Yesterday I joined a lunchtime networking session that, on the face of it, was no different from hundreds of others taking place across the country. A collection of mostly solo business owners and micro businesses logged on, introduced themselves and began chatting. Nobody was trying to conquer the world before close of play and there wasn’t a motivational speaker promising we’d all be millionaires by Friday by follwing their simple 3 step process. It was simply a group of people talking honestly about business. What surprised me was how quickly the conversation drifted away from sales, marketing and turnover. Instead, we found ourselves talking about something far more fundamental. People.
Several admitted they missed working in an office, not because they longed for fluorescent lighting, broken printers or the annual debate about whose yoghurt had been stolen from the fridge, but because they missed being surrounded by other human beings. There is something strangely motivating about overhearing someone else’s small victory, listening to a challenge they’ve overcome or simply hearing conversations that have nothing whatsoever to do with your own workload.
When you work on your own, your biggest daily conversation can easily become the one you have with the latest WIndows update which has disabled your internal camera drivers – again… Working for yourself can be seen as the dream, and in many ways it is. You decide what hours you work and whether Tuesday afternoon is a perfectly acceptable time to mow the lawn because the sun has finally appeared. Nobody questions your decisions because, rather wonderfully, they’re your decisions to make.
The downside is that you also lose something you never really appreciated while you had it. Offices are noisy places, not just physically but intellectually; ideas bounce around, someone mentions a customer problem and another person casually says, “Have you tried this?” Before you know it, a solution has appeared almost by accident – this sort of spontaneous exchange is surprisingly difficult to recreate when your office consists of four walls and a broadband connection and a cat walking across your zoom screen.
As the conversation continued, another interesting pattern emerged. Quite a few people around the table had already experienced building businesses with partners. Some had sold successful companies, while others had simply reached a point where they wanted something different. None of them were saying partnerships were a mistake, but almost all had reached the same conclusion. They no longer wanted to tie themselves to another business relationship in quite the same way. Instead, many of us had built something arguably more valuable: our own trusted circle: an accountant and solicitor who understands our business and does not charge big corp rates, a web designer who does it right up front and does all your updates as part of your annual package. None of these people sit on a company payroll, yet all of them play a part in helping the business succeed.
It struck me that this may be where modern business is heading: rather than creating one organisation that attempts to do everything, more people are creating small, agile businesses surrounded by carefully chosen experts. Everyone remains independent and when the right opportunity comes along, they collaborate naturally because trust already exists. That seems a far healthier model than feeling you have to find a single business partner who shares your ambitions, your appetite for risk, your work ethic, your long-term plans and, ideally, your tolerance for working weekends when needed. Finding someone who ticks every one of those boxes is a bit like looking for a unicorn that also does the backups.
The beauty of trusted collaborators is that every relationship exists because both people choose it. There is no obligation to manufacture work for each other or force decisions through because of a legal agreement. If someone is the right person for a project, they become part of it, if not, they might well be on the next one.
Perhaps that’s what networking has become at its best: no longer about collecting business cards or seeing how many LinkedIn connections you can accumulate before lunch. It’s about slowly discovering the people you genuinely enjoy working with, whose judgement you respect and whose values align with your own.
Business can be a lonely place, particularly if you’re running it alone. Yesterday’s conversation reminded me that independence doesn’t have to mean isolation and maybe the most successful independent businesses may be those that never stop building relationships with other independent businesses.
You might own your company on your own, but there’s absolutely no reason you have to build it on your own.
