Are you confident about what you want to achieve in life with the nine-to-five job you have right now? It’s time for you to explore life’s possibilities. Upgrade your lifestyle! Stephen Jaye sits down for a conversation with Emily Drost on the future of networking. Emily discusses the corporate world and why it’s crucial to consider contract employment because it provides more flexibility. Emily is the founder of eNTWKS, and she believes in the power of networks and connections between people for an exceptional business. Learn how you could establish a network of power partners, enrich your life more, and be happy while earning money. Set yourself up for success and tune into this episode!
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The World Of Corporate Work, Mindset Shift, And The Future Of Networking With Emily Drost
One of the most frustrating processes I’ve ever been in is finding jobs in general. I’ve also witnessed a lot of other people in the same process. It confuses and frustrates me how we can still have such an archaic process. It seems logical that we’ll be looking to upgrade this but also, the nature of work is changing quite a bit. Not everyone’s necessarily looking for the standard full-time job and getting your business, livelihood or career intact requires networking with people, meeting a lot of people and being connected. It’s essentially connecting your service or product to the person or people that need it the most. I’ve discovered where the answer is going to come from.
My guest, Emily Drost, is in the process of building a networking platform that is going to make that connection between the product and service you’re offering and the people who need it in a way more seamless fashion than what we do which is so much stress. I would like to welcome you to the show, Emily Drost.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you so much. How are you doing?
I’m doing splendidly. Thank you.
Thank you so much for joining and for being willing to come on and talk about this because I’m a futurist at heart. Imagining a future where things are better than certain frustrating experiences nowadays is one of the best ways a lot of people can cope with some things that they’re going through. In eNTWKS, I see a little bit of this possibility coming forward. Tell me a little bit about your process. What got you interested in designing this and what you’re trying to do with eNTWKS?
My background is in Psychology. I studied Industrial-Organizational Psychology. Primarily what that means is we were studying the motivation of employees and people in the workplace. I did that for quite a bit of time, and then I parlayed that experience into an advertising career where I was still continuing to study motivations for people and consumers.
Over time, what I started to find was that we’re in the middle of this shift and people are starting to get frustrated with this idea of the 9:00 to 5:00 work. What’s happening is they’re starting to seek and figure out how to apply their expertise to the workforce but being able to focus on their expertise. My expertise happens to be understanding how employees are motivated and what they like to do. Also, my expertise happens to be in understanding consumer motivation. Those two come together and I said, “I’m seeing this shift in the marketplace. I’m seeing this shift in the workplace, and I want to be able to support that.” I happen to have the technology, experience and background, so I can build that.
The idea started coming together in 2019 for this workplace platform that is based on business networking at its most basic. The idea is that we all have a certain sphere of influence. We all have a network or a tree of people that we know. We all know people that have certain expertise in certain fields. When I say expertise, I don’t mean a lawyer. I mean a very specific business litigation lawyer or bankruptcy lawyer.
When I say marketer, I don’t just mean a marketer. I mean maybe an advertising or a digital ads specialist or an SEO specialist. Letting people highlight their expertise and then letting people connect with one another and letting those referrals happen in a digital space. You can go in and you can say, “This week I’m looking for somebody that does marketing but does digital marketing.”
You can go into the app and you can say, “My problem this week that I’m trying to solve is I need an Amazon SEO specialist.” I can type that in and within my sphere of connections. All of a sudden, I’m going to be suggesting people that fit that criteria and are going to let me connect with them. I’m already connected with them, and there are referrals happening without the referral meeting happening.
You need contract-based jobs. Those are points in time allowing you to apply your expertise to the specific project. Share on XIt is just fantastic for anybody out there who’s realizing that “Maybe the 9:00 to 5:00 isn’t for me. Maybe I would be much better off just utilizing my expertise and giving that to employers.” Whether it be big corporations or mom-and-pop shops. We’re going to start transitioning into this place where corporations don’t have the typical 40-person deep marketing team. Rather they have a 40-person deep team of experts that they can tap into on an as-needed basis.
When eNTWKS is launched, fully functional and all the people are on it, how is the average day going to look different for someone who’s a digital marketing specialist? In the past or currently, they probably have a regular standard full-time job. Maybe a few of them freelance on Upwork or something like that. In the eNTWKS world, how will that day look?
It will work very similar. They’ll go in and they’ll create their profile and they can update their profile as needed. They’ll be getting pings of people that are trying to connect with them on a daily basis and looking specifically for their expertise. The nice part is these aren’t going to be perfect strangers of the internet like you see with Upwork and some of these other platforms. These are going to be people that are within your first, second and third-degree of connection.
They are going to be somebody that you can potentially trust, that you feel a little bit more confident working with. Otherwise, why would somebody within your sphere of influence be connected with them? Ideally, you’re only connecting with people that you know, trust and are willing to do business with. If you look at it, I’m this nucleus of this atom and coming off at all my proteins. Those are all my connections or all of the people that I know. That’s my little sphere and people are going to be able to come in. That digital marketer will come in. He’ll have his profile and all of a sudden, all these little neutrons are working together and they’re providing him referrals without him having to do a whole lot.
We also are going to encourage people to use the platform and not just receive. We want them to give as well. Maybe that digital marketer goes in and he goes, “I have this great strategy but I need a great graphic designer to partner with and to create the designs. I’m going to need a PR person who can help me write a press release once this digital campaign launches so that it’s a more cohesive marketing effort.” This digital marketer can go in. He’s going to be receiving people to connect with. He’s going to type in graphic designer. All of a sudden, he’s going to be recommended 4 or 5 graphic designers from his spheres of influence that he can work with, interview and talk to about the work, and maybe he develops a relationship there.
This sounds like somewhat of a transition in mindset for what people refer to as a rank-and-file employee. The standard employee mindset for someone that’s particularly in an entry-level position is you’re a worker. You wait for a boss to tell you what to do, and then you do it. You have the boss that tells you the next thing you’re supposed to do and do it. You have a project manager or a product lead coordinating your work.
This sounds like a very different mindset that even people who would consider themselves at the “lower levels” of an organization still needs to adopt a little bit more of determining what work needs to be done. I’m determining who I need to collaborate with to get certain things done. That’s going to be an interesting transition for a lot of different people. How do you see that unfolding?
It’s already happening naturally. In this shift that we’re undergoing, we’re seeing a lot of people working from home more frequently. We’re seeing corporations give up that “holds” that they have because they’re quite literally breaking down walls. People aren’t going to the office every day. We’re seeing that happen already.
The reality is most people are self-starters and most people know what needs to get done to be successful in their job. This is just providing tools and resources to those individuals to achieve truly what they need to. What we’re noticing and seeing is that people are realizing that there isn’t necessarily an advantage to being a corporate employee anymore, but there’s a greater advantage to them being able to go out and contract with companies to provide their expertise for this point in time and develop relationships that then allows them to be pulled in as they’re needed.
This encourages that where some of the other business social networking platforms out there are so corporately driven. “Get this job. We’re going to give you a 401(k) and medical benefits, but you need this job.” Whereas we’re sitting here and we’re looking at, “You need gigs. You need jobs that are contract-based that are points in time allowing you to apply your expertise to the specific project.”
The reality is people are already doing that and people are already transitioning to that. Even those entry-level employees know what needs to be done, and there’s a learning curve for them, as with everybody, when you first come out of college or wherever you came from. Intuitively, people can figure out, “I need to do this to be successful or I need this to happen for this to be successful,” and they can work with or more easily tap into a team of people that are going to support them at that.
One of the things I often think about is that people have different seasons of life. Current or past, the sunsetting work culture has always been 40 hours a week, and 40 hours a week being the minimum. Sometimes it cranks up and cranks down. People will have seasons in life where maybe you’ll have a hyper-motivated season where you’re wanting to get to the next level and you want to work 50, 60 and 70 hours a week. You’ll have another season where you’re burnt out. You want to pursue something else or you just started a family and you want to work less than 40 hours a week for a while. Will this platform enable people to manage that? If people want to manage that and manage their workload, is there a new set of skills that people who are accustomed to 9:00 to 5:00 need to develop?
Quite frankly, people need to learn how to say no. Especially, as women in the workplace, I feel like we’re up against ourselves in that regard where we stretch ourselves too thin. My hope is a platform like this will give you a little bit more confidence in saying no because you know that there’s always going to be an opportunity out there for you.
This whole platform takes the whole concept of networking as a whole and puts it in a digital space. The whole concept of joining a networking group or a networking organization is you’re going to go in and you’re going to talk to people. It’s not necessarily the people in the networking group that are going to be hiring you, but they’re going to be referring you out to third parties.
That’s ultimately what we’re doing but without you needing to go to the meeting every single week or every single month. You are able to gain access to people’s networks without them necessarily needing to have to go in and say, “You should talk to this person.” The concept is that those people who are willing or wanting to ramp up their work or maybe they’re wanting to slow down their work can just say no.
Here’s my favorite. “Here’s somebody else that you can talk to. I don’t have the capacity right now, but here’s somebody else in the field that I love that you can talk to.” These referral cycles just keep happening and work keeps getting passed around. It becomes a little business incubator if you will. You can come in and tap into it whenever you need it.
The one thing I’m also wondering about is the whole spin-up cycle as someone starts their career or makes a career transition, which I believe is going to be happening more frequently because the world is changing faster. A skill that’s hot may be useless in ten years or vice versa. As people need to spin up a new career or new path, how would that work? What would someone need to do in the future eNTWKS world to establish that reputation and start getting that work coming in?
That’s best illustrated by what I went through. When my first daughter was born, that was when I knew I wanted to take a step back. I couldn’t be working the 80-hour workweeks that I was working prior to that. That just wasn’t realistic with kids. I made the conscious choice to take a step back but I still was consulting with clients.
Oftentimes where my clients came from was my referral network. It would be somebody that my husband had met and they were starting a new law firm and they needed help. Somebody that friends knew and they were starting a new coffee shop and they just need a little bit of assistance with advertising. They were these little things that it was somebody who happens to know somebody and that was how I would get a consulting contract.
That’s one of the first things that I always advise people when they come to me and they say, “I’m looking to cut back on my hours or I’m looking to make a shift in my career. What’s the best path for me to do that to be successful? You’ve somehow done it.” My response to them always is, “It’s my network. It’s just the people that I know.”
I put it out there that this is what I’m doing. It takes some bravery to do that. It’s hard for people to put themselves out there in that capacity, but I put myself out there that this is what I’m doing now. I’m going to be starting consulting or a new career path. All of a sudden, it just puts you top of mind and somebody will reach out to say, “Did you do this? I know somebody who needs that.”
That’s your referral network and that’s networking happening. This is just a digital way to support that, where if you’re making that transition and you come in, you build your profile. All of a sudden, you essentially have access to your contacts’ networks in your new role. You can share that more readily with everybody.
People need to learn how to say no. Don’t stretch yourself too thin. Share on XWhen I think of networking, I oftentimes think of at least the process I went through, which is you look up what networking groups are out there, and then you join one and try to meet all the people, which is what I’ve done with a few different groups here in Denver. This would be an electronic or digital version of doing that exact same thing. If someone needs to generate a network, let’s say your contacts are all in one industry, and now you suddenly want to go to a different industry or a whole different field. You can browse the groups the way you would do in something similar to a meetup where you find a group. You’re trying to find and say, “Is this a good one to join? Is this a good group of people to try to get to know a little bit?”
The way that our platform works is we work based on questions. Oftentimes, the way traditional networking works is you designate an industry that you represent, and then all of a sudden, the networking group is closed off to letting anybody else from that industry come on board and come within the network, even though you only work in a very specific segment of that industry. That’s where your expertise is.
The concept is you come in and when you’re building your profile, we’re not just asking you what your job title is and what industry you’re in. We’re also asking you to describe your expertise. We want to know what problems do you solve for your clients and customers. We want to know who your ideal clients and customers are. We marry that with our search feature which asks you a very simple question. What are you looking for this week? You could type in there that you’re looking to connect with other people in the marketing industry because you’re interested in making a switch to that.
All of a sudden, your search results are going to come up with five people in the marketing industry that you can go talk to and have a conversation with to learn more about. Maybe start establishing some relationships in an industry that you’re thinking about moving to. You can go in and you can say, “I’m trying to solve a problem this week. The problem is I am not a copywriter for a website. Specifically, a direct-to-consumer sales website.”
You could take that in and then all of a sudden, within your spheres of influence, you’re recommended 3 or 4 different copywriters in that industry to talk to that might be a good fit for solving the problem that you have. My intent was to think more to get into the psyche of people and how they are truly making this transition to a gig economy, providing their expertise, and how do we facilitate that connection? How are they thinking about it? If I’m making a job transition, I’m going to go in there and I’m going to say, “I’m looking for people in my industry that I want to talk to learn more about and get connected with.
Find out if you want to do that job by talking to people who’ve already done it type of thing. That’s a wonderful way to find that out.
People want to share what they have going on. These other platforms are so corporate and it seems so job transactional focused. There’s a transactional part to what we do, but it’s also about connecting people and establishing relationships because those connections are what’s going to serve you long-term. If you talk to any successful businessperson, oftentimes, what they tell you is it’s not necessarily what you know, it’s who you know. That’s what our intent is. It’s to connect people so that they’re building relationships, meeting more people, and expanding their spheres of influence, whether it’s in their specific industry or something that they’re trying to move to.
One of my favorite features is if I’m picking up and I’m moving from Colorado to Florida, I need to start building my business down in Florida. Now I’m going to focus on spheres of influence that I already have potentially tapped into connections with in Florida, so I can start building my business there. The idea is we’re all at this point where we’re fluid. That was the keyword of 2020 and carried over into 2021. We’re looking for a lifestyle that supports that. These corporate experiences don’t support that. On the other hand, we want to and it all quite comes down to who you know, and let’s build some connections based on that.
The first thing I want to point out is how much I love the fact that you’re using Psychology and principles of Psychology. One of my biggest regrets for my college/graduate days is that I didn’t do any study in Psychology, which I’m trying to make up for now through a program called Coursera. At the time, I was just thinking about specific jobs and I was like, “What’s the specific job in Psychology that I didn’t know?” Psychology is pretty much interwoven into almost everything we try to do.
With this show, there’s a reason why I try to make every episode between 30 and 45 minutes. That’s my belief as to what my audience is going to want out of the length of these discussions. Psychology is embedded into it. One of the things is that it feels like when you start asking these questions and start tapping into people’s Psychology, you end up with a better result. One of the things that the current method or whatever you want to call the method that we use about finding people’s jobs. I’m going to come out and say that it does a crappy job of matching people to jobs.
If you look at the Gallup surveys and some of the other ones about what percentage of people are engaged and happy to go to their jobs, it’s low. There’s no reason that we should have put up with this for many years. I’m excited that in this world, we’ll have better results as well. Once you ask these questions, you’re more likely to get to a job that you want to do. Not something that you just need to do for the money or for the consistency. One of the things I’m wondering because I do have an interest in Psychology is you talk about the question of the week. Is there a psychological principle why it’s a week as opposed to a day, month, pay period, fortnight or whatever you want to call it?
The thought process on that was you could go in and you can answer that question as many times as you want, but the idea is most people can only handle so much in a given week and they’re doing it week to week. Oftentimes what we’re seeing is people sit down on Monday morning and the first thing that they would do when they get into the office is they organize and they look at, “What do I have coming up this week? What am I going to need to tap into? What am I going to need to do? Where does my capacity lie?”
This idea is that the app is going to prompt you on a Monday morning because that’s when we know people are doing it. On a Monday morning, come in and answer the question. What are you looking for this week? What problems can we help you solve? You can go in and put that in, and then all of a sudden, it’s going to give you a list of 4 or 5 people to talk to, to help solve that problem for you for this week.
We do it based on the whole week schedule because we know that by sending and responding to emails, getting a chance to even connect, people tend to only be able to think about the week that they’re dealing with. They’re not oftentimes thinking about 2, 3, 4 a month in advance. We want to break it down into something that is consumable and people are able to handle it at a given point in time.
It makes sense thinking about Monday morning when you wake up to begin a workweek. A lot of people have talked about, “What are my weekly goals? What are the five things I want to accomplish?” I tend to write weekly and daily lists. You’re not thinking November, December, January unless you’re part of a corporate board doing quarterly strategy sessions. Usually, for the people who are doing the day-to-day work, it does tend to be of the week.
When you think about it too, even in those corporate strategy sessions, they’re going to say, “We’re going to need somebody in a month. What’s the process to getting that person before that month timeline?” It usually starts with somebody writing on their lists that this week, my goal is to reach out and interview two people. It’s this concept that even things that are happening one month from now, there are steps that you need to take to get there that is going to happen in this week. That’s where we want people to feel empowered. We don’t want them to come in feeling overwhelmed. We want to make it consumable for them and feel they’re in control of this and it’s something that they can handle.
One other thing I’m wondering because we were talking about how the world of work is in transition. On this show, I’ve had plenty of guests that do some form of coaching or another. I’m wondering if, over the next 5 to 10 years, there’s going to be a significant coaching need around this transition. If certain people are really ingrained in the mindset of, “I show up at 8:00, I go to lunch at 12:00 and I leave at 5:00,” are they going to need a coach to transition them into how they can work in this new world?
Something that we’ve given a lot of consideration to is how do we help people transition out of the 9:00 to 5:00 and into a gig economy? That way, they’re able to apply their expertise where and how they want to. For me, that comes down to they need a little bit of coaching, mentorship and guidance. This concept of coaching is not new. It’s something that’s existed. This concept of charging for it is new. It used to just be called mentorship. You would find your mentor in your company or industry, and you would work with them. I’ve had many mentors over the years, and oftentimes they’re going to change. My mentors now are not the same mentors that I had when I was starting my career many years ago.
The point is that there’s going to be a need to have guidance. Something that we’ve already looked at and have tried to identify is, what is the right guidance? What do people truly need as they’re making that transition? I don’t know that we’ve cracked the code on it yet but we’re going to certainly try and take a stab at it because there’s a huge need for that because it’s a mindset shift. It’s very different from the traditional 9:00 to 5:00 corporate employee rule.
I’m even imagining someone that’s done it for 30 years now. People who were pretty far into their career but are not quite at that retirement age yet. I’m imagining a bunch of people if they’re going to make a transition to something else, and the first thing they encountered anything different was when their company decided, “Now after COVID, we’ll let you work from home if you have a dentist appointment.” It’s like where everyone else was around 2000. I’m just imagining it being tough and trying to empathize a little.
Even getting corporate jobs is the same way. I think back to every job that I’ve ever gotten came from somebody that I knew. I knew somebody who knew somebody, and that’s your referral network. What people don’t recognize is that making that transition to a gig worker or a contract worker is much the same way. The difference that I’m hoping that we’ll start seeing is that corporations are hiring more contract workers on an as-needed basis, and tapping into that gig economy.
We’re starting to see it a little bit. I think it’s going to continue to expand as this whole economy shifts where now the employees are saying, “I don’t want to be an employee for the rest of my life. I want to have more freedom and flexibility.” We’re going to see companies start tapping into that and they’re going to be going in. Instead of providing a job description for a 9:00 to 5:00 job, they’re going to be saying, “We have this project and we’re looking for a specialist in this. Who do we know?”
If you talk to any successful businessperson, oftentimes, what they tell you is “it's not necessarily what you know; it's who you know.” Share on XThat’s a good segue to the last thing I wanted to make sure we covered here. What do you think the world of 2030, 2035 after this transition looks like?
I think about that a lot because that’s right around the point that my daughters are going to start entering the workforce. I’m hoping that we’re going to see more of an emphasis on the trades. We’re recognizing as a society right now that the trades are so vital to how we keep moving forward and so critical. I also am hopeful that over the coming years, we see more emphasis put on the educators of the world because they’re shaping the minds of what’s going to come next. I feel like they get the short end of the stick right now. I’m hoping that we see fewer career administrators. We start seeing a return to, “This is what I’m good at. This is what I’m going to do. This is where my expertise lies. Let me do that. Let me be really good at my job. Set me up for success.”
People are doing what they want. One thing I want to see come to an end is the world of, “I got a job I don’t like. I feel like I have to be there a certain number of hours of the day for appearance. As a result, I spend three hours surfing the internet but it looks like I’m working.” That’s the aspect of our culture that I feel most needs to be sunset.
If you ask a three-year-old what they want to be when they grow up, they’re not sitting there telling you that they want to be a lawyer and sitting in an office all day. If you think about what they’re telling you, they’re telling you the problems of the world that they want to solve. I think that’s how we intuitively think, but over the years, over the centuries, we have forced ourselves into the thinking of, “What’s my job title going to be?” That’s not how we should be thinking as humans. We should have more freedom and flexibility to think about, “These are the problems that I want to solve.” We should all be entrepreneurs in our own industries and be given the freedom and the flexibility to do that, pursue what truly excites us and gets our minds moving.
One of the topics I’ve covered in previous episodes of this show is the idea of people who don’t want to do just one thing. People want to dabble into 3 or 4 different things. It goes without saying that eNTWKS in this broader transition that we’re talking about will facilitate people, even if it is like what problem do I want to solve, as opposed to what job title I want to have. People say, “I want to work on A, B and C. I want to work on this a little bit and that a little bit,” especially if they’re having one of the more highly motivated seasons of their lives where they want to take on more.
We all have things that we love to do and it’s not just tied to our job title. We should have the freedom and flexibility to explore that and figure out what it turns into and how it all works together because we’re not one-dimensional. People are not one-dimensional. The way that our economy works is it expects people to be one-dimensional, and that’s not realistic for who we are and how we are.
I love this future of people being able to be the non-one dimensional true to themselves and true to who they are. I hope that this process continues. Any last messages that you would like to impart onto my readers about anything along in their journey and what they’re looking into, what they want to do or how they’re going to navigate this transition in the way the workforce works in the coming years?
Start with your network. Be brave and put yourself out there. It’s the hardest thing to do. Your network embarrasses you almost to a way where you’re more embarrassed to go in front of your network than you are with perfect strangers, at least I am. I struggle with that. Be brave and put yourself out there and tap into your immediate network because people truly genuinely want to help and they will help you. You will be shocked by how many referrals you will receive to talk to other people as you’re making any transition or even thinking about. Also, learn how to be specific in your ask. What are you looking for? Learn how to be specific in that and don’t be afraid to ask. Don’t be afraid to say it very clearly.
This show itself is a testament to what you were saying a little bit earlier about how people do love to share what they’re doing and what they’re working on. Almost everybody has enjoyed doing these interviews because people love talking about what they’re doing, especially if it is a problem that they chose to solve as opposed to, “What do you do?” “I’m an Eastern Regional Strategist,” and then they want to change the conversation as quickly as possible.
It’s so true. Once you find your passion and what makes you happy to go to work every day, then you can start to find what going to work every day looks like for you. That’s the exciting part about tapping into your network and building a business that you want, not one that some job title tells you, you have to have.
I want to end by saying cheers to this emerging future where people are going to tap into what they want to do and tap into themselves. I also hope people consider things like personality because that’s something that doesn’t often come up when people look at jobs. It didn’t come up for me when I was starting my career.
I would like to thank you so much for joining us on Action’s Antidotes. I’d like to thank all my readers out there for reading and stay tuned for more awesome discussions with people who are following their true passions, finding out what problems they want to solve or what they want to address, and hopefully, even emerging us toward a much better future.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you.
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About Emily Drost
As an award winning marketer, Emily Drost has enjoyed a successful career helping brands solidify their position in the marketplace. Emily believes in the power of networks and people connecting when building a successful business, which turned into an idea, which turned into a business model. As the founder of eNTWKS, Emily focuses on supporting small and independent business owners in establishing a network of power partners to support and celebrate their success.