Stealing Is Good!

Q: When is theft a great idea?
A: When you steal other people’s concepts, change them and apply them to your own situation.

In referral networking this means analysing the most effective communication and marketing strategies of successful referral networkers that you come across, then making them your own and adapting these concepts to your own situation. As long as you are not parroting another networker’s exact words, this is completely ethical.

The trick is to retain the concept, but change all the other elements. Here’s an example of what I mean:

You see a web designer called Web Wonders use a diagram of a spider’s web as part of her pitch. Around the spider’s web she has written the key benefits of her service.

You steal the concept in this way: Your business is called Green Fingers Gardening. You get an oversized plastercast gardening glove and one each fingertip of the glove you place an icon that relates to an area of your business.

If Web Wonders was in the same referral networking group as Green Fingers, it would be wise for the gardener to wait a few months before using the plastercast glove, and not to use it every meeting. The more subtly you can alter the original concept and the more time that has elapsed between the original idea and the altered one, the better.

One thing to note: only ever ‘concept steal’ from businesses in different fields to yours.