…work for you?

All these £15 quid lunches and stuff?

Sort of – you never know how things are gonna pan out, but it's the old lottery ticket scenario innit?

Yeah. We've never really had to market ourselves in the past (although we have done), and now it's getting tighter I'm wondering whether spending on the lunches that may or may not bring in the bucks is worth it

I guess it depends on what the event is. Is everyone there going to be on 'transmit' mode and looking for opportunities, or is it an event where people are actually looking for people to fulfil situations and projects etc? It certainly can work, but perhaps not often, and maybe you have to choose your networking events wisely. Obviously, a huge amount of business is based on networking, I guess you just need to build your own one up bit by bit, as I am doing now.

Yeah – we don't use these sort of events to actively try to get business directly, more to get our name known in the area as you never know when a friend of a friend of someone who once went needs someone who can offer what we do.

And as I type we are waiting to hear from a local business who *might* want to engage our services after such a chance opportunity.

I do a weekly breakfast meeting – i've been a member for about 6 years and it's more than paid its way every year, so that's OK. It's not a short term thing though, you get people who show up and expect to be minting it after a few weeks and that just doesn't happen – if you reccomend someone who turns out to be a turkey then that reflects badly on you, so there's a fair bit of 'testing the water' before anything really emerges. I've had intros to jobs that i'd never have got any other way, so if you're prepared to do the leg work then it can pay. Just turning up for a lunch now and again won't do a damn thing.

The other big thing is to see who else is there – if you're a financial adviser and you go to a group where there's a mortgage broker and a solicitor then things could work well – if there's no obvious connection with anyone else then it'll be that much harder to make it work.

So take your time, visit a bunch of them and decide what feels right for you and your business, then commit to attending those meetings. Attending the right one or two good networking groups will pay off better than scattering yourself too thinly.

Totally depends on what sort of event and what you want from it.

Some go just to fight over scraps of business (and are a PITA), some go about it sensibly but IMO, if you need to use this sort of "fake" environment to try and win business, you aren't doing thing right.

Get a delegate list if you can and whatever you do, don't try and big time anyone! Had the same done to me by a company that decided to try and "one up" us with loud and arrogant remarks and attempted put downs and they ended up looking really, really silly. Many try it on.