Lovely doing business with you
NETWORKING – black art, or the new business black? In my view, “know who” has never been more important.
While everything around us is changing, one thing constant is our relationships. Our little black books can be used for better (or to mitigate against worst).
In all times, particularly challenging ones, people do business with people, and particularly those whom they trust and respect!
It doesn’t matter what how old or young you or your enterprise is – business advantages to be gained from making new contacts are legion, and they’re global. Don’t dismiss “old” contacts either – don’t be a stranger to them. I think we’re all aware of the statistics – 70% of new business comes via referrals.
That’s as true if you’re just starting out and or are in a competitive service provision – it’s a people business and, faced with a choice, most of us would much rather do business with people that we know and have built a relationship with.
It never ceases to amaze me that we all think other people know our business as well as we do. How can they if we don’t take the trouble to manage our relationships with them?
I remember working in relationship management for Coopers & Lybrand in the City of London to address exactly that – helping them build relationships with their major blue-chip clients that would herald an early warning of potential trouble spots and manage expectations more effectively.
That relationship building and management is at the very “top end” of networking. My late husband used to say “fish feed where the bottom changes” and it was great to spend an afternoon at Microsoft HQ in London seeing nine companies flying the North East flag and strutting their stuff before a packed room of London investors and corporate venturers.
From that and other experiences organised under a Connect North East access to finance banner, it appears people with cash to spend (either for their companies or to add to their own portfolio of interests) are quite amenable to receiving invitations that create opportunities to connect communities for mutual benefit.
Early-stage growth firms and those (either individuals or corporate) that are further along the business running track need each other to survive. Never has it been truer that necessity is the mother of invention or innovation.
The corporate sector is waking up to the fact that innovation is alive and kicking in the North East’s Innovation Connectors.
Not for nothing did the Home Office and other multi-nationals sniff around the last Connect North East investment conference focused on national security. They wanted access to the innovators hard at work in our universities or taking part in initiatives like IDI’s fellowship scheme.
A group of us has just returned from Gothenburg in Sweden, where the “no substitute for shoe-leather” philosophy has begun to bear fruit.
I didn’t choose to sit next to two captains of Swedish industry at the Think Britain finale in the Opera House there. But with a captive audience on either side I could tell them a little about the interesting and investable technologies being developed in the North East.
Self-proclaimed capitalists as they are, I think they’ll be here with the Swedish ambassador in October to see what joint ventures they can conclude to take their business interests further forward.
How’s that for networking with attitude!
:: Caroline Theobald is managing director of Bridge Club Ltd
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