 All of us, self-employed people, can have more than enough clients if we only collaborated more with each other. But the problem is that so many of us think of the people in our industry as competitors. And how do you relate to that word competitor and competition? For most of us human beings, it makes us less cooperative because we are thinking, gosh, if they got a new client that we could have had, that's one less potential client for me, that's one for them. But that's not really how the self-employed world works. It's how maybe in a corporate setting, you know, only one of two people can get promoted, for example. Or in the school setting that we grew up, only some of us can, you know, can get the top score. Obviously, not everyone can get the top score. But in the self-employed world, in the freelance world, in the small business world, the reality is that we can all help each other make the pie bigger. And so let me give you a quick suggestion, right? Right now, if you think about your 50 closest friends and family members, you probably know 50 friends and family members, people that you can easily reach out to obviously instantly know who you are and they're willing to talk with you and tell you about their life. Okay, let's think about your 50 friends and family members. If you think about them, they each maybe have like 10 problems or yearnings in their life. It's a problem in their relationship or a yearning in their work life or they have a problem in their health and they have a yearning in their spiritual life. But let's say out of your 50 friends and family, there are a total of 500 problems and yearnings, 10 for each person. So 500 problems and yearnings that you can help to solve, right? Now, not all 500 can have a service solution, but let's say out of the 500 problems that you have access to your friends and family's problems and yearnings, those 500, maybe 80 of them, 80 of those problems and yearnings can be solved by somebody you know who is a self-employed person. Yeah, someone provides some kind of coaching service, healing, mentoring, consulting service that can help solve 80 of the problems that you have direct connection with because it's one of your friends and family. And that's true for every single one of us here watching this. Now, why isn't that everybody here has more than enough clients? That's more, you know, 80 problems and yearning is like 80 clients. So you directly probably have access to refer 80 clients to 80 people or 20 clients to 40 people each, whatever, or two clients to 40 people, whatever the math is. But the bottom line is that each one of us is like this. And so we can each have enough clients if we just collaborated more. And instead of thinking of competitors, I invite you to think of niche mates. Yes, the word niche mates. Now, if you want to get fancier, you'll say niche mates, right? But it's easier for me to say niche mates. So that's what I say. There are the old saying is there are riches in niches, right? So if you just think of niche mates, what are niche mates? Somebody else who provides a similar service that you do or for a similar audience, they might provide a different service for a similar audience or they might provide the same service you do before a different audience. So those are fellow service providers, fellow self-employed people are your niche mates. All right. So your niche mates are actually your best collaborators, your best partners. Why? Because somebody who is growing the same audience that you do, if they became more successful or they became successful in their business, guess what? If you are a friend of theirs, who are they going to refer their overflow clients to? You. That's who. Why would they refer overflow clients to anybody except a friend of theirs who they know provides a similar service? Of course it's going to be you. So why aren't you making friends with more of your niche mates? Well, I don't know. Maybe you haven't thought of it up to now. Maybe you've been, guess what? As many of us do, afraid of our competitors. So my invitation to you in this video is to drop the fear and experiment with bringing on a collaborative mindset and imagine this. Imagine you were to reach out to one niche mate per week for a collaboration conversation, just one per week. That's it. Sorry. Let me explain. Not everyone's going to say yes. So I invite you to reach out to three niche mates per week for a collaborative conversation. And one of them probably will get back to you. Say sure. Let's see how we can support each other's business because you can. There are going to be some people that inquire with you that you have a friend of yours who you can't help, but they can. So you will refer them a client. And same thing. They're going to have a friend that you can help or someone who inquires with them that you can help. And if you're friends, of course, they're going to think of you and say, hey, would you like this introduction to this client or this friend of mine? So if you connect with one niche mate per week, to be honest, that's more connections than most self-employed people do. Because most of us are so afraid and we're so stuck in our little bubbles. We don't reach out. But the reality is that we can each have more than enough if we only reached out to each other. Now, one more thing I'll say before I end this video, which is do a little bit of research about your niche mate social media following. You want to reach out to people who have a similar sized following. So if you have, you know, 500 Instagram followers, you can reach out to somebody who has 750 or 250. It's similar enough in that range. If you have, you know, 100 Instagram followers, reach out to someone who has 150 to 200. It's similar enough range. Got it? And a similar enough audience. If you feel like, hmm, their audience, we could refer business to each other probably, then reach out to say, hey, I'm thinking maybe to connect with you we might be able to support each other's business, refer business to each other. If you're interested, let's connect. Let's talk. I hope this is helpful. I'm George Cao, Authentic Business Coach, and always open to your comments and your questions. Feel free to add them below. I'll see you in the next video.