My Top 3 Takeaways From the First #ChaseforBiz Conference

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend the first ever JP Morgan Chase For Business Conference (#ChaseforBiz) designed exclusively for startup and small business owners. It was an action packed day of networking and education, featuring entertainer/business mogul Nick Cannon as the host, and Fubu Founder/Investor/Shark Tank star Daymond John as the keynote speaker.

Here are my 3 key takeaways from the day--notes on things I learned or had reinforced from my time at the conference.

1. Ask people how you can provide value

I ran into my friend Josh Simons (ChicagoInno) at the conference and noticed he would close conversations by asking the other person, "As part of your network now, how can I provide value?" I LOVED this approach. I've written before about my crusade against asking how you can help, and asking the value question instead is another great way to build a relationship without putting the other person in an awkward spot. Some people had a direct answer for Josh, others said, "I'm not sure yet, but let me think on that." In either case, his question was memorable, and he has a great lead in for following up.

2. When the speaker asks the audience for questions, ASK A QUESTION!

Nick Cannon took a few minutes in the afternoon to field questions from the audience. Never one to shy away from a microphone, my hand immediately shot up. He came over to me, I stood up and asked him my question in front of the entire conference, and he took time to give a thoughtful answer.

Afterwards during the cocktail hour, people came up to me and said, "Hey you're the guy who asked the question to Nick Cannon! I thought that was great! Can you tell me more about what you do?"

It's SO EASY to shy away when a speaker asks for questions. You might think you have nothing valuable to say, or that there are other people more deserving of the mic, or you might just be too damn nervous! Suck it up, and put yourself out there. While it's easy to shy away, if you instead lean into the mic, all the networking afterwards comes even easier when people decide to come up and talk to YOU because you decided to stand up.

(Side note: Ask something you actually want to know the answer to. Not something you already know the answer to. Use this as another opportunity to provide value for others.)

3. It's not cool to be stupid

The opening talk in the morning came from Chase's own Noah Wintroub, who spoke on The Evolution of the Disruption Space. Amidst a brain-exploding amount of wisdom he shared, his most quotable line came when talking about new technologies, new ways of doing business, etc.

Noah flat out said, "It's not cool to be stupid." What he meant was, if you don't know about it, take it upon yourself to learn. Your choice to remain ignorant only puts you further behind. You don't have to like something or even use something, but you do need to know about it, otherwise have fun eating others' dust.

I've intentionally avoided Snapchat, letting myself get away with saying, 'It's too confusing' and 'I hate how it makes people think that boring shit is all of a sudden interesting because you took a photo of it'. <<< Okay, I still think that second point is true, but that shouldn't hold me back from at least taking the time to learn how it works.

What have you avoided out of intentional ignorance? Because of Noah's words, my homework coming out of the conference is to stop being stupid and learn Snapchat.

All said and done, the Chase for Business conference was pheNOMenal (and NOM is in caps because the food spread for the day was off the charts). Shout out to Laura Helmuth at JPMorgan Chase for the invitation. I'll close this out with the best line of the day, which came from Nick Cannon,

Don't go through it, GROW through it.

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If you can't tell, I'm pretty obsessed with communication. I work with startups and sales teams, using my background in branding and live entertainment to help them turn their sales pitch into a performance. I also host the Discover Your Inner Awesome podcast, available on all major podcast platforms. Give me a shout at [email protected] if you want to connect!