Your Business Networking Tune Up

Four Steps to Better Networking

I’m rolling out of a company I’ve helped build. My role in the company has kept me behind a browser, working from home, for 6 years. Two and a half years ago, I moved out of a market I’d lived in for 32 years. 

What does this mean? 

I had a network. I didn’t network. There is a significant difference between the two. 

In your corporate life, the one that lasted twenty or thirty years, the relationships came to you. A title on a business card did most of the introducing. The company paid for the conference, the assistant booked the dinner, and people returned your calls because of the logo behind your name, not the name itself. That system worked beautifully, right up until the moment it stopped being yours.

Now you're building something. Maybe it's a consultancy, a franchise, a fund, a nonprofit, a second act you've quietly wanted for a decade. And you've discovered that the phone is heavier than it used to be. The names in your contacts have moved, retired, or forgotten who you are. The muscle you need, walking into a room of strangers and turning cold into warm hasn't been used since flip phones. It's atrophied. 

Let's get you back in the room.

First, kill the story you're telling yourself

Let me describe where I am in the process. In launching a new software product I’ve designed, I have to build a list of people who have benefited from the tool. I have to find users. LinkedIn is valuable for some things. Blocking and tackling for the real relationships where trust is the first step is not a LinkedIn strength. 

Before I talk tactics, I have to deal with the narrative, because the head trash in my mind, and yours, is the actual obstacle. Most professionals over 50 walk into networking carrying one of three stories, and all three are expensive.

The first is "I'm starting over." You are not. You're transferring. Starting over implies an empty account. You have three decades of pattern recognition, a Rolodex of hard-won judgment, and the ability to smell a bad deal from across the table. A 28-year-old with a great LinkedIn presence would trade their student loans payoffs for what you know. Stop pricing your experience at zero.

The second story is "Nobody wants to hear from the older person in the room." The data disagrees, and so does human nature. In a world drowning in confident amateurs, calm competence is a scarce asset. People are exhausted by hype. What they're starving for is someone who has actually done the thing and lived to describe the scar tissue. That's you.

The third story is the quiet one: "I should already know how to do this." Should you? You built a career inside institutions that handled relationship infrastructure for you. Expecting yourself to be fluent at something you were structurally protected from is like expecting a great passenger to parallel park a truck. New skill. Learnable. No shame in the learning.

Your network is not a list. It's an asset that compounds,  or decays, based entirely on whether you tend it. Every relationship you don't touch loses value quietly, like a plant you forgot to water. The good news about compounding is that it rewards the people who start clumsily today over the people who wait to start perfectly. Awkward action beats elegant hesitation every single time.

Your options are wider than you think

When people over 50 hear "networking," they picture the worst version of it: a hotel ballroom, a name tag slapped on a blazer, and some guy pushing life insurance. That version exists. Ignore it. Your real options fall into four buckets, and you should be sampling from all of them.

Structured referral and business groups. These are the organized rooms, BNI, chambers of commerce, industry associations, Rotary, EO or Vistage if you qualify. They meet on a schedule, they have norms, and they run on reciprocity. The upside is predictability: you know exactly where to be Tuesday at 7 a.m. The cost is the early alarm and the occasional forced ritual. For a builder who needs consistent local referrals, these are the gym membership of networking, sometimes boring, repetitive, and the only thing that actually works.

Communities of expertise. Mastermind groups, professional cohorts, paid memberships, alumni networks, and niche online communities where your peers gather. Here you're not hunting for a sale; you're deepening in a domain. These rooms are where you find collaborators and referral partners who get what you do without a fifteen-minute preamble.

Digital-first relationship building. LinkedIn is not a billboard; it's a coffee shop where the coffee is free and never closes. Commenting thoughtfully on the right twenty people's posts for ninety days will do more for you than any single conference. Newsletters, podcasts (yours or as a guest), and small online forums let you build reputation at scale while you sleep. For the introvert, this is the on-ramp. Also, very importantly, reach out for a call. Connect over the phone with your connections. Just being digitally connected is NOT enough. Speak to someone. Ask about their business. Does your network help them in some way? How might your social relationship capital deliver value for the connection? 

Warm reactivation. The most overlooked option, and the one with the highest yield is this simple move. You already know 200 people who would take your call. You've just gone quiet on them. Reaching back out to a former colleague with "I've been thinking about our work at [X] and wanted to catch up.  This is simple friendship cultivation and maintenance. It happens to be the most profitable friendship maintenance you'll ever do.

These are my recent action steps: I joined the local Chamber of Commerce. Were my business cards in? No. Was my site up? No. Do I have my “What do you do?”  answer perfected? Nope. I rsvp’d for networking events, I attended speaker sessions. I followed up with people I met for individual appointments. I joined an informal “Go-Givers” networking meeting that meets weekly. I do this with no near term agenda. Just make connections, get to know people, and listen to what they do and where they are in life. You can do this as well. Local sponsors into groups, involvement, and activities are everywhere if you look. 

There will be some hard days.

Every real strategy accounts for friction. Here's what's actually going to get in your way, and how to route around it.

The energy tax. Networking after a full day feels like exercise after a full meal. Solution: treat it as a scheduled appointment with your future revenue, not a leftover you do when you're tired. Put it on the calendar at your best hours, not your worst, if at all possible. 

The status stuff. You used to walk in as the VP. Now you walk in as "the new person building a thing." That language feels like failing. Reframe: the title was rented, the reputation is owned. You're not lower on the ladder; you're on a different ladder, and you brought your own. I couldn’t agree more. I’m a former founder of a sexy tech and promo firm in the booze business. It’s how a lot of people know me. However, what my networking groups know about me now is what I choose to bring to the table. Who I am? A person who built a business he could walk away from knowing it could grow. A person who has knowledge in tech, finance, marketing, sales, and digital. A person who is interested in helping others succeed! 

The technology gap  and the technology trap. Yes, some of the tools are new. Learn the three that matter (LinkedIn, a simple CRM or even a spreadsheet, and a scheduling link) and ignore the other forty with the exception of AI. Learn enough to be well-versed in the discussion of AI even if you don’t use it. The trap is the opposite: hiding behind screens because rooms are scary. Digital scales reputation; it does not replace the handshake. You need both.

I used to have an ask allergy. Many seasoned pros, myself included,  would rather give help forever than ask for it once. Generous, admirable, and quietly self-sabotaging. A network that only receives your help and never gets to return it isn't a network,  it's a charity you're running. Letting people help you is a gift to them. It's how the bond completes.

Four tips for making the most of networking

You've picked a group. You're showing up. Here's how to make the hour count instead of collecting business cards you'll never touch.

1. Go to give, and be specific about it. Walk in with one question: Who in this room can I help this week? Not someday, this week. Make a concrete introduction, send the article, refer the client. Generalized goodwill evaporates; a specific favor delivered within 72 hours creates a debt of gratitude that pays back for years. The person who consistently gives first becomes the person everyone wants to send business to. This is not charity. It's the highest-return investment in the room, and almost nobody does it because it requires patience.

2. Master the ten-word version of what you do. When someone asks what you do, "I'm a consultant" is where the conversation goes to die. So is a four-minute autobiography. Build one clean sentence that names who you help and what changes for them: "I help family businesses hand off to the next generation without blowing up the family." Specific is memorable. Memorable gets referred. If people can't repeat what you do in a sentence, they will never do it for you when you're not in the room,  and referrals happen when you're not in the room.

3. Work the follow-up, not the event. The event is the trailhead, not the destination. The real relationship is built in the 48 hours after, when you send one genuine, personalized note, referencing something they actually said, not a template. Then you build a simple system: a spreadsheet, a reminder, a rhythm to reconnect every quarter. Most people network like they're panning for gold and then throwing the gold back in the river. The fortune is in the follow-up, and it's shockingly uncrowded there because it requires discipline instead of charm.

4. Play the long game, and let people watch you show up. Networking groups reward the regular, not the dazzling. The person who comes to eleven of twelve meetings, stays consistent, remembers your kid's name, and never disappears becomes trusted through sheer reliability. Trust is not transferred in a handshake; it's earned in repetition. Decide up front you'll give any group a full year before you judge it. Six weeks tells you nothing. Twelve months tells you everything and by month twelve, the referrals arrive on their own, because you've become part of the furniture in the best possible way.

You do have an advantage

The very things that feel like disadvantages are, correctly used, your edge when you are over 50 years old.

You are not desperate, and it shows. The 30-year-old networks with the twitchy energy of someone who needs the deal to make rent. You network with the calm of someone who has weathered recessions, layoffs, and at least one catastrophic business decision you can now tell as a funny story. That composure is magnetic. You've also stopped wasting time on people who drain you,  a discernment that took decades to develop and saves you from the single biggest networking mistake, which is spreading yourself across everyone and connecting with no one.

Pressure doesn't break you at this stage. It's made you. Use it. 

The cost of staying home

Inaction always disguises itself as caution. Every quarter you avoid the room, your network decays a little more, your skills stay rusty, and your competitors, many of them less experienced than you,  build the relationships that turn into the referrals that turn into the business you wanted. The cost of networking is a few uncomfortable hours and some early alarms. The cost of not networking is a business that stays theoretical. One of these bills comes due whether you pay it or not.

You already know how to build things. You've done it your whole life. The only new part is doing it out loud, in rooms, in front of people, one honest relationship at a time. The muscle is still there. It's just waiting for you to exercise it.

YOU CAN DO THIS:  This week, pick one structured networking group and commit to attending for a full year, put the first meeting on your calendar before you close this email. Then reactivate five dormant contacts with a genuine, no-ask "thinking of you" message. Expand and deepen. Do it before Friday. The room isn't going to come to you anymore, and honestly, it never really did.

— Sherman G. Mohr

Founder, Over50Pros & Front of the Check

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Networking changed my life.

I spent the late 2000s networking. I organized a series of Meetups on the Meetup platform. I started with an Entrepreneur meetup in the Nashville TN market. It grew from 60 members when I took it over to about 1400 when I gave it to someone else. A cigar meetup I organized grew to hundreds very quickly. All I did was provide a way for people to connect. I introduced people to people. As a result, a woman introduced me to someone who became my business partner. Another introduced me to a woman that introduced me to a key Mentor. A key man in my life provided me a roof over my head for a year after involvement in a cigar meetup. Another woman introduced me to my lovely wife, together for 14 years now.

Connecting with others and then connecting those you meet with others. That is all networking really is. Helping others. Do it and success will come.

And as always, if you need help with anything related to topics in the newsletter or transition over 50 years old, schedule a call.

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