Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Professional Relationships: Double Down, Abandon or Stay the Course? 2-4-25
Tue, 04 Feb 2025
In this episode, Scott Becker breaks down professional relationships into three key categories—those essential to success, those that drain your energy, and those worth maintaining but not prioritizing.
Chapter 1: What are the key types of professional relationships?
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. In this suggestion for a podcast, maintaining professional relationships, it comes to me from a close, close colleague, one of my favorite people in the world. So thank you very, very much for this suggestion. We're going to discuss today maintaining professional relationships.
Now, I'll give you three or four points around professional relationships. First, and this may sound strange to you because I'm sort of in the mass media world, But your real professional life is built around five to 10 serious professional relationships and business connections. And those may change some over time.
But at the end of the day, I can probably count on, you know, it's like the 80-20 rule. It's like 10 to 15 relationships, maybe 20 over the course of a professional life. And I've been in business for 30 plus years. They're the real linchpins of your professional and business success and career.
So the first thing that I think about when I think about maintaining professional relationships is to understand who are your most important, synergistic, beneficial, mutually lovable business relationships that really drive your business career and business success and really to double down on those relationships.
Chapter 2: How can you identify your most important professional connections?
Second, there are a set of relationships that go in a whole different category that I would put in the category of parasitic. And that's to put it nicely. People that always want something for free or always want something. And I'm a huge fan of you give and give a few different times until you see if there's some mutuality in a relationship or whatever it is.
Or you just give because people are pleasant people to work with and you love them and you like them. But then there are others that are always trying to take. I remember somebody at one of our conferences saying, well, you shouldn't pay for that because if you approach Scott in this way, he'll give it to you for free. And it was really where, you know, with this concept, nobody writes for free.
Chapter 3: What defines parasitic relationships in a professional context?
Chapter 4: Why is it crucial to double down on beneficial relationships?
So the first thing that I think about when I think about maintaining professional relationships is to understand who are your most important, synergistic, beneficial, mutually lovable business relationships that really drive your business career and business success and really to double down on those relationships.
Second, there are a set of relationships that go in a whole different category that I would put in the category of parasitic. And that's to put it nicely. People that always want something for free or always want something. And I'm a huge fan of you give and give a few different times until you see if there's some mutuality in a relationship or whatever it is.
Chapter 5: What should you do about relationships that drain your energy?
Or you just give because people are pleasant people to work with and you love them and you like them. But then there are others that are always trying to take. I remember somebody at one of our conferences saying, well, you shouldn't pay for that because if you approach Scott in this way, he'll give it to you for free. And it was really where, you know, with this concept, nobody writes for free.
And that's not really true because a lot of people do write for free. But this concept of like so underhandedly trying to. you know, take one of our paying customer sponsors that that's how we pay the bills and try to find a way to get them free. And that's how we pay our staff and our teams and stuff like that. So just parasitics.
Chapter 6: How do you maintain valuable but low-priority relationships?
There's other people in your professional life that we think of as parasitic. So the first category is those that your whole entire professional life is built around. The second are those that you are better off not having anything to do with because they're just parasitic, meaning like parasites. The third type of professional relationship is somewhere in between.
And the question that really came from this listener was, and one of my favorites was, or my favorite, was this concept of what do you do with people that, like, you've had professional relationships with, you're maintaining those relationships, but they're no longer so central to what you do and no longer, but they're also not horrible. They're not people you just like.
And I guess if I think anything, it's you sort of stay in touch, you maintain those relationships, you stay friendly. Not because there's a business interest in it. There might be. But because no good to burn bridges. And two, because you like them. And three, because why not? And you're not going to spend tremendous energy in those relationships.
So you might not go travel to go see those people. You might not pick up the phone. But you would stay in touch because you had some mutuality that you really liked each other and respected each other. And because... You never know when you might be able to help them or vice versa, whatever it is. So you sort of maintain those relationships.
We sort of look at this like we do with most things is double down, stay the course, or abandon. And so when I look at these three different types of professional relationships, those that are integral to what you do, your top 10% of relationships that drive 80% of your professional life, you got to double down on those.
Those that are parasitic or like parasites and leeches, you've got to abandon those. And third, those that are not your closest relationships but that you like very much, that somehow or another might have had importance at some point in your business life, might not now, but that you like very much, you sort of stay the course with those. You sort of maintain them.
So that's how we sort of look at these professional relationships. Double down, abandon, or stay the course. Thank you for listening to the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. I'd love your thoughts if you could identify the person I was referring to in number two as the freeloader. I'm sure you cannot.
I will not say the name out loud to anybody, but I will send you a $100 Amazon gift certificate, 773-766-5322. Two people that I think will know who this is, if they listen, are Jessica Cole or Amber Walsh, will know who the person is that I'm talking about in category two, the parasitic situation. Thank you for listening to the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast.
Thank you very, very much.
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