Next Level Networking — First Pro Dinner Party
I co-hosted a dinner party with 17 wonderful people. 3 months prior, I was incapable of such an event.
Pete Willette and I co-hosted a Detroit dinner party with 17 curious, intelligent, ambitious people. A group of doers: founders, investors, and volunteers. Smart people who get stuff done. We had great conversations, shared memories, laughed, and enjoyed food of the gods.
I had a blast.
3 months before, I couldn’t have hosted this event. I’ve been networking for almost two decades. I have thousands of connections around the world. However when it came to helping my network, I struggled. I tried to give first, I tried to help. I usually failed. Sometimes I was really helpful, getting a friend a job or getting a colleague a warm intro to a target company. I struggled though.
I wondered — man I know so many people why is it so hard to help them?
I had the right pieces — a large, valuable network filled with people who liked me, or at . Thanks to Pete strong-arming me into reading Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz I learned the tactical steps of how to be useful to my network, like using a spreadsheet to organize my contacts. Then Pete took it to the next level and asked me to cohost a dinner party with him, a tactic straight out of Never Eat Alone, that was slightly out of my comfort zone.
I’m glad I said yes.
So how did we do it?
The Right People
To kick things off we needed a list of people to invite. I went through my 728 Detroit LinkedIn contacts finding everyone I was interested in getting to know better.
I banged out “Detroit” in the search bar and then filtered to just first level connections.
When I spotted a contact I wanted to get to know better I added them to a Google Sheet Pete and I shared.
We were left with a list of about 100 people we’d love to get to know better — things were about to get hard — how to whittle down the list?
We decided we wanted around 20 people at the dinner. We added a column — “LinkedIn Title” to the Google Sheet so Pete would know something about the people I added and I would know something about Pete’s people. Then we made tough decisions to trim the list down to 38 invitees. I had such a hard time dropping names I started a separate list for lunch invites.
We picked a Monday about 5 weeks out and let the invites fly! Why Monday? We figured most people don’t have Monday events, making it easier for our contacts to say yes.
We planned on calling people, thinking calls would improve turnout. When it came time to execute I started emailing, Facebook Messaging, and text messaging. Right after sending the first few invites I started getting YES’s so I justified not calling anyone.
We wanted to keep the event casual — we wanted invitees to expect a fun event! Not something they’d have to be ‘on’ for. We wanted to energize attendees, not suck their energy.
Honestly Pete did most of the invite wording on our planning call and this was what we came up with:
Our invite tracking sheet looked like this:
I’ll explain the columns. The dinner column is for the people to invite to dinner — a 1 let us sort / filter / count who we were inviting. Then we put a 1 in the invite column when we invited them, and yup you guessed it a 1 in the coming column when they said yes.
Finally the confirmed column — we used that a few days before the event to reach out to everyone and confirm they were coming.
Man I felt great marking confirms minutes after sending invites.
We targeted the right people with the right message.
The Right Place
Ok so now we had 20 VIPs coming to dinner — we needed to get a place to host our thang!
I called around a few Detroit restaurants. This part was more challenging than I thought — places are closed on Mondays, they have minimum food orders, etc. Luckily Pegasus Taverna said hey no problem we’ll take care of you.
I added a sheet to our spreadsheet to track venues so next time this piece would be easier.
Boom we had our place!
The Right Execution
Pete made these awesome cards with everyone’s name on them and three questions on the back for me to ask other people.
On the back were questions like:
- What sport would you compete in if you were in the Olympics?
- If you could have dinner with anyone, (dead or alive) who would
it be and why? - Have you seen any good movies lately you’d recommend?
Initially there were some philosophical questions — but we decided to keep it light and focus on everyone having a fun time. I didn’t want anyone to feel frustrated, or worse have anyone get angry. Probably an unfounded fear but we went for safety.
I also pushed to remove assigned seating. Luckily Pete made a convincing case that by keeping assigned seating people wouldn’t clump next to friends they already knew and would appreciate meeting new people.
The name cards and questions made everyone feel great.
Day of
I arrived at the restaurant about an hour early. I changed out of my casual clothes into my host clothes and made friends with the manager.
I was nervous people wouldn’t arrive on time. I was happy guests started arriving at 6:15. We hung by the bar for about an hour while others arrived, so we wouldn’t be awkwardly sitting around a half-filled table for 45 minutes. I worked to introduce people and help start conversations. This group of experienced networkers made that part easy.
Shortly after 7, Pete and I set the namecards around the table to mix people up, our crew sate, and the main event started!
I conferred with the manager and ordered appetizers for the whole table. Aside from that everyone was on separate checks.
Aftermath
I followed up with everyone the next day with a note saying I was glad they came and sharing some memories from the night.
Separately I followed up with any connections I’d promised.
While doing the follow ups I went to our spreadsheet and added a private notes column. I wrote interesting conversational details (like proudest moment, etc.). I care what everyone had to say and I want to be able to remember. It’s important to me and so I wrote it down.
How to: Host your own fab dinner party
- Identify the right people (we used LinkedIn) and individually invite them. I’ve hosted a lot of events — I know it’s tempting — but don’t do it. Do not mass message these people or FaceBook invite 100 attendees— some people can do that , I cannot. I recommend individual communications every time and leave the mass mailings to the big brands.
- Find the right place (enough space, appropriate pricing, attire, etc.)
- Make it special (we used name cards, questions, appetizers)
- Follow up with all attendees.
