Tend Your Garden

We've been travelling away from our home in Michigan most of the past two months. Business, family, weddings and such have kept us away from our home of twenty-some years.

It's a great house, old, full of character and with a beautiful lawn, shrubbery and gardens. But, with great grounds comes great responsibility. We've had someone looking after the place, mowing the lawn, getting the delivered packages, etc.. We're heading back soon and I'm worried what I'll find. Will the tomato exo-skeletons still be standing in the garden like rusted sculptures, will the leaves cover the ground in wet, mushy masses and will the random weeds outnumber the "good" plants? We'll soon know.

I like to work in the yard, but it's not my favorite thing to do. I do it out of a sense of pride and Midwest, middle-class responsibility. Mow the lawn on Sunday. Don't be "that guy", who has the brown, overgrown, weedy yard. These are things drilled into my head and part of my psyche. It's the same way with my business network, maintain your contacts, know your "friends", help people out whenever you can and keep looking for ways to freshen things up.

Here are some of the things that I regularly do to "tend my garden", business network-style.

• Categorize your contacts within your network - Determine who are your most cherished contacts, those who you'd call when you need something. They can be your best friends, those who you've helped in a big way, and those who are the most influential in their segments of business. These are my business advisers. In my case, this list represents around 5% of my network.
• Develop a contact strategy to keep in touch with your network. For me, it's a call once/quarter, sometimes just to say hello and find out what's new in their world. It's amazing the things you can learn, both that which is just plain interesting and that which is useful to you in your everyday life.
• Never miss an opportunity to connect with new people. I spoke with one of my business advisers this morning and she let me know she'd hired two new employees to manage part of their growing business. I didn't know these two people, but they do work in my field and it would be useful to know them. She offered to introduce me. I won't pass up that opportunity.
• Never pass up an opportunity to help someone in your network. You can never be too helpful and you can never know when the help you provide will come back to help you.

There are lots of other contact strategies and many posts which can help you develop a strategy of your own. However you plan your contact activities, make sure you keep your network garden tended and do it every day. It will yield results long after the seeds are planted.