Does it really work?

A fortnight ago I introduced two people to each other. Nothing unusual about that - except that one of them, I’d never actually spoken to myself.

Let me walk you through it, because the timeline is the whole point. I’ve changed the names; everything else is exactly as it happened.

I’d reached out to Andrew on LinkedIn the same way I reach out to anyone - a short note, written off his profile, about the work he actually does. No pitch, no angle. Just: you look like someone worth knowing, let me find out about what you do.

We got messaging back and forth, and the conversation drifted somewhere I’ve seen it drift before with fractional executives: how much they lean on each other. When you work across half a dozen businesses at once, you can’t be across everything - so fractionals end up trusting other fractionals, and passing work between themselves, more than almost any group I know.

And then Andrew mentioned, almost in passing, that the place he was working with right now had a gap. They needed exactly the kind of help that a bloke in my network provides - Rob, a fractional CFO.

Now here’s the part I want you to sit with. At this point, Andrew and I had never spoken. Not a phone call, not a Zoom, nothing - just messages. The old rules say this is far too early. You haven’t earned it yet. Referrals are the payoff at the end of years of coffees and favours, the interest on trust you’ve slowly banked.

I introduced Rob anyway - before my own first call with Andrew had even happened.

The next day, Andrew came back to me: great call, perfect fit, he’d be recommending Rob to the business.

So what actually happened there? Not charm. Not history - there wasn’t any. What made that introduction land was everything that happened before it: Andrew was in my world because I’d chosen him, deliberately. There’s a first cut everyone does, and it matters - the right industry, enough years of experience, whether they’ve actually posted on LinkedIn lately or gone quiet. That tells you who’s worth a look. But the filter that does the real work comes after it, and almost nobody applies it: attitude. Does this person think long-term about relationships? Do they share what they know? Do they talk about other people as generously as they talk about themselves? Andrew read that way from his profile onwards - and Rob was in my world for exactly the same reasons. When the need appeared, the introduction was almost mechanical - right person, meet right person. Two days, start to finish.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about a well-chosen network: the introductions aren’t a distant reward for years of relationship maintenance. They’re just what happens when the right people are connected and actually talking. The years-of-coffees version isn’t wrong because the trust is fake - it’s wrong about where the trust comes from. It comes from who you selected - especially on attitude - far more than from how long you’ve known them.

And notice the direction it flowed. I didn’t get a recommendation - I gave one, to someone in my network, from someone brand new to it. Which raises a question worth turning over: if introductions like that are moving through a network within days of someone joining it - what happens when you’re the one standing in the middle of it?

That’s where this series is heading. Next: why the way most of us were taught to network makes stories like this one basically impossible.