Don't Be A Selfish Networker

I went to a networking event last week, nothing new there, but there were 3 new people that I got to have a chat with and each one of them bothered me for different reasons.

This doesn't usually happen by the way and it's probably unprofessional of me to talk about, but I think every encounter is a learning experience and maybe by sharing this story with you I can help you think a little more about the things you say and do within the scope of your business and how you interact with people.

So, first off I spoke to a gentleman who had recently launched a HR business. I always try to find out as much as I can about people's businesses to store away in my vault of information in case it can help me in the future, my clients or people I know. This gentleman worked with anyone from a sole trader taking on their first employee to teams with 20+ staff.

His ideal clients were those with more than 10 team members so that he could offer a rolling monthly subscription. I asked him what a rough cost would be for someone looking for support with their first employee, putting policies and contracts in place. His answer was that there is no set price because if he feels the job is going to be more effort than it is worth, he would simply hike the prices.

Yeah. I didn't really like that. It was a rookie mistake to share such unethical practices with someone you had only just met and I could tell he thought so too. Maybe I'm being naive, but my outlook is to be helpful, a small business owner taking on their first employee is likely to be stretched anyway financially. Hiking prices just because the workload isn't going to be sufficient enough for you for me, feels all wrong. But that's just my opinion.

Person number 2. Have you ever been networking and spoke to someone who clearly has no interest in anyone other than themselves? Of course you have, who hasn't, right? Well, person number 2 was launching a new business and this was their first time networking. After telling me all about their business without asking a single question about mine, I decided to volunteer the information myself. Now, please bear in mind, when I network, I talk more about the systems and processes I help businesses with, the automation and more technical side of how I support people. So, when I finished explaining and she said "oh, so you're like a receptionist"? I felt justifiably aggrieved.

Moving swiftly on to person number 3 and she had been trying to lose weight for years and had a finally managed by finding a nutritional supplement from an American doctor who had turned it into a big business, recruiting people to use the supplement and then sell it. Now, I think if you're going to go down the route of offering health and nutrition advice you have to know exactly what you are talking about, be qualified or have a mass of experience, and be extremely careful that you're not giving false information and be passionate about genuinely supporting people.

So, I understand a little bit about nutrition and naturally, when she started telling me that this nutritional supplement could regenerate cells I quizzed her more on that. I asked her if fasting was part of the programme because I understand that fasting can achieve this or something along those lines. She said yes. Well, for me, it's not the supplement offering this benefit it's the fasting. Anyway, after explaining how great the product was she then exclaimed; "and you can make money too"!

I did a double take. What? That's when she explained that just by watching a coaching video you could then go on and peddle this stuff to other people. Sounded very much like a pyramid scheme to me and when it comes to people's health and nutrition, I don't feel good about that.

So, what's my point? Well, all three people turned up with selfish intentions and networking can't be selfish. That might have been naivety on their side. But two of them also made it quite clear that the end game for them was money. It wasn't serving their customers in the best way they could, offering care and concern, or sharing in their clients success. It very much felt "as long as I get paid, I don't care"

A bit of a scathing article today and I'm sorry about that. But it bothered me. Please don't show up networking with these sorts of attitudes. Yes we want to do business with people but we also want to connect with people, we want to know about them and we want to help them. More importantly, we want to show them how passionate we are about solving our customers problems and how much those customers mean to us. Because those business owners are the only business owners I'm going to make referrals to.

Have a great day!

Lisa

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