EP279: Matthew Pollard - How Bookkeepers Can Succeed At Networking & Sales More Easily

Speaker D: So if you feel like your customers aren't giving you much time and they're getting straight into, "How much does this cost?" or, "Oh, I need to ask these direct questions," it's because you're giving away too much jargon. You tell a story, their logical brain, which is doing that to you, will short-circuit and they will just listen. You're listening to The Successful Bookkeeper with your host, Michael Palmer. Listen each week as inspiring guests share their secrets of success to help you increase your confidence, work smarter, and build a business you love. This episode of The Successful Bookkeeper is brought to you by purebookkeeping.com, the proven system to grow your bookkeeping business. Welcome back to The Successful Bookkeeper Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Palmer, and today's Today's show is going to be fantastic. Our guest is the author of the Introvert's Edge book series, which includes his latest edition titled The Introvert's Edge to Networking. Matthew Pollard, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, mate. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to have you. And literally, when I read your bio, I just thought, wow, this is going to be an amazing show for our listener. Instead of me telling that story, I'm going to ask you to tell us about you and your career journey leading up to this point. Sure. So I think, look, most people—

Matthew Pollard: and I think this is pretty important to, to say up front— most people, when they hear someone like me on a podcast or see me speak from stage, they naturally project extroversion upon me. They're like, oh, successful guy, he's clearly articulate from stage or on a podcast, he's just got that natural gift of gab, clearly he was just born to be successful. And I think we do that all the time. We project extroversion on anyone we see as successful, never mind people like Ivan Misner, the founder of BNI, is an introvert. Or, you know, Zig Ziglar, the most well-known sales trainer on the planet, is extroverted. Or Oprah Winfrey and Ellen DeGeneres, even though we believe we can't do small talk, they're both introverted. So it's so important for people to understand that we've got to stop seeing people as the person that they are today and start remembering that everybody starts somewhere. And for me, you know, I had a reading speed of a 6th grader in late high school. I mean, I was horribly introverted. And, you know, years of feeling like the slow kid really built beat up my