Meet Deb Seeger
Deb is the managing director at BDO Resource Solutions. Deb has been recognized as a female entrepreneur by receiving the woman of influence award in 2015. Prior to joining BDO Deb was a co-founder of Patina Solutions. She spent over a decade in professional services consulting. She's an innovator, keynote speaker and panelists in the field of employment trends, workforce of the future, agile talent solutions and building strong cultures.
How do you tie in the personal networking goals that you have to align the goals of that of your firm?
Networking is so important because it's really part of everything we do as we go out into the business world. I thought of it from early on is this idea of really building friendships, maybe more for a business reason, but friendships to me start with getting to know people. And understanding that we can go a lot farther in with a group of people and the resources that we all bring together than we can alone.
How does one appropriately tap their network when in that state when looking for a new job?
Having been through a transition for really first time in my career, and also having been coaching executives in transition for many years now, I believe going forward, I'm going to be a better coach. Because I've already talked about the idea of networking. But I saw a lot of executives in my career who worked really hard to kind of build a wall of separation around themselves so that other outsiders, and sometimes competitive firms or vendors, providers, salespeople, you know, couldn't get in, so to speak. But then when those folks were at a stage in their career, where they were in a transition, they really didn't have enough of a network that they could go out and engage with in order to help them in their career transition. So I think it's really important for people to understand that you may never need to ask somebody a favor. And it wasn't until recently when I was in transition that I realized it was really valuable to have such a vast network of people that I've done a ton of favors for over my career. And I think about it as like the bank of the universe. If you're putting out favors and doing favors for other people one day, when you need something, you're going to have a lot of people that you'll be able to consider to call on for help.
Can you share with our listeners one of your most successful or favorite networking stories that you have?
My son who graduated from college in 2008. And as he was really looking at the job market, one of the things he considered was going back to get his graduate degree, which he ended up doing. I said to my son, if you see anybody in my network that you want to go and just learn from, because you have a lot of learning to do about the kind of career you want. And maybe you'll see people who are in careers that you find interesting. But you got to go and just go talk to a lot of people. So I was really happy number one that he did in the two years while he was getting his graduate degree. He spoke to 100 people, either by phone or in person. And what I really appreciated about his experience was he came back to me towards the end of that experience, and he said, Mom, not one person said no to me. And that means I did a good job of doing favors for people who were happy and returned to do this favor for me.
How do you stay in front of and nurture your network?
I think the other thing about having a giving mindset or an abundance mindset is knowing that you have to intentionally and deliberately schedule time for it. Again, there's a person who wrote a book and in that book, the author talks about his internal personal discipline that every day he decides he's going to write X number of emails to reach out to people or make X number of phone calls, or how it reaches out but he's going to do it intentionally. To let them know that he...
