Starting a business is hard. really, really hard. It’s also pretty anti-social and there’s no such thing as a 9-5, on the plus side its rewarding, really, really rewarding!
In a bid to be infinitely more social, we attended our first Networking event, in a former life this would have made me shudder (honestly it still made me shudder), however, in the spirit of open mindedness I went along trying to suppress my pre conceived ideas.
So it turns out Networking is genuinely a great way to get the business ball rolling - unlike Fight Club the first rule of Networking club is to talk - simply telling new people what you do is a really liberating experience, they will be genuinely interested (or at least do an Oscar winning job of feigning interest) and in exchange for you telling them what you do and how you do it they do the same. I found speaking to people about my personal experience starting a business is a great way to learn, if you’re an advocate of the mantra of failing fast, there are worse ways to fail fast than have someone do the failing for you - then tell you about what not to do!
You’ll also grow a network of other brains, ideas and experience to tap into - and your customers will really appreciate that, after all knowledge is power, shared knowledge (it seems) is even more powerful!
So my idea for this week is (unsurprisingly) for you to find a local networking group - go along, leave your preconceptions behind, introduce yourself, use it as a launch pad to do what you do best - talk about you and your business to other business owners, one of the things that was very clear to me was the most valuable USP of your business is you so exploit it, show off and sell yourself - you never know you might even enjoy it!
One final piece of advice is don’t do what I did and spend the entire time enthusiastically calling someone by a totally different name (a lot) #awkward
Go out there and get ‘em!
(IDEA) Lee