Make No Small Plans: Lessons on Thinking Big, Chasing Dreams, and Building Community

Lead with generosity. Generosity creates trust. Trust creates productivity.

Start with the people in your circle and spiral out from there through referrals. It had worked in his knife-selling and nightclub-promoting days. If you grow your audience organically through the people you already know, you can build meaningful relationships that will do your networking for you.

Elliott emailed them his pitch: “I’m an entrepreneur. I really want to bring together twenty creative people and build a peer group so that we can connect with each other, meet new friends, and brainstorm. I don’t know most of you that well. What if we went off to a ski retreat in Utah for a weekend to really connect?”

Elliott understood in that moment that the most important quality an event can have is space for the unplanned—room for the spontaneity and randomness that create sparks.

Elliott doubled back to Joel Holland. But instead of asking him to fully commit, he posed a different question, one that would later become the bedrock of Summit Series’s strategy for growth: Elliott asked him if there was anybody else he knew who might like to come.