The ROI of Long-Term Networking

There is a version of business networking that most people have experienced and, like me, probably quietly dread finding again. A room full of strangers, a sixty-second pitch rehearsed in the car park, a stack of business cards handed out with the efficiency of an Evri delivery, and very little of substance said (or listened to) by anyone. You leave with a pocket full of names you will never contact and a vague sense that you have ticked a box.

It’s not networking. It’s speed dating.

Real networking, the kind that builds a business and sustains it through the awkward patches, looks quite different. It happens over time. It is built on consistency, on showing up not just when you have something to sell but when someone else needs support. It is the kind of relationship where the value flows in both directions, often in ways that were never formally agreed. Having said that, actual speed networking can be a real adrenalin blast and worth trying, you can often strike a spark with someone and make plans to talk later.

Before and after: How Covid changed the room

To understand where business networking is now, it helps to remember what it looked like before March 2020. The format was largely fixed: a hired room, a breakfast or a lunch, a round of introductions, perhaps a guest speaker. It was physical by default and almost exclusively local. Your network was, in practical terms, bounded by how far you were willing to drive at 7am.

Covid broke that model. The established networking organisations which had met in hotel breakfast rooms and pubs for years were now scrambling onto Zoom. Some struggled with the inevitable informality of video calls, the dogs, the deliveries, the broadband cutting out. For the more formal groups it all sat uneasily with the slightly performative confidence that “traditional” networking had rewarded.

Some networks thrived. 4N went online fast, and all credit to Brad Burton and his team who probably saved mine and many other businesses . For a few weeks at least I didn’t have much to do so 2 or 3 Zooms per day kept me occupied, helped me plan how to “pivot” (another pandemic thing) so that I kept dog food on the table. The geographic constraint vanished overnight. Someone in Scotland could join a session hosted by a group in Bristol. For me the hours spent going to groups in Taunton, Wells or the far side of Bristol was not showing an ROI by late 2019, so this was another aspect of the freedom that lock down gave networking.

What the pandemic period made clear, was the difference between networking as performance and networking as relationship. When you took away the venue, the name badges, the weird chants, and the structured pitching rounds, what was left? For some groups, not much. For others, the connections turned out to be genuinely robust. People who had built real relationships within their networks checked in on each other, passed referrals, collaborated on building new businesses. The crisis became something of a filter. The people who said, “I’m not doing online networking, I’ll wait for the old world to come back,” largely vanished never to be seen again.

Post-Covid, the format has fractured in some interesting ways. The in-person event came back, people had missed it, I found that I’d missed it, and there is something that video simply cannot replicate about being in a room together. But the assumption that in-person is the only serious format has gone for good. Hybrid groups are common. Online-only communities have matured. Informal, sector-specific gatherings have proliferated in the space that opened when people realised the old gatekeepers of the networking calendar were not the only option. Newer groups tend to be less rigid about format, more willing to experiment, and often built with a clearer sense of who they are for.

The other shift, and perhaps the more lasting one, is cultural. There is less tolerance now for the transactional hard sell in networking contexts. It was always annoying; it is now visibly out of step. The people who came through the pandemic period with strong networks intact were, almost without exception, the ones who had invested in those relationships without a particular agenda.

The case for playing the long game

There can still be a tendency, for some people at least, to treat networking as a short-term lead generation activity. Attend an event, get a client, move on. The problem with that model is it requires constant effort for inconsistent returns. You are always starting from scratch.

Long-term networking works differently. Every conversation you have, every event you attend, every time you offer something useful without expecting an immediate return, you are adding to a reputation that travels ahead of you. People talk. When someone mentions a marketing problem over coffee, and someone else at the table says, “you should speak to X” that referral happened because of accumulated trust. There was no transaction in the moment of the recommendation. The transaction happened over months of consistent presence, and conversation.

Is it worth your time?

If you have been wondering whether the time spent at networking events is worth it, the post-Covid period gives us a clear answer. We have seen what happens when the in-person ritual disappears, and we have seen which relationships survived the absence. The ones that did were built on something more than proximity to the breakfast buffet.

The format of networking has changed and will keep changing. The principal behind it has not. Showing up consistently, being useful, investing in people before you need anything from them: over time, with the right people, that is one of the best things you can do for a business that will bring returns way beyond the effect on your bottom line.