Business Networking Strategy

Next week is Enterprise Week in the UK. Part of the Make Your Mark Campaign, Enterprise Week (12-18th November) is a national celebration of enterprise in all its forms with thousands of events and activities happening across the UK. Last year there were 3,184 events, and 448,000 people took part!

I am speaking on 'The Noble Art of Networking' at The Swedish Chamber of Commerce UK in London on Monday April 28th. The event, at The Swedish Embassy, runs from 6.30pm until 9.30pm and I have a few invites for my network. I have spoken for the Swedish Chamber before and the events they run are excellent. It is a very warm and friendly crowd and there are some very good people to connect with there. If you would like to come along, please email me at andy@lopata.co.uk. I need to send names to the Chamber by next week, so please contact me by Tuesday 25th March.

Tim's comment on my last blog raises a very interesting question. When it comes to taking networking opportunities,as Tim put it, "So we all have time (168 hours per week), energy, and money. The question is 'how should we spend it?'" So, where can you go to network and connect with people?

An interesting combination of statistics stands out from the Ecademy survey released today. Over half of the respondents (56%) state that they get less than 10% of their business through online networking, with only just over 10% getting 50% or more from that source. At the same time, nearly 40% of members get over 50% of their business through offline networking. Nothing unusual about that, you may think.