Pleasing methods, pleasing results

There’s a kind of networking that feels wonderful and produces almost nothing. You know the one. You may well have paid for it.

The weekly breakfast. The badge, the round-table, the sixty-second pitch you’ve polished to a shine. A room of friendly faces, a coffee, a genuine warmth to it. You leave feeling like you did the thing - like a good, diligent professional who’s out there, building. And that feeling is most of the problem, because the feeling is a lot of what you’re paying for.

Let me be careful here. I’m not sneering at any of it. I ran networking meetings myself for years - in person and online - and did enormous amounts of matchmaking by hand. I know exactly why people love these rooms. The company is real. The mornings are pleasant. But I stopped, and I won’t go back, and it’s worth saying plainly why.

Start with the room itself. Who’s in it? Whoever paid the membership. That’s the whole selection - not the people best placed to send you work, not the ones whose judgement you’d stake your name on. Just whoever bought a seat, in whatever jumble of trades the morning happened to serve up. A mortgage broker, a printer, a life coach, and you.

Then there’s the machinery. A lot of these groups run on a quota - you’re expected to produce so many referrals a month. Think about what that does. It pushes you to recommend people - into an unfiltered room you didn’t choose - not because you’ve found the right person for a real need, but because it’s the end of the month and your number’s due. Referrals become homework. And everyone can feel the difference between an introduction that was earned and one that was owed.

For a while it works well enough. The first year has a honeymoon - fresh faces, a few leads, the novelty of it. Then you’ve met everyone. The same people, the same pitches, the referrals thinning to a trickle of obligation. By year two a quiet weariness sets in, and you can’t quite say why the thing that felt so productive stopped producing.

Here’s the sharpest version of it. I once watched someone do eight one-on-ones in a single day at an event. Eight. They were shattered by the evening, and glowing - what a productive day. And nothing came of a single one. Not because the conversations were bad, but because there was no reason for any of them to go anywhere next, and not one of the eight had been chosen for anything beyond being in the building that day. Maximum effort. Maximum pleasantness. Zero mechanism for a result.

That’s the trap in a word: these are pleasing methods. They please you - they feel like networking, they tick the box, they let you tell yourself you’re doing the work. What they don’t do is build a network.

And notice what I’m not saying. I’m not saying community is worthless, or that introductions over coffee are a bad idea - they’re the whole point. The thing that’s broken isn’t the connection. It’s the grind wrapped around it: the turning up, the chasing, the quota, the room you had no hand in choosing. Separate the grind from the gift. Keep the introduction. Shed the labour and the randomness that were never really helping.

Which points at the one thing every pleasing method has in common, sitting underneath all of it: you never got to choose who was in the room.

But what if you could? What if the room were yours to build, deliberately, before you shook a single hand?

That’s next.