The World Of Corporate Work, Mindset Shift, And The Future Of Networking With Emily Drost

Are you confident about what you want to achieve in life with the nine-to-five job you have right now? It’s time for you to explore life’s possibilities. Upgrade your lifestyle! Stephen Jaye sits down for a conversation with Emily Drost on the future of networking. Emily discusses the corporate world and why it’s crucial to consider contract employment because it provides more flexibility. Emily is the founder of eNTWKS, and she believes in the power of networks and connections between people for an exceptional business. Learn how you could establish a network of power partners, enrich your life more, and be happy while earning money. Set yourself up for success and tune into this episode! --- Listen to the podcast here: The World Of Corporate Work, Mindset Shift, And The Future Of Networking With Emily Drost One of the most frustrating processes I've ever been in is finding jobs in general. I've also witnessed a lot of other people in the same process. It confuses and frustrates me how we can still have such an archaic process. It seems logical that we'll be looking to upgrade this but also, the nature of work is changing quite a bit. Not everyone's necessarily looking for the standard full-time job and getting your business, livelihood or career intact requires networking with people, meeting a lot of people and being connected. It’s essentially connecting your service or product to the person or people that need it the most. I've discovered where the answer is going to come from. My guest, Emily Drost, is in the process of building a networking platform that is going to make that connection between the product and service you're offering and the people who need it in a way more seamless fashion than what we do which is so much stress. I would like to welcome you to the show, Emily Drost. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much. How are you doing? I'm doing splendidly. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining and for being willing to come on and talk about this because I'm a futurist at heart. Imagining a future where things are better than certain frustrating experiences nowadays is one of the best ways a lot of people can cope with some things that they're going through. In eNTWKS, I see a little bit of this possibility coming forward. Tell me a little bit about your process. What got you interested in designing this and what you're trying to do with eNTWKS? My background is in Psychology. I studied Industrial-Organizational Psychology. Primarily what that means is we were studying the motivation of employees and people in the workplace. I did that for quite a bit of time, and then I parlayed that experience into an advertising career where I was still continuing to study motivations for people and consumers. Over time, what I started to find was that we're in the middle of this shift and people are starting to get frustrated with this idea of the 9:00 to 5:00 work. What's happening is they're starting to seek and figure out how to apply their expertise to the workforce but being able to focus on their expertise. My expertise happens to be understanding how employees are motivated and what they like to do. Also, my expertise happens to be in understanding consumer motivation. Those two come together and I said, "I'm seeing this shift in the marketplace. I'm seeing this shift in the workplace, and I want to be able to support that." I happen to have the technology, experience and background, so I can build that. The idea started coming together in 2019 for this workplace platform that is based on business networking at its most basic. The idea is that we all have a certain sphere of influence. We all have a network or a tree of people that we know. We all know people that have certain expertise in certain fields. When I say expertise, I don't mean a lawyer. I mean a very specific business litigation lawyer or bankruptcy lawyer. When I say marketer, I don't just mean a marketer. I mean maybe an advertising or a digital ads specialist or an SEO specialist. Letting people highlight their expertise and then letting people connect with one another and letting those referrals happen in a digital space. You can go in and you can say, "This week I'm looking for somebody that does marketing but does digital marketing." You can go into the app and you can say, "My problem this week that I'm trying to solve is I need an Amazon SEO specialist." I can type that in and within my sphere of connections. All of a sudden, I'm going to be suggesting people that fit that criteria and are going to let me connect with them. I'm already connected with them, and there are referrals happening without the referral meeting happening. You need contract-based jobs. Those are points in time allowing you to apply your expertise to the specific project.Share on X It is just fantastic for anybody out there who's realizing that "Maybe the 9:00 to 5:00 isn't for me. Maybe I would be much better off just utilizing my expertise and giving that to employers." Whether it be big corporations or mom-and-pop shops. We're going to start transitioning into this place where corporations don't have the typical 40-person deep marketing team. Rather they have a 40-person deep team of experts that they can tap into on an as-needed basis. When eNTWKS is launched, fully functional and all the people are on it, how is the average day going to look different for someone who's a digital marketing specialist? In the past or currently, they probably have a regular standard full-time job. Maybe a few of them freelance on Upwork or something like that. In the eNTWKS world, how will that day look? It will work very similar. They'll go in and they'll create their profile and they can update their profile as needed. They'll be getting pings of people that are trying to connect with them on a daily basis and looking specifically for their expertise. The nice part is these aren't going to be perfect strangers of the internet like you see with Upwork and some of these other platforms. These are going to be people that are within your first, second and third-degree of connection. They are going to be somebody that you can potentially trust, that you feel a little bit more confident working with. Otherwise, why would somebody within your sphere of influence be connected with them? Ideally, you're only connecting with people that you know, trust and are willing to do business with. If you look at it, I'm this nucleus of this atom and coming off at all my proteins. Those are all my connections or all of the people that I know. That's my little sphere and people are going to be able to come in. That digital marketer will come in. He'll have his profile and all of a sudden, all these little neutrons are working together and they're providing him referrals without him having to do a whole lot. We also are going to encourage people to use the platform and not just receive. We want them to give as well. Maybe that digital marketer goes in and he goes, "I have this great strategy but I need a great graphic designer to partner with and to create the designs. I'm going to need a PR person who can help me write a press release once this digital campaign launches so that it's a more cohesive marketing effort." This digital marketer can go in. He's going to be receiving people to connect with. He's going to type in graphic designer. All of a sudden, he's going to be recommended 4 or 5 graphic designers from his spheres of influence that he can work with, interview and talk to about the work, and maybe he develops a relationship there. This sounds like somewhat of a transition in mindset for what people refer to as a rank-and-file employee. The standard employee mindset for someone that's particularly in an entry-level position is you're a worker. You wait for a boss to tell you what to do, and then you do it. You have the boss that tells you the next thing you're supposed to do and do it. You have a project manager or a product lead coordinating your work. This sounds like a very different mindset that even people who would consider themselves at the "lower levels" of an organization still needs to adopt a little bit more of determining what work needs to be done. I'm determining who I need to collaborate with to get certain things done. That's going to be an interesting transition for a lot of different people. How do you see that unfolding? It's already happening naturally. In this shift that we're undergoing, we're seeing a lot of people working from home more frequently. We're seeing corporations give up that "holds" that they have because they're quite literally breaking down walls. People aren't going to the office every day. We're seeing that happen already. The reality is most people are self-starters and most people know what needs to get done to be successful in their job. This is just providing tools and resources to those individuals to achieve truly what they need to. What we're noticing and seeing is that people are realizing that there isn't necessarily an advantage to being a corporate employee anymore, but there's a greater advantage to them being able to go out and contract with companies to provide their expertise for this point in time and develop relationships that then allows them to be pulled in as they're needed. This encourages that where some of the other business social networking platforms out there are so corporately driven. "Get this job. We're going to give you a 401(k) and medical benefits, but you need this job." Whereas we're sitting here and we're looking at, "You need gigs. You need jobs that are contract-based that are points in time allowing you to apply your expertise to the specific project." The reality is people are already doing that and people are already transitioning to that. Even those entry-level employees know what needs to be done,...