Interview with Ron Bates

Ron Bates is a Managing Principal with the retained executive search firm Executive Advantage Group, Inc. His search practice focuses on mission critical retained searches for pre-IPO Venture Capital backed start-ups to Fortune500 clients. He has delivered personal executive coaching projects to former SAP, E&Y, Oracle, and WorldCom Exec's responsible for multi-billion dollar business units, and co-founded www.CV-Advantage.com a self guided job search oriented executive coaching process. With +22,000 direct contacts, Ron is also the most connected individual in the world on www.LinkedIn.com. His Ecademy profile can be viewed at http://www.ecademy.com/user/ronbates. Ron can be reached at rbates@executive-advantage.com.


i) What you like about Linkedin?

+4,000,000 business professionals makes LinkedIn one of the largest business networking sites. Out of all of the “business networking” sites, it is the most focused on business rather than social networking. That said, every networking platform is limited in how it can help someone accomplish networking objectives. LinkedIn is simply a database of +4 million members combined with a not so sophisticated note passing mechanism, with all of the capability and content being behind a password protected firewall. In other words, I’m the most connected person in the world on LinkedIn by almost 2X, but I’m invisible on the Internet with respect to my participation on LinkedIn. This isn’t necessarily true as compared to other networking platforms like Ecademy.

ii) How does linkedin helped you?

I use LinkedIn to help other people less than I do to help myself. Prior to LinkedIn, I was always getting contacted by people that knew me asking, “You’re an executive recruiter. Do you know anyone that we could talk to about Beta-site testing our product, market research, interviewing for a book, etc.” (i.e., stuff that had absolutely nothing to do with what I do for a living, and purely wanting access to my contact database). I try to help people out however I can because I believe that “Good Will” will always comes back to me. When LinkedIn came along I saw this as a platform where I could continue to do this, but on a greater scale and much more efficiently.
That said, Linkedin has increased my exposure in that more people know who I am and what I do.

iii) Has your business increased by using linkedin? Please explain.

Not hugely, but in the approximately 2 years I’ve been a member, we have won approximately $250K - $350K per year of business that came directly through LinkedIn members coming to me.

iv) How do you select contact to whom you want to connect?

I believe everyone has unique value and as such I’m happy to connect with anyone. Needs by definition are a time based reality. I also can’t predict what my needs will be in a week, month or year, and as such don’t know what kind of individual I may need to leverage from a networking perspective. Same is true with respect to the people that connect with me, and why people feel connecting networks with me is so beneficial. Net, I’m a believer in their being “Quality – in – Quantity”.

Personally, I believe networking is about “giving before getting” which implies you need to be willing to accept a certain amount of risk when networking with others. I don’t believe in the limiting approach of solely networking with individuals “I know –really- well.” As such, I end up helping far more people than those who are only willing to network with people that they do know really well. I find that more often than not, people that are only willing to network with you if they know you really well aren’t so focused on “giving before getting”. At one point in time everybody that knows anyone really well – didn’t – and accepted the risks associated with developing a relationship with that person by giving them the benefit of the doubt that they were a well meaning good person. It would be a pretty cold world if we didn’t do that, and I believe the more often we do that the more enriched our lives can become through relationships with other people.

That said, the most common question I get from people is, “+23,000 contacts! How do you build/maintain/grow relationships with +23,000 people?” My answer is always the same, “One person at a time.”

Happy Networking,

Ron Bates
Managing Principal
Executive Advantage Group
rbates@executive-advantage.com

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