Lisa Vickers

The reasons are endless! As well as identifying new business opportunities, networking allows you to share ideas, experience and good practice, meet inspirational role models, combat isolation by making new contacts, increase your confidence and self-esteem and build long term relationships.

In the early stages of business it is easy to suddenly become isolated and lose touch with what is happening around you - therefore missing out on opportunities that could be vital to your business.

However, networking isn’t just for business types, if you’re in an organisation, it helps you seek out like-minded people, uncover opportunities and build relationships.

Difficult to say as I have met so many interesting and wonderful people over the years, and developed many relationships.

However, if I had to pull out just one, that would have to be the late Sandy Richardson who I was introduced to at one of my first networking events. Sandy was passionate about women’s enterprise and an inspirational networker. She put people at the heart of everything she did, bringing together like-minded people and developing partnerships and links wherever possible. She sadly dies of breast cancer in 2005 but is still remembered throughout the North East and beyond and remains my inspiration and role model.

Practice, practice, practice! Make time for it, and remember that it takes time to build relationships and trust, so don’t expect immediate results. If you put the effort in, you’ll reap the rewards. But remember that there’s no one single method for networking, so don’t get too hung up on it – be yourself!

Email (a lot), face to face meetings and that good old fashioned thing, the telephone! I have various databases and email lists so that I can find contact details easily – however, I still rely on my card index system to store contacts and business cards and those people who you don’t keep in touch with regularly, but you know will come in useful one day!

Arrange an event with an interesting topic/focus – do your research beforehand and find out what your members/network are interested in. Having it on the same day each month helps people plan and build the events into their hectic diaries. Create an attendee list which details attendee names and what their business does, and send it out in advance so that people can pre-plan their networking Prepare name tags in BIG LETTERS. If it’s someone’s first event, make sure you know about it and have a greeter to introduce them to others. Get feedback from each event and act on it. Remember you can’t please everyone all of the time!