OPINION: Dougal Paver on networking

It isn't what you know; it isn't who you know; it's what use you make of who you know that counts - and what use you let them make of you.
Put another way, if your outlook is to help good people they'll reciprocate, with long-term gains for your business. Behave like a 'harvester', going to events to grab as many cards as possible and you'll soon be brushing up on the law of diminishing returns.
There's an intangible quality to building and sustaining a strong network: you know that people bat for you, but much of it is unseen and you often can't pinpoint a single action that led to a great referral. But keep looking after people and the referrals keep coming.
Networking, therefore, not only adds to the stock of people you know, it constantly throws up opportunities for you to help others.
Because it's a long game it doesn't work for people in a hurry. Their impatience undermines the whole principle and they sit on the sidelines wondering why it is that you're getting sniffs of business that never wafted past them.
The market's so huge, of course, that there are literally thousands of orders placed every week that you never had sight of. All you can concentrate on is your own network, not anybody else's.
After all, the grass isn't greenest over there: it's greenest where you water it most.