Networking is key to your success – you hear that everywhere. But there are rare occasions when the gathering is truly useful for building your valuable network.
For me this January network event was truly special – it was about speed-networking and was led by Claudia Suhov (awarded young entrepreneur from Romania). She did not talk about her success and how she got there (maybe next time?), but her presence meant something else: a well-prepared networking event.
She organised the event in a way that we could, possibly, meet with more than 15 people within an hour. Claudia divided us into groups, remixing the groups every 20 minutes. She also suggested some questions to help us prepare our pitch and find the most important questions we needed to answer (Who are you? What do you offer? What are you looking for?). The questions served only to break the ice – because they led to intense conversations about us and our businesses. It helped us to discover our “why” and goals better but also to listen others and gather deeper insights about their personality and business in general.
In my group I happened to listen to some people more than once and it was truly interesting to see how their pitch changed and became more focused. It made me realise that it is important to work on your pitch, to talk about it with as many people as you can – because sometimes things will only become clear when you get the chance to talk about it with your peers.
So, I would like to thank WBII for organising such a special event, which I’m sure will help many of us to move towards our goal and broaden our network. I also hope that such events will be regularly repeated, so we can learn from and about each other from time to time. Regular networking still works well, but this type of speed networking works even better.
Every month WBII gives a member the opportunity to talk about her business in 10 minutes. This time Karine Kayitesi-Ponting talked about her life coaching business and the ancient Chinese medicine she uses to improve the life of her patients. You can see her presentation here.