Interview With Nick Kho (Papa From Real Social Dynamics) – Networking Masterclass

I’m interviewing Nick Kho, who’s one of the best net-workers in the world. In this interview you’ll find out which events to go to, how to build valuable relationships, and even close sales.

You can meet a lot of successful people: millionaires, billionaires, industry leaders, whoever you want to meet, and achieve your goals.

Nick is the CEO of Real Social Dynamics, and I’ve seen him connect with millionaires, and billionaires. His company, has offered thirty thousand dollar seminars in the past, and still currently offer that for networking, and sales. He’s probably the best worker that I’ve seen, in the field. His whole business is based on meeting people, and the business teaches thousands of people every single year, on how to do it.

He’s travelled to one hundred and eight countries, and he just got married to his wife. When he was in his hundredth country, he was busy organizing networking events, and he’s the founder of Zeppos house.

He’s organized an event in New York, with bestselling author Michael Ellsberg. Other people like Tim Ferris showed up there, and other bestselling authors. He’s organized other big events in Las Vegas, and he also wrote a chapter in a book by Emit.

For someone who thinks they don’t have a lot to offer yet, who doesn’t have a well running successful business yet, and is not very successful yet, in Nick’s view, they should network: a lot of successful CEO’s enjoy networking, and just hanging out with people, who have that common passion for business, and entrepreneurship.

When he was first getting into business, and entrepreneurship, he approached them for dinner, and got to know them in a casual environment, and built friendships with these individuals. He also got involved with every kind of possible organization, involving business and entrepreneurship, whether it was a seminar, or an organization.

When he first started trying to get into Networking, he looked at who was organizing business events in his city, then he would go there, and he would try to build relationships with people he thought would be fun to hang out with, and he thought that could give him some interesting tips.

Nick was always very inquisitive, so when he would hang out, he would always be asking questions, and people that he thought were fun to hang out with, he’d invite them out to do fun activities with him.

One thing, that he used to do all the time, would be to organize lunches, cocktail parties, and gatherings. That eventually grew into organizing business mastermind groups, and get togethers. Nick was being a connector for all these people, and as it got cooler, more interesting people started to attend.

He went from organizing dinner parties, with local entrepreneurs, to then growing that into seminars, and hanging out with the keynote speakers, and hanging out in all these mansions in Las Vegas, or the home of Tony Shay in New York.

He didn’t do it for a fee, he did it solely to bring interesting people together, and build his network, developing that social capital, and having a lot of fun. He thinks that a lot of it has to do with friendships, and getting to know people that are a good personality match.  He’d want to hang out with people, which he’d want to go the movies with, go have lunch with, or go on holiday together.

A lot of it, has to do with a being a fun cool guy, that just wants to help other people, and he thinks other people are attracted to that. Most successful people want to help other people out also. He thinks that whether you’re really successful in business already, or developing it, if you’re a smart, educated guy, who is laid back, and cool, almost anyone will hang out with you, no matter how successful you are.

A lot of people who are already successful entrepreneurs, if you run into them, a lot of them want to be mentors, a lot of them want to be advisors. Nick spent a quarter of a million dollars a year, for four years going to business seminars, and a lot of the keynote speakers would personally give out their email, contact information, and would want to stay in touch with random attendees,

Nick was the same way, when he spoke at the world summit in London, he gave out his contact details, and he did the same thing to stay in touch with people. A lot of people like mentoring other people, and helping them grow, and being able to contribute, and give value to other people.

Nick has stayed in touch with a lot of his professors from his media programme at USC, and a lot of them were random successful entrepreneurs, doing it for one or two semesters. He also thinks a lot of them did it, just to have fun. He’ll often invite them out, to hang out at cool events that he’s had access to on a social level.

Sometime business deals come out of that, and sometimes they don’t. A lot of people talk about making business deals on the golf course, but in our day and age, he sees people making them at parties. Nick does both, he’s just joined a country club golf club, in Vegas. He will bring his friends, and random business associates out, to play golf with him.

Before he got into golf, he used to invite people out to dinner parties all the time, or organize a semi-annual get together. In the summer, he organized a get together in the four seasons, in Indonesia, but you don’t have to be extravagant.

When he was just starting out, and he was starting his own company, maybe three or four times a week, he’d get people together at a local restaurant, and get people to hang out with him. He knows a lot of his friends did the same thing, where they organized business forums, for people in non-competing industries, to share ideas, and help each other out. He’d talk about the most pressing issues.

He’s also doing it with the young entrepreneurs’ organization, and might be doing it with another business organization. He thinks that you should go qualify for some of these organizations, and develop a chat group for you as well.

For people going to events, for networking purposes, Nick goes to a lot of events that are related to his business, so he’s been looking for those expose, and those seminars that are related to your industry. For him, he’s been going to events like the summer series, where you have a lot of interesting people, and he’s also gone to events, that are associated with popular internet marketers, and seminars linked to marketing, and entrepreneurship.

He’s also spent a lot of time, going to random events he’s found on meetup.com, and he knows a lot of friends, who have been introducing him to Facebook groups, and he’s going to their events as well.

A lot of the time, he will go to events, which are organized by friends, or friends that are speaking at the event. When he was really interested in meeting particular speakers, he would actually just google their name, and write their name plus seminars, and find out where they were speaking at, and go to those events.

In his view, if an event attracted a particular speaker, it’s probably something that he’d want to go to, and then he’d try to network with people at the event, because they probably have a similar mind-set. He knows a lot of events that he’s gone to, have been solely for fun, where a lot of the time, a lot of the value, isn’t from the content of the event, but in the hallways of the event, where you network with the people outside.

In fact, he has had several events, where he spent more time out in the hallways networking with people, and organising dinners, instead of watching the seminar. He got a lot more value through this, because he will stay in touch with them. He’d stay in touch with people from meeting people like that, for seven years.

Sometimes he has his own agenda, when he goes to events. One time, he organized a bunch of events, at a series of mini castles in Las Vegas. His goal at the events, was to get speakers that were interested in coming, and he went to the key note speakers at the events, and invited them to come to the one he was organizing.

However most of the time, it’s just to gather information from other people, and meet friends. A lot of the time, when he was going to these events, he was actually going because he knew other friends, which were really successful, and he wanted to spend more time with them.

It was an opportunity to share ideas, and you’ll find that you brain storm rapidly, about ideas the speaker brings up. Many times you’re not interested in the exact topic the speaker brings up, rather it’s the ideas that you think of yourself, which comes from the topics, which the speaker brings up. He thinks most of the time, if it’s a particular topic, say about ad software, he’s of course there for the content, but when goes to these larger more general events, it’s more for the high successful people, and networking.

So if he’s at south west, it’s to party with successful people, and then talk about your interests on the side. Going to events like awesomeness fest, is about hanging out with entrepreneurs, and building a social relationship. Most of the value has come from the social relationships that he builds with these people at the events, from this one valuable idea, that the key note speaker spoke about.

It’s interesting, how your networking branch expands, just by going to a large event. He’s not trying to meet with a small group of people, at an event, he’s trying to build a network, as big as he possibly can, and stay in touch with as many people as possible. He has built email lists to invite people out to certain events that he thought they’d be interest in. He also stays in touch one on one with certain people, and goes to their cities.

When he was travelling around the world, he did a tour about seven years ago, where he went to two hundred and seventy seven cities, over six months, and he did sales and marketing seminars, trying to build his company.

During that time, he reached out to his entrepreneur friends, and reached out to a data base of the entrepreneurs’ organization. He’d invite everyone he knew out to dinner, and he was only in each city for a day, but he’d always get a handful of these people to meet up, and it allowed him to create new relationships, and build new ideas, and a lot of the people he met, when travelling around the world, are still his close friends today.

They have given him business ideas, or clients to Real Social Dynamics seminars, which has also led to them getting more involved with not just self-improvement, but also business seminars.

One of the things they have been doing more recently, is helping people go to events, and do networking. Real estate companies, and tech companies hire Nick’s guys, and instead of taking them out to bars and clubs, to pick up girls, and instead of doing it for being a wingman in a club, they’re actually doing it for business related conventions.

They are walking up, and approaching people to close deals, and business sales, or invite them out to have lunches. A lot of the same enquiries, and questions he gets from RSD seminars, are the same ones they get at business seminars they do. For example, getting approach anxiety, or being too scared to make that first approach, not believing they were enough, and having those inner state issues.

What you feel on the inside, will be projected onto those around you. So if you feel good, and positive, and that you can offer value, people will feel that.

He also found out, that a lot of people, were hanging with each other, and only people that they knew, and they were forming chode crystals: where guys are stuck together, and they don’t want to network with other people.

So Nick goes in there, and forces them to approach other people. It can be very intimidating at first, stepping out of your comfort zone for your sales process.

Nick can remember when he first started networking, and he had that fear to approach. He would often hang out with people, and often network through his social circle.

If you do that, you never really grow your social circle, you just stay where you are, and you never really grow, or meet new people.

The biggest epiphany for Nick, was trying to get leverage upon himself to approach other people. The way he’d leverage himself, if he wanted to do an approach, would be to have a mental self-punishment if he didn’t do it. Another form of motivation, was to have total disrespect for himself if he didn’t do it, therefore it wasn’t an option for him to do it anymore.

If you don’t take a shot, you never know if you’re going to have that rejection. That fear of loss, was much worse than that fear of rejection.

When closing someone at an event, Nick thinks the most important thing is to develop a relationship, where the guy wants to stay in touch with you. When he’s talking to people on a sales basis, a lot of it has the basis of talking to them, as if they were a brother of friend, or a family member. They treat people like that from the very beginning, and by doing that, they’re more likely to develop a relationship, and maybe do business with him as well.

People are often times surprised, how often people he doesn’t know very well, will just crash at his house, or when he invites them out to dinner, and treats them like really close friends of his. When you do that, people will be reciprocal, and do the same for you.

However, one of the things he is doing this weekend, is there’s this company that paid thirty thousand dollars, to actually live at his house for a couple of weeks, and learn sales, not just from business events, but from going out to bars and clubs.

Nick was interviewing the top sales rep in this organization, and he’s making three hundred thousand, when the average guy makes forty thousand, and he asked him what makes him different compared to these other sales reps, and he said: “going out, and meeting girls, and having an awesome dating life.”

It’s really interesting how skills in your dating life, can be applied to business, and the CEO decided he wanted to do a programme with Real Social Dynamics, and create a custom programme for him. Nick’s found a lot of companies, approaching them under the table, because they aren’t really things they advertise on their website, but have come to the RSD website, and contacted them privately, and they talked about fees, and potential programmes.

For these guys, a lot of it is focused not on sales tactics, but rather their individual sales sticking points. Nick will look at a guy, and see he’s a little bit too rigid.  Where he’s very nervous when approaching someone, and he stands so far away from them, they can’t hear him.

Or custom things you don’t even realise you do: Nick will watch them out in action, and critique them, just like in his dating programme.

Most of his sales advice, isn’t necessarily about what to say, a lot of it is what they are doing, saying, and what they’re projecting as an individual.

It’s more customized: a lot of people will do business, and sales seminars, where they’ll talk about all the typical things, but you get a lot more value, getting a guy to personally critique you.

If you go to a golf course, and you have someone critique you one on one, and teach you how to swing, you’ll get a lot more value from that.

Nick establishes, and maintains a relationship with people for a networking event, by organizing his own gathering at the event. When he went to a traffic conversion summit, he rented out a suite, and he had a party for people he wanted to continue to develop relationships with.

He networked with them, and had a BBQ party. On other occasions, he’s organized dinners on the side, at smaller conventions. He thinks a lot of the value comes from not just hanging out with them that weekend, but outside of the weekends. He’ll fly out to cities, that interesting people live in, and he will hang out with them, and crash at their house, and have fun with them

A lot of business people, talk about business all the time, so it’s inevitable you’ll talk about business at some time. Hanging out with people in your industry, and having that common bond, of wanting to grow themselves to the next level is very exciting.

He likes hanging out with people that are like that. Nick’s network is now so large, that he’s trying to build relationships that are in his business, as opposed to otherwise. He knows people now, that if he has a particular issue, he can contact them, and ask them questions.

When he first started, his company was very small, now his company has a lot of people, especially where he lives out in Las Vegas, where a lot of his staff live.

He spends a lot of time, hanging out with his local staff, developing relationships with advisors. He’s spent a whole day with Tony Shay, asking him questions about his company. Tony has casually come to his company board meetings, where they meet at restaurants and bars.

He invites all these interesting people, to hang out with him as advisors, over a nice dinner. At the board meetings, they’ll go over key performance indicators, and talk about their gender items, future growth, and just share their ideas.

You’re helping people, by sharing ideas. Nick tries to make it fun, that’s why he does it over dinners. He’s also organized fun trips, where he’s organized retreats. There was a group, which he’d meet up once a month with, for four hours, and share business ideas, and then every six months, they’d go to some place and share ideas (go deep sea fishing or camping, for example).

He started organizing that, from the entrepreneurship organization he was in, and personal friends, who were interested in talking on a casual level.

He even organized a meet up, where he rented out a big boat in the Caribbean, and they made a reality TV show out of it, called below deck (he was in episode six). They rented a thirty million dollar yacht, where they shared business ideas on the beach, in st marks. If you watch the episode, you won’t see any of it, because in order to create drama, the TV show creators converted it into a wedding, where Nick and his wife, got married on the boat. It ended up turning into more of an interesting TV show, where it had a countdown clock to the wedding.

Nick and wife, got married on the reality show, knowing that they already had a wedding planned in December, even though then it was in May 2012. They still had the real wedding in December, which was close friends and family, and then a more public wedding with people who couldn’t make the first one.

A lot of the people that came to his wedding, were people that he met at business seminars, or he organized these fun gatherings with.

However, Nick thinks a lot of the long term value comes from relationships and friend ships. Some of his grooms men, were people he’d known from college. He went to the University of Wisconsin, and people he went to college went to his wedding, and those were guys he’d known for a long time.

He remembers in one of his groups, there was a guy called Harry Yay, who owns a successful hedge fund for bitcoin, and also a computer consulting company, and Nick met him on a cruise, a random party cruise.

Like most people he meets, he treats them like close friends and family. He invited people he met on the cruise, to come back and stay at his house for the next week, and that developed friendships. Harry started attending RSD seminars, and they stayed in touch through that. Harry is also one of his best friends, and was a grooms man at his wedding.

Nick would go about a getting a mentor, who’s very advanced (they might even own a billion dollar company), but there a lot more millionaires, than billionaires, so it would be easier to get them. Nick would just ask them to be a mentor. One of the things he was talking about earlier, was organizing board of directors meetings, once per month, where the executives in the company meet up, and you could invite them to that.

He has also invited people to share ideas with him, and take a tour of their office, and they will often give you advice, and allow you to ask questions. One of the advantages he had, when he was an MBA student, was that he could reach out to anyone, and ask for advice. Anyone will give students advice, because people like helping other people.

Nick, when he meets people, won’t often exchange business cards, but what he’ll often do is get their business cards, and he’ll email them, and tell them it was nice meeting them. He’ll then give them his contact information, and develop a friendship that way. If he’s meeting them on the spot, he’ll grab their phone number, and text them, expressing how it was nice to meet them, and invite them out to events.

He knows friends, who will pass out cards to other people, and physically mail them. Especially if it’s random thoughts of kindness sometimes, he personally doesn’t do that. He used to, when he was on holiday, or at an event like Christmas, or people’s birthdays, he’d do text messages, and text pretty much everyone on his phone.

He knows master networks: people who know tonnes of people, who’s networks are very vast, and just look up what their friends are up to on a regular basis, and reach out to them, and see if they could help him out. Nick remembers last year, he was dealing with some media crisis issues,  and a media guy he knew, reached out to him, because he noticed what Nick was going through, and offered to introduce Nick to some people, that could help him out.

Those kind of things, really stuck out in his mind, as a really cool thing. Other times, Nick has seen more value, in staying in touch with people, and inviting them to social level. Invite people out, to really awesome events that you’re involved with, or introduce them to other people you think they should meet. He knows some people that were in Los Angeles, when he was living there, where he got involved in a business from the ground up and he had a large role in that, and used that to his advantage.

He remembers nine or ten years ago, when the summit series was first created, the founders of the summit series, reached out to people they just wanted to meet. He got invited out, on a first class flight, paid for down to Mexico, and hung out with all these interesting people for free.  So he met Tony Shay, Zuckerberg, and all these other famous entrepreneurs, and after doing it one time, they did it again, and started charging people for it. It went from a small group, to a couple of hundred people, and then two hundred people.

Today, there’s a list of thirty thousand people, that have attended their events, and they could only handle a thousand people going to their event, so it’s super exclusive, and in order to go to their events now.

A lot of the people who get involved, they actually now will even buy land on a mountain. They raised fifty million dollars, to create a home for networking in Utah, at Powder Mountain, which is the largest ski resort there. It’s now dedicated for networking, not just business, but for entrepreneurship, and people making a real influence, and change, Similar to what Ted is doing, but this is a bigger bolder, cooler version.  A lot of the people there are next generation, so most of the people there are thirty five and under, and really big influence creators.

Everyone knows them, because they will be models, fashion designer, or maybe famous actors, famous politicians, or just business entrepreneurs, and non-profits. Nick thinks it shows you the power of networking, and how Rolodex is the epitome of that.

A lot  of what RSD teaches isn’t about pick up, but an identity level change, where they take you out of your comfort zone, and you take that next step towards success, but actually opposed to just talking about it. Tony Robbins is a guy that he sends a lot of clients to.

RSD will actually do it with you, in your social circle, in your city, and actually be your individual mentor, and coach in person, instead of just talking about it. A lot of the guys that went through RSD’s programmes, are at the summit series events. Owen Cook, his business partner, has actually spoke on the same stage as President Clinton, and Richard Branson. A lot of it has to do with brilliant networking. Nick’s programme is more catered about how to network with any one, in any situation, and anywhere for any reason.

They did another seminar for personal success, and a lot of the stuff that he teaches, will be applied in business, and actualization. Nick’s business partner, has told him how the dating side of the business, will probably go on for another few years, before he focuses solely on the self-development side.

Nick will always have the dating side of business, because it’s a large part of business, and RSD is the world’s largest dating company (over a thousand programmes a year), and that will always continue to grow it. But they will also focus on growing the self-development side of it, with the same premise about how they teach self-development in the blue print, and developing that process, and living that life, instead of talking and just thinking about it, or trying to manifest it.

I’ve seen Nick implement a lot of the stuff that you’ve talked about, be implemented with millionaires, and billionaires, and it’s all true.

If someone wants to get in touch with Nick, they could email him at: papa@realsocialdynamics.com, or just come to one of the RSD events like the world summit. He’s always at the summit events. If you have any questions, comment down below.