Choose, Don't Collect

Think about the last networking event you went to. Who was in the room?

Whoever paid to be there. That’s the whole answer. Not the people best placed to send you work, not the people whose judgement you’d trust with your reputation - just whoever bought a ticket, in whatever mix of industries and intentions the morning happened to serve up. And then you did the polite, diligent thing: you worked with what the room gave you. Swapped cards with the mortgage broker. Had the coffee with the printer. Hoped.

We treat that as normal. It’s worth saying out loud how strange it is.

In every other part of your business, you select. You don’t hire whoever walks past the office. You don’t take on every client who rings - you’ve learned the hard way what a wrong-fit client costs. But when it comes to the network - the asset that decides where your next years of revenue come from - most professionals accept whatever assortment of people circumstance deals them, and then wonder why the recommendations feel random.

Here’s the shift: you’re allowed to choose the room.

Not tweak it. Choose it. Decide, before you meet a single person, who actually belongs in your network - and go find those people, instead of hoping they find the same breakfast you did.

That flips the question from “how do I work this room?” to “who should be in the room at all?” And that’s an upstream decision. It happens before the coffee, before the handshake, before the follow-up. Get it right and everything downstream gets easier, because you’re building relationships with people you picked on purpose. Get it wrong - or never make it at all - and no amount of charm or follow-up discipline fixes it. You can’t relationship your way out of a badly chosen room.

So what does choosing look like in practice? Two filters.

The first is position. LinkedIn means you can search the whole professional landscape and pull out exactly the kind of people you want - by role, by industry, by where they sit relative to your future clients. The person who belongs in your room usually isn’t a buyer. It’s someone embedded where your future clients live, who’ll come to know your work well enough to put their name behind it.

The second filter is the one nobody automates: attitude. Some people get relationships and think in introductions; some collect contacts and think in transactions. You’ve met both. Only one of them belongs in a network you’re going to invest years in - and you can tell which is which surprisingly early if you’re actually looking for it.

Position, then attitude. Filter twice, and the room stops being an accident.

And notice what that means: the quality of your network was never really about how good you are at networking. The charm, the follow-up, the staying in touch - all of it multiplies whatever the room contains. Selection decides what there is to multiply.

So here’s the question to sit with: if you could put twenty people in a room - any twenty, chosen deliberately for where they sit and how they think - who would they be? Not who do you know. Who would you choose?

Hold that picture - because that room isn’t a fantasy. Imagine every one of those twenty coming to know your work well enough to put their name behind it, sending the right people your way without being asked. That’s not a better networking event. It’s a network you designed on purpose - and it can be built.