I just read a Fast Company article by David Teten and Scott Allen View image (oh, I like that effect... Scott's the one with the beard!) on networking, which reminded me I promised to rewrite one that I wrote some time ago, but which was lost at the unfortunate flick of a switch.
I was told what follows by the then Head of Recruitment at PwC (he may well still be there) at a seminar. At the time I thought he was being extremely calculating, but now five years on, I can see where he was coming from.
He started the seminar by saying he was going to teach us all we needed to know about networking. From what I recall, these were his instructions:
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Take a large (A3 at least) piece of paper and divide it into four columns. In the first column (let’s follow Western cultural customs and call it the left hand one), list all of your family and closest friends. In the second column, write all of the people who you consider to be good friends and contacts, in other words people who would return a phone call if you rang them. In the third column, you want to put all the people who you used to know quite well, but, with all of the pressures of modern living, etc., etc. you’ve allowed them to slip off your radar. Finally, in the right hand column, list all the people you ever wanted to meet, including potential bosses, or heroes, or anyone else you can think of (if your goal is purely professional, this might limit your ambitions, but personally I think that’s slightly boring).
You now have a personal networking tool that you can use. The goal is to move people from the right to the left and you can use any communication method you like to do it (pen and paper, email, phone, SMS, carrier pigeon – it really doesn’t matter as long as it is appropriate). What the PwC consultant suggested was that if you are in work, you should contact at least five people on the page every day. If you want to change jobs (or if you think that your job is on the line) you should raise this to ten a day. If you are actively looking for work, e.g. if you are unemployed, you should look to be contacting no fewer than twenty people a day. Every day.
If we followed this method, we were told, we would never be out of work again.
He also said that nobody in the room would follow his instructions (something that he had every reason to be happy about, given his job).
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As I said, at the time I thought he was being cynical. Then I thought about it and realised that in actual fact, it is just a very good way of managing one’s network of contacts. What’s wrong with sending an email to someone you haven’t seen for a while, or a postcard, or ringing them up out of the blue? Nothing. Does it matter that you are doing it in a vaguely systematic way? Not a jot.
What’s more, with the Fast Company article in mind, this approach to managing your contacts is a lot healthier than some of the ‘meet-as-many-people-as-you-can’ arguments that are being bandied about… personally speaking, I don’t want to be just another name in someone’s increasingly cluttered address book. Contacts are people. People you know deserve respect. The best way to show respect is to stay in touch, even if you don’t speak to them every day… or even every year!
Getting in touch with people only because you want to flog something to them, or because you want them to help you get a job is not particularly respectful, unless that is the professional relationship you have with them. By dropping people a note to say hello, you are demonstrating that you value knowing them.
I only wish that the PwC chap hadn’t been right about his prediction; I’m far too lazy and disorganised to follow his instructions…
/Dom
Cashflow is king. Cashflow is king. Cashflow is king.
Thousands of business advisors, lecturers, mentors and coaches have repeated the mantra again and again. As a budding entrepreneur, I can testify that it is worth repeating it every day. If you survive starting a company and inevitably get squeezed by clients and suppliers, you’ll know what I mean – many of the former, particularly large ones seem to have an aversion to signing cheques and popping them in the post, very few of the latter are particularly understanding when you explain to them for the umpteenth time that you are STILL waiting to receive money that is owed to you.
Still, cashflow bottlenecks do bring benefits. When I throw dinner parties, I am often asked how I became such an accomplished cook (honest, it does happen quite often! My friend, the lovely Sandira, reckoned the best meal she has tasted in the UK was at my flat and she’s French, so there!). The honest answer to my cooking skills is: Cashflow.
While I have my mother to thank for the basics – when, aged fifteen, I announced I no longer wanted to eat with the rest of my family, mum told me I had to cook for myself… given that I like to eat well, I set to and taught myself how to make decent nosh – but the reason I have been getting better and better at cooking over the years is that I’ve been broke for long periods.
I believe that what one puts in one's stomach is important and, apart from an occasional irresistible late night urge for a Whopper from Burger King (the last one tasted like burned rubber so I haven’t been back in two years, sorry BK) that means I am extremely choosey about what I buy; just like buying clothes, if you pay for quality, it lasts a lot longer (and to prove the point, I have a 1930's French airman's leather jacket).
You see I love making stews and casseroles and my fridge-freezer pretty much always has a ready supply of stocks of various kinds on hand for immediate use; currently there’s what’s left of a particularly good fish stock in a jar in the fridge, as well as a handy bean one (useful if any vegetarians pop round). I had a joint for lunch/dinner today and the bones will be boiled up in due course. While I lived in Sweden, I became proficient in the art of pickling and, although I haven’t yet found a reliable, cheap source of herring in central London, I find that mackerel makes a fair substitute (goes a bit mushy if you don’t eat it quickly). My pickled vegetables are delicious.
I haven’t counted my collection of cookbooks for some time now, but it totalled over fifty several years ago and has continued to grow since – I tend to pick them up when I visit foreign countries, as understanding the food of a given culture is, together with its language, fundamental to understanding how the locals think. For good British cuisine (yes it does exist, my parents cooking being an excellent example) Nigel Slater is as good as any and I have most of the books he has written – this is also one of the reasons I tend buy the Observer on Sundays, as he is the resident cookery writer. I can also recommend Joël Robuchon for modern French delights – check out his book on the ‘humble’ potato! Carl Butler has published some great insights into traditional Swedish food, while Carla Capalba (bottom of the page) has done the same for Tuscany… mind you, pretty much any Italian cookbook is brilliant and I have never met an Italian who can’t rustle up a masterpiece with barely half a dozen ingredients. One country whose food I love, but for which I haven’t yet found a decent recipe book is Spain. I think that’s because I graze on tapas when I’m there and have only eaten ‘proper meals’ a handful of times in the many years I have been visiting that great country – on reflection, that’s not strictly true as I recall I ate everything on the menu of one restaurant, La Paloma (halfway down the page), in the six months I spent in Malaga, but that was before I started forming companies, so it doesn’t count.
I'm also very knowledgeable about which foods to carry with me in order to stave off pangs of hunger and save on the cost of dining out... Organic chocolate and pork pies are firm favourites!
Luckily, when one's finances are particularly weak and credit/debit cards are maxed out, British supermarkets seem to accept them for a lot longer than bars and restaurants... although that does mean you get stung for 'card misuse' every time you have to resort to using them. I guess it makes the food taste all the better!
Four of my friends have now told me that I should open a restaurant and two of them insist they would invest if I did… I just haven’t found the right location yet (and I’m far too busy chasing invoices!). The fact that Crisis trained me up on food hygiene can only be a good thing on this front.
[My company has just received a cheque for an invoice that was issued fourteen weeks ago, despite the stated terms of payment… obviously my beloved client – and I really do enjoy working for them – thought there was a risk I’d blow it all on corporate Christmas gifts, so they rescued me from that fate. Thanks.]