Are You Referral Ready?

We all have friends, relatives, and professional contacts whose company we enjoy far too infrequently for whatever reason. When it comes to keeping score of our networking activity, greater emphasis is almost always placed on the addition of new contacts. New contacts are important, but budgeting time to maintain existing contacts is even more important.

The poet Rod McKuen once wrote ‘We can never have too many friends; only too many to properly take care of.’ Like a pot of boiling water, relationships can and will evaporate if ignored. It takes ‘work’, and blindly adding another layer to an already neglected network hardly seems like a strategy for long-term success. If your idea of networking is always adding more bodies, you reach diminishing returns much sooner.

Networking is not only building relationships, but maintaining them as well. Both require time and energy. Invest wisely in your existing network, and give yourself the opportunity to add new contacts along the way…but only to the extent that you are prepared to manage the whole process.