Q: When is theft a great idea? A: When you steal other people’s concepts, change them and apply them to your own situation.

1. Stealing Is Good To Improve
Your Referral Networking Pitch
By John Fisher - Business for Breakfast
February 2011

2. Quick Question
Q: When is theft a great idea?
A: When you steal other people’s
concepts, change them and apply them to
your own situation.

3. Quick Analysis
In referral networking this means analysing the most
effective communication and marketing strategies of
successful referral networkers that you come across
Then making them your own and adapting these
concepts to your own situation.
As long as you are not parroting another
networker’s exact words, this is completely ethical.

4. Quick Trick
The trick is to retain the concept, but change all the other
elements. Here’s an example of what we mean:
You see a web designer called Web Wonders use a diagram of a spider’s web
as part of her pitch. Around the spider’s web she has written the key benefits of
her service.
You steal the concept in this way: Your business is called Green Fingers
Gardening. You get an oversized plastercast gardening glove and one each
fingertip of the glove you place an icon that relates to an area of your business.
If Web Wonders was in the same referral networking group as Green Fingers, it
would be wise for the gardener to wait a few months before using the
plastercast glove, and not to use it every meeting.

5. Conclusion
The more subtly you can alter the original concept,
and the more time that has elapsed between the
original idea & the altered one - The Better
One thing to note: only ever ‘concept steal’ from
businesses in different fields to yours.