Build Your Network
The biggest advantage you can build is through your network, but it doesn’t just happen.
Sometimes you start a new venture with your network already developed, knowing all the people you will need to make progress fast.
More likely, you absolutely don’t.
Even if you do have a network in place, it will need to develop and evolve as you learn about new worlds, new challenges, new problems, and new markets.
I talked earlier in the year about how it isn’t what you know, but who you know. This post is about the practicalities of building your network.
Your networks are made up of all sorts of people — and these relationships can alter how you engage and what you ask for. How frequently you get in touch with advisors or customers is different to investors or your team.
Here are some things to consider as you build your network of supporters around you.
Where to meet people
There are ways to accidentally build your network, and ways to be more proactive.
You might have had luck on your side when meeting people at uni who shared your corridor in halls, or you might have had the serendipity of picking a seat next to a like-mind in your first lecture. It could have been a supportive boss or colleague who backs you even after you’ve moved on.
These “accidental” relationships might not have been by design, but they are still massively valuable.
As you start, grow, and develop your business, you might need to take a more proactive and intentional approach to growing the “who you know”. This might sound cynical, but it is a part of everyday life when running your business, so as with every other part of your day job, it’s useful to have systems, processes, and designs in place to make this more effective.
Thinking about the sorts of people you want to meet is an important step. When you’re looking for investors you’re going to look in different places and take a different approach to when you’re looking for a co-founder or future team members.
There’s a strategy akin to building personas for your marketing activities that can work here, thinking about who you’re trying to reach and how you might find them.
It isn’t always that easy, but it’s important to remember: you don’t know who you don’t know.
Don’t be too narrow minded — some of the most interesting conversations you can have will come from people who you might have had no agenda or reason to meet with.
Even after being active in an area or ecosystem for years, you can still find new people — despite feeling like you’ve completely exhausted the pool. This is true in bigger cities and ecosystems like capital cities, or in regions.
The most effective thing I’ve ever found to build your network is to just ask people for introductions.
If you meet someone interesting, chances are they know other interesting folks. At the end of those meetings, ask if they have any people they’d recommend you speak to next. If you can get three introductions from every meeting then you can very rapidly scale up your network.
If you’ve made a good impression and they make the introduction you have a much higher chance of getting a response than if you cold-message them on LinkedIn or by email.
Always on the lookout for your future team
I took a really useful bit of advice from David Stevens when he gave the keynote upon becoming Chair of Business in Focus.
He said to always be on the lookout for your future team. He shared the example of when they founded Admiral.
The four co-founders had all known each other for five years or so, but had never had a conversation about ever starting a business. They just knew that they liked and, crucially, trusted each other.
When one of the co-founders had the idea and opportunity to launch Admiral, they called around this small network of people with the offer to see if they could get them on board.
Whenever you meet someone new, try to carry that question in the back of your mind. “Would they make a good co-founder?” and, “Is this someone I want to work with in the future?”
After exiting from ICE, I spent the summer doing a lot of life design activities, but one of the things I did was wrote down a long list of people I want to find a way to work with in the future. It’s a simple activity, but it asks a question of you that you don’t often ask.
If you’re pre-start, it helps to think about questions like these. Who will be your co-founder? Who will join you at the crucial moment? Who inspires you and makes you feel like you can take on the world?
Recruitment is hard, it’s even harder to find someone who has the commitment that you will need if you’re a start up or purpose driven venture that’s going to have to go through hell to get to its destination.
I’ve talked about this in the post on finding a co-founder, but if you can do a lot more due diligence on a potential co-founder years in advance, you can keep an eye out for traits that you might learn to love or hate when going through the punishing process of growing a business together.
In That Will Never Work, Marc Randolph talks about his car rides with Reed Hastings when they commuted and worked together at Pure Atria being crucial to the development and eventual launch of Netflix.
They spent every day discussing the merits of different ideas, markets, and opportunities. They picked them apart without ever acknowledging or committing to the idea of ever starting a business, but it built a trust and understanding between them that was a strong foundation for building a business which 60% of households in the UK alone have access to.
Five year process
Building a network, like anything in growing a business, is not an overnight effort. It takes years.
Jeffrey Hall, a Professor at the University of Kansas has spent years studying this topic, and in 2018 released a paper which set out how long it takes to build relationships.
His study suggests that it takes 50 hours of time together to move from an “acquaintance” to a “casual friend”, 90 hours to get to “friend” and more than 200 hours — or 50x four-hour chunks of time — to get to “close friend” status.
More importantly, it is the intensity of that time together that makes the difference.
You might not be looking to build friendships, but it’s useful to understand what it takes to build meaningful relationships.
If you don’t have all the time in the world, there are simple things you need to do if you want to build trust fast, and they’re really more indicative of being a good person.
You need to be consistent, do what you say you will do, keep to your word, and understand what is shared in confidence and what can be shared wider.
As a social pollinator you can create value by sharing useful knowledge, which helps people to better understand a situation or ecosystem, but there’s a fine line between that and oversharing and getting a reputation for having loose lips.
You need to give value if you’re asking for anything in return, but that’s a separate topic for another day.
Some simple things that I found mind-blowing when I learnt about them:
You’re more likely to make a good impression if you meet someone over a coffee than a cold drink.
Research published in 2009 from Lawrence Williams and John Bargh showed that you build stronger connections when someone is holding a warm drink in their hand. The theory here is that this influences our perception of the “warmth” between the two people.
Another staggering example of this is the weight of a clipboard, and its influence on recruitment. Again in 2009, Nils Postman at the University of Amsterdam shared research that showed that we were more likely to value a candidate who’s CV was attached to a heavier clipboard than a lighter one, even when the achievements were identical.
If you’re rushing about, late, unreliable, and taking them into a cold meeting room with just water to drink, it doesn’t matter how competent you are and how good the content is of what you’re delivering — you’re going to be at a disadvantage.
One final example of this is singing. It isn’t so easy to make a new acquaintance join you in a song, but there appears to be nothing better when it comes to building relationships than singing or drumming together. Synchronicity and shared vulnerability, as well as so much more, creates the perfect conditions for building relationships. There’s a reason why so many rituals include songs and chanting.
This can all feel like a full-time job, but we can learn from Robin Dunbar and his creation — Dunbar’s Number.
Dunbar’s number tells us that we can only realistically keep track of around 150 “meaningful relationships”. There are steps within this 150: two “special friends” usually a partner or family member, five “close friends” and so on.
You might have 1,000 connections on LinkedIn and Facebook, but you can’t possibly sustain 1,000 meaningful relationships by Robin Dunbar’s definition.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DunbarsNumber.png
Don’t overly worry about having to keep hundreds and hundreds of meaningful relationships going, this isn’t sustainable or realistic.
But it does introduce one last point: the amount of time you spend finding new people vs reengaging with past contacts.
If you’re spending all of your time building your network and finding new friends then you’re going to lose all of the old ones. This isn’t like Pokemon, or mid 2000s Facebook friend collecting.
Different friends will be there at different times of your life, normally when you are going on shared experiences. Your uni friends are more likely to stay closer if you get married at similar times and start raising a family at the same time. This was captured beautifully by C.S. Lewis in The Four Loves:
“Those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers.”
Focus on connecting with people that you want to have with you on the journey, not for hollow and transactional reasons, but because you enjoy their company, trust their perspectives, and feel you can take on the world with them by your side.
There’s one last point on ecosystem mapping which I wanted to include in this but feel guilty about how long this one has become! If you’re interested to know more about that, give me a shout, otherwise I’ll maybe cover that at some stage down the line.
Bonus activity time!
A couple of years ago I delivered a workshop on this topic and created this documentto help go through the exercise.
Some simple instructions:
At the top, write out a ten-word goal. Something simple that sets out what you’re looking to achieve. Give yourself two minutes.
In the boxes on the left-hand side, write out five steps you need to take to get closer to the goal. Give yourself three or four minutes.
Next, below the three heads write a high-level identifier for who you might need to speak to in order to hit those steps. That might be something like “lawyer”, “designer”, “customer”, “investor”, or “mentor”.
Underneath that title, write something specific about that person, for example if you put “customer” you might put “currently paying”, or “currently using a competitor’s product”. Give yourself four or five minutes.
Finally, in the abc boxes, come up with three specific actions to meet with those people, identify those people, or move forward on your steps. This might be “Speak to five current users about our new feature” but be as specific as possible — name those users if you can. In the right-hand column put a deadline in there.
Summary
Networking might feel icky, and the idea of network building might seem cynical, but it is an important part of building your strength as a founder.
Understand our relationships, why we rely on them and what they mean to us, can help us to better design and maintain those that we value most.
Founding a business is not a solo adventure. Recognise and nurture those relationships that can make the difference.
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