Keeping your network alive
A very long time ago, President John F. Kennedy was holding a news conference. After he concluded his prepared remarks, he opened himself up to questions from the assembled reporters. The first question was: What had he and his administration done to further the equality of women in this country. He paused for a moment, smiled, and said: “I’m sure not enough.”
In much the same way, most of our members if asked how much networking they had done in the past year would also answer: “I’m sure not enough.”
A few years ago I hosted a Stop by My Office on the issues involved in building a fractional CFO/Controller consulting practice. One point I mentioned the need to spend at least one day a week on practice development. It doesn’t have to be one full day each week, but to be successful you do have to devote 10%-20% of your time to finding new clients. (The phrase “all jobs are temporary” comes to mind. It is also true about clients.) You can do an hour or two every day or 15 minutes in the morning and 45 minutes in the afternoon and more on some days than others. Any variation on this theme will work. You can even count research time against this goal.
For those only interested in W-2 employment, there are only 3 ways to ensure that you will be able to work as long as YOU want to work: Networking, Networking and more Networking. Job leads are all very amusing and we do publish a lot of them, but the “real deal” is networking.
Jobs have always been an all-consuming proposition, at least in my career. That said, I always made a point to call those I knew several times a year to see how they were doing, and when I worked in Manhattan, to meet for lunch. I can’t say I did it every week, but when things got quiet, I would try to “take a day off at the office” and connect with old friends. I had an address book, and I would work my way through it from A to Z. No reason to be random.
Sadly, once you hit middle age and are no longer working for “the great corporation,” you will through no fault of your own be changing jobs from time to time. It’s the nature of working for middle market companies. The good ones get acquired and the CFO gets fired. The bad ones go out of business and the CFO gets fired. Not much you can do about it but manage your career smartly.
In today’s world, you have better tools than I had with my hand-written address book. Buy yourself a contact database program that you can keep on your own laptop. It is your best security blanket. I built one for myself in MS Access and used to copy it from my home computer to my office computer. (It actually formed the basis for The FENG’s membership database.) An Excel spreadsheet won’t keep you organized. You need to be able to page through to see who you haven’t “pestered” in a while. Each record needs to be a page that sort of stands on its own with notes and comments.
No one ever has enough friends, even me. So, in addition to calling your old friends on a regular basis, you need to always be trying to add to your Inner Circle of Friends. Should I mention The FENG’s website? Why not?
We have a great tool called Member Directory Search which you will find at: https://www.thefeng.org/members/search. There are endless ways to utilize this remarkable tool to play “New Friend Solitaire.” Start by putting in the names of firms where you’ve worked. If you have worked for large companies and the tool returns too many responses, use the “Records Updated After” feature and set it for one year or at most two years back. In this way, you will only be looking at records of members who have cared enough to update their listings. They are more likely to engage with you.
It is a regular Swiss Army Knife with ALL the blades. You can look up folks in your town, your Special Interest Groups, folks who have worked for your competitors. Really, there isn’t enough space in an editorial to list all the ways. Be inventive. And, let me appeal to your inner accountant. You can search as many different ways as you like, and it won’t cost you any more money. And you can search as many hours as you like at no additional cost.
The care and feeding of your network is key to your long term success. Don’t be the person who only calls when they are out of work.
As the sign in the restaurant said: Good food takes time. Give your network the time and attention it deserves. It will taste better.
Regards, Matt