Networking Insight

Holiday Tips for Strengthening Existing Relationships

The holidays are an important time of the year to build up your current relationships. Make the time and effort to further develop the relationships that you have built over the last year.

Below are a few tips on how you can advance your relationships during the holidays:

- Invite people to holiday parties - Whether you host your own or attend someone else's party, invite people to attend with you. While at the party, make sure to spend time with those who you know so you can get to know them better in a more casual setting.

- Send holiday cards - During the holidays, you have a good reason to directly contact people. Send them a family, personal, or company holiday card. Sending people a card will be seen as a nice gesture and show that you value the relationship.

- Organize a charity event - During the holidays, some people give back and organize charitable events such as Feed My Starving Children. Take the time to organize your own charitable event and invite some people from your network. It will be nice to get to know them better in this type of setting.

- Meet for lunch or drinks - During the holidays, some people have a slower paced work environment. If this is the case, then invite some of your network to meet for lunch or drinks. Get to know people more one-on-one when they have the time.

What other tips do you have?

 

Entrepreneurs Should Leverage Relationships to Raise Capital

One of the most important assets that entrepreneurs have while building a company is their network.  Relationships are critical to making things happen in a variety of growth stages. In the earliest days of launching a company, entrepreneurs perform customer development research to figure out there is a big enough pain point for their idea to solve. Many of those earlier conversations are with people whom they know. 

When it comes time to raising capital, certain relationships are critical. Early rounds of capital come from family and friends. They want to see you succeed so some will invest in you more than just the business itself. As you start to grow, entrepreneurs usually need capital from professional investors. An entrepreneur's network is critical at this point to get introduction to angel investors or venture capitalists.

Relationships are critical for the deals that investors see. Most deals that they fund come from their own network. So entrepreneurs need to find ways to get connected to investors through their network. Entrepreneurs should spend a good amount of time in the earlier days building a variety of relationships that can lead to investor introductions. Or entrepreneurs can focus on building relationships with investors as well.

As a firm continues to grow, entrepreneurs' networks will become extremely valuable for customers, partners, employees, etc. Entrepreneurs should continually build relationships. In fact, having a few key relationships of people who can make lots of connections is extremely valuable. That way, entrepreneurs only need to focus on a few key relationships versus trying to build all of the relationships that they need on their own.