Networking – it works and is full of surprises!

Being a fairly logical person the warm contact approach and networking promoted by many people seemed to stack up. The key message is – numbers are everything and anybody is fair game no matter how tenuous the link.

It might seem a minefield of potential rejections but provided you’ve done your homework and generated a reasonable warm contact list – it’s only us that think we will be rejected – it works.

In my experience rejections are rare since contacts seem pleased as well as surprised to hear from you (you remembered them!) and don’t forget you have something of value to offer them. The other message is that your list is none time dependant, so if you have a lot of contacts on your list don’t get paranoid about contacting them all quickly. You pick the time to contact them to fit your process and capacity; they didn’t know you were going to contact them anyway.

Having said all of this that’s where the logic stops. It is a numbers game and with the approach there is little to flex the percentage success rate (I’m working at ideas to alter this at present). In my view, which contact is going to generate referrals is a bit of a surprise and even more so which referral will generate work. From a fairly large list of warm contacts my first work came from an old squash competitor and a referral from an MD I met at a business dinner about nine years ago.

Squash man

I met Claude (he’s French) through squash about ten years ago when he played for my team. The relationship was developed at that time since he was a casualty of industry and was looking for a job. I think I helped a little by inviting him for discussions to where I was working at the time. I even had ideas of offering him a job until I realised what salary he was used to!

We lost touch when I stopped playing squash and he moved on to pastures new.
In July when I started looking for contacts he was on my list and I tried to contact him at the company he had moved to, only to be told he didn’t work their anymore – I failed another one off the list? Fortunately I had the telephone number of one of his managers who worked at the company’s other plant. A phone call resulted in, “oh yes I remember meeting you and yes call in and see me” (another contact), and the story that Claude had been made redundant – a bit of gold was he had Claude’s home telephone number. I called Claude and we met up to discuss his latest casualty experience and for me to explain what I was doing. That was back in August and he gave me three contacts that in turn have since generated six more contacts.

Claude continued to check how I was going on with his contacts and at the end of September he told me he’d got a job as a general manager of a £16m TO aerospace company. Yes he was happy for me to come and have a look when he had settled in.
Our meeting at the end of November resulted in an invitation to do a proposal for some work in the company. This was refined early in November and I carried out a three day scoping project.
This moved on and my proposal was accepted. It ultimately provided me with six months work and a lot of internal contacts in the Company.

The story doesn’t stop there. The aerospace company was a multi-national with head office in France and plants in Europe and the USA.
Having made a success of the UK plant, Claude was moved to the USA in charge of two plants. We stayed in touch and after about twelve months he asked me to put a proposal together to visit and review one of his plants. I did this and completed two weeks work in the USA providing a number of ideas to improve the business.

 

A number of years further on I’m still in touch with Claude – he’s still in the USA and now a consultant! I should also mention that I’ve carried out some further work at the UK plant for Claude’s successor. Where did it all start? On a squash court!

 

Dinner Date

Some nine years ago I met Paul at a business dinner hosted by a supplier both our companies dealt with. My company had traded with Paul’s Company but we had never met. I had further dealings with Paul’s Company a few years later but only saw him fleetingly whilst visiting the premises (I don’t think I really recognised him).

When I rang him early in October he seemed pleased to hear from me and whilst inquisitive agreed to a meeting the following week. Our meeting was very relaxed and he told me how his company had developed and its good potential for the future. Having explained what I was doing he seemed genuinely interested and said he would keep me in mind with respect to the changes involved in his growth plans. In answer to the question “did he know of any companies who might be interested in my services?” he responded with two, one a supplier and one a customer. With respect to the latter he asked me not to mention his link – this was not a problem.
I contacted his supplier (£500k TO Company, 14 employees) and I met the MD/Owner towards the end of October. Following a further meeting we agreed to one fee paid day to scope a project to improve his business and make the running of it more independent of him. This blossomed in to some regular support visits and I became good friends with the owner. The Company has links to another similar sized company and supplies a major engineering OEM in the area.

 

Did I get anywhere with further contacts from Paul? Well I have still to contact the manager in his business that I actually dealt with – he’s proving a little more difficult to fix a meeting with.

 

In summary the process of networking works however results are unpredictable but most surprises are good ones.

Written by Geoff Trapnell