back to the third option: Why should I help someone who has refused to help me—and been rude about it? I don’t really know. Maybe I’m just a nice guy—no, I’m sure that’s not it.

Do I think there’s a small chance that helping them will help me down the road? Yes, but a very remote chance, because they have shown themselves to be the kind of people who only think of others when they need them. That’s not to say they’re bad people—it’s actually quite normal behavior that most of us practice most of the time.

The real reason I’ve decided to help them is that I would like to believe there is such a thing as karma, and what goes around really does come around. I personally haven’t seen enough evidence that it’s true, but why take a chance?

But I’m not superstitious, so I’m going to refer to it as referral capital. If you ever want referrals or help in the future, you need to start building capital now. When you least need help from others is when you’re most able to pay into the help bank. Then, when you ever do need it, the check you draw on won’t come back marked, “insufficient funds”.