Benefits of Local Networking for Entrepreneurs and Would-be Entrepreneurs
Dip
July 21st, 2009
When you network, you gain the trust of others as well as their “seal of approval.” That makes your business stronger and more competitive in the mainstream marketplace. But, networking is more than exchanging business cards. It means initiating relationship. A contact won’t remember your name for long time unless he notices and values you. In this article, I emphasized on the core benefits for business networking.
- Network with each other: Experts in small business networking recommend that you start by assessing your own strengths and weaknesses. That way, as you develop your network, you can focus on building bridges to those areas where you need help. Find local business and civic groups and start joining them. Chamber of Commerce, women’s business alliances, neighborhood business councils and other business leader networks, professional organizations are good example to begin with. Be genuinely interested in gaining a mutual benefit from networking. Don’t only take, be ready also to give.
- Collaborate on projects for mutual benefits: The objective is to reduce production costs, make better use of skilled, specialist resources, and speed up the time to market. Tools like videoconferencing and the use of secure extranets made collaboration simple. You can use collaboration to bring together the knowledge, experience, and skills of multiple team members from different organizations. They can contribute to the development of a new product more effectively than individual team members in one company. By collaborating and creating joint teams, you can tackle key challenges in the product development process, reduce the time to market, improve the success rate of new products, and grow market share and revenues.
- Access to other Resources: You shouldn’t only collaborate within your own technical or managerial group only. It is imperative for you to get access to architectural, administrative, HR and other resources so that all of you can perform better as a group. Say for example, if HR people do not provide right resources for a new project that includes hardware, software or skilled manpower, the performance of the project may turn out to be a nightmare.
- Educate people about their product and services: You may be a technology buff. If you are into local networking, this is your turn to provide technical knowledge to other people in the group so that they can have a better value addition in their respective area with your companionship.
- Get feedback from other entrepreneurs about their product and services: If you are going to launch new product or services, you can find people with similar interest from the group and get their feedback about their product and services. That can give you some new tips about the design of new product, potential marketability and a ballpark about the ROI.
- Be able to hire mercurial and goal driven candidate: Another positive aspect of local networking is that you may be able to get right candidate for your company if you have any hiring plan soon. The reason is that you get to know many people in different groups in terms of their technical skills, interpersonal skills, goal down the road. That can save you much time and revenue related to on line or newspaper ad and interview process etc.
- Future entrepreneurs: Would-be entrepreneurs will be able to know the reality of their profession from the experienced entrepreneurs in the group. They will also be able to know their shortcomings and the way how to avoid them. Also, they can get some hands-on training or job opportunity to gain further knowledge about their profession by joining at any organization that belongs to established entrepreneur in the networking group. The future entrepreneurs should also arrange for meeting with other experienced people in the group to expose themselves further for future entrepreneurship.
Related?
