The saying goes: It is not always what you know but who you know that leads to success. Who you know refers to the circle of contacts and relationships that you have built up around you.
A large part of your success and happiness in your career and in life will depend on the quality of these relationships that you have developed in your personal and business life. Businesses operate within a network of people. The process of starting and growing a business, to achieve wealth, involves interaction with others to supply and receive resources, advice, information and assistance.
Whether you want an online business, home business, Internet business or off-line business, if you want to get rich and make money, you are going to have to do it through other people. No venture can be successful without a certain amount of help from others.
That is why establishing effective networks are one of the most critical factors in becoming a millionaire and that is why successful people make a habit of building and maintaining a network of high-quality relationship throughout their lives, and as a result, they achieve a great deal more than those people that have a week circle of contacts.
The people around you have such a profound influence on your life that some people are even drawn into criminality or are so negatively influenced by the wrong people that they never succeed. Remember that you take on the attitudes, behaviours, values and beliefs of the people with whom you associate most of the time. You must make an effort to stay away from these negative, critic and complaining people. You must be critical and set a high standard when pulling people into your network.
It is incredibly important to develop your network continuously. Entrepreneurs aiming to achieve high growth do not develop contacts and networks in a vacuum that develop then according to their needs.
Entrepreneurs who want to start developing an effective network should understand two important principles.
Firstly, networks are built on reciprocity. This means that the relationship should be one of "give-and-take". Networks are built on friendship, good humour and shared interests and activities; the wider your interest is, the easier you will find it to network.
Secondly, networks need to be maintained constantly, and because they are not compulsory relationships, they are very hard to repair when broken by confrontation or neglect. So a proactive process of maintaining them will be required.
You can use the following steps to develop a network:
Step one: establish your business goals and establish what needs and what resources it will require to achieve these goals.
Step two: chart the current state of your networks and make a list of the names, addresses, telephone numbers and the nature of the links and all necessary information.
Step three: using the needs from step one chart your required networks, filling the gaps, and then set network goals to meet those needs.
Step four: start filling the gaps by extending current networks and by increasing your network diversity.
Step five: design a system for maintaining your networks and make sure your network register is always up-to-date.
With careful planning the following procedure can speed up the network development process;
· Identify people and organisations amongst existing connections, close to potential stockholders.
· Actively seek criticism, advice and suggestions from these people.
· Ask them for advice about further contracts that you can approach and get permission to use their name as an introduction.
· Ask them what preparation is necessary before speaking of the target contacts and then make adequate preparations before you see them.
· Tell your existing connections, later, how helpful they have been, thus cementing useful relationships.
· Repeat the steps for the new set of contacts.
Entrepreneurs and millionaires use their networks to gain access to sources and for a variety of support functions. So make a commitment to maintaining your contacts to the implementation of an effective networking system. This will be as good as saying: give me money!
By Tobias Mauro
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7366831
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