Fast forward to the year 2040. My grandchildren are sitting at my feet, begging me to tell them a story of the “olden days.” I remember doing the same with my grandparents as they obliged me with stories of what it was like to live through the Great Depression. It was fascinating yet utterly unrelatable as we sat in our comfortable surroundings with no thought of where our next meal would come from. “Tell us about what it was like back then, Grandma,” they beg me. “You know when there were those things called ‘conference rooms’ and strangers use to touch hands when they met? What was that called again? Oh right, the ‘handshake.’ Show us how to make a handshake again, grandma….please?”.
While I truly hope this little story will remain fiction, other than the part about my adorable grandchildren and that they don’t appear until 2038 or so, part of me wonders. I don’t intend to dwell on any gloom and doom messages today because frankly, I’m done with hearing them from other people. But what does make me curious is the lasting social change that this year will bring. As the lighted ball drops on the year 2021, I wish nothing more than to take the blue pill and wake up to find that I’m out of The Matrix and can go back to hugging people other than family members in my personal bubble. But as long as I’m feeling the effects of the crazy red pill, let’s examine what experts are telling us are the social changes bound to last, and how they might impact how we network and grow our business. Here are some interesting trends I’ve been reading lately. Of course, they’re all hypothetical at this point, but having spent time as a Girl Scout, I’m a big believer in the motto, “be prepared.”
- Technology is accelerating: The good news is that we may have cooler toys in our future, and God help us, I sure hope for a faster, more reliable Internet service. The bad news is that lower-paying jobs may get automated sooner rather than later and that our impoverished communities will be more at risk.
- Our big cities may become ghost towns: Perhaps not entirely, but as people become more nervous about living in tightly packed communities, and with the rise in telework, there are projections that people who can move from larger cities to improve their quality of life may do so. I mean, if you didn’t have to be in an office, would you live in a tiny New York apartment with a view of a brick wall, or would a beach house where your kids can ride their bikes outside be more pleasant? And if you need a good conference room, wouldn’t a local coworking space do the job? The days of the 10-year office lease may be over. That said, Gen Z has strong urban roots, so time will tell if they really want to live in the burbs.
- We’ll return to having our meals prepared, but perhaps differently: Sure, crowding ourselves into the latest “it” restaurant may be a thing of the past, at least for a while, but being forced to eat our own cooking probably hasn’t made us love it any more than we used to. In the beginning, it may have been fun to break out the old recipe books, but by now, most working families have at least incorporated frozen dinners into their weekly routine or family-sized delivery service.
- Small businesses who were on edge financially may use COVID-19 as a reason to close up shop: I heard this interesting projection from Freakonomics co-author Stephen Dubner, and it makes sense. That’s not to say that most small businesses haven’t truly been negatively impacted. Still, the saying “cash is king” never rang quite as true as it did for small businesses faced with declining revenues during the pandemic. It is estimated that the country will lose 2.9 million micro-businesses due to the pandemic. However, we all know the power of the entrepreneurial spirit, so personally, I believe that these business owners will dust themselves off and launch something new, but this time paying more careful attention to their bottom line.
- Skills will become more important than roles: We’re already seeing a shift toward companies hiring more contingent rather than full-time workers, so it has never been more critical to have highly marketable skills. This may be part of why we see such a tremendous surge in online courses
What do these five key social trends mean for trying to network and grow your business? Well, first of all, we can assume that those tightly packed networking events may not be back for a while. That should make all of you natural introverts very happy but may cramp the style of any of you social butterflies who used to love working the room and collecting business cards. Second, since you’ll be networking on Zoom for a while, try to upgrade to the highest bandwidth your carrier will offer you and avoid those awkward moments when your face freezes in a contorted position. Sadly, those of us in condos don’t have many options. Xfinity, are you listening? I will happily pay you to upgrade my service to the speed you provide commercial buildings. And allow me one quick rant on this. If 40% of people are working from home and a bunch of office buildings sit close to empty, why the heck can’t you direct your bandwidth to us? That is one problem that I hope gets resolved soon.
Now, back to the main part of this conversation, which was about COVID social trends and networking. So we’ve pretty much determined that we won’t have big events, we may not even live in the same city where we’re networking, going to lunch is still pretty iffy, and we’ll want to think strategically about the types of businesses we network with so we can focus on growth areas.
That brings us to how to network better on Zoom. I know I’ve touched on this before, but I thought I’d add a few pointers. When networking, those big events were never where you closed any business; they were simply where you met people, exchanged cards, and agreed to get to know one another better. You’d share a coffee, figure out who you could connect your new networking partner with, connect on LinkedIn, keep in touch via emails and the occasional text, and once you’d learned enough about what they do, you’d look for potential connections for them in the future. If you were part of a networking group that met regularly, this would happen somewhat naturally, and otherwise, there was a pretty good chance that you’d move on with your life and forget about them unless one of you made an effort to reconnect periodically for another coffee.
So now what? What has taken the place of networking events and meetings? They’re still here. They have just moved to zoom. There are a lot of organizations now holding these events online. But when you attend, even if it’s with a group you know, you have a choice. You can feel frustrated by the interruption in your busy day, regret you agreed to the meeting in the first place, join a couple of minutes after it starts, leave your camera off, multi-task during the meeting, say your quick commercial, and then cut out early. Or, you can plan your schedule, so you don’t have a meeting bumping right in front of your networking zoom, join 10 minutes early, casually reconnect with anyone you know or introduce yourself to new people, get their contact information, and agree to schedule a 30-minute followup get-to-know-you zoom later in the week. I won’t lecture you on which approach is likely to be more effective. You already know.
What else can you do to make yourself known? Now that you have made those networking connections, what synergies do you have with another business owner to co-host a webinar? Come up with an interesting topic, pool your list of contacts for greater reach, and let people know. Invest a couple of hundred dollars in good lighting, a professional microphone, and a green screen if you don’t want everyone to see your unmade bed behind you. Be sure to look straight into the camera, so you appear engaged. Just the fact that you’re delivering a webinar may get others thinking about your expertise, and if you co-host, then you’ll each be exposed to a bunch of new contacts who probably don’t yet know you. Remember that you should not be selling in this webinar. Instead, you’ll deliver as much value as you can. Be sure to record your webinar, and now you have something to add to your YouTube, add as a media file to your LinkedIn profile, as well as edit clips to use on your social media.
One other idea I’ll throw out there before I wrap up today is to think about your networking partners like business partners. Most businesses are finding a need to pivot to some extent. A great way to grow your business is to figure out how to partner with some of the business owners you network with to start something new. If several businesses target the same types of clients, you might have an opportunity. An immigration attorney might partner with a business attorney to help people from other countries to invest here in the U.S. Maybe that investor will need a business broker to help him find something. He’ll need a place to live, of course, and he won’t know the area so a realtor can be really helpful. Buying that home will also require the help of a mortgage broker. And he’ll need a local bank to make his deposits and payments, so an introduction to a banker would be good. If he does invest in a business here, he’ll need a CPA to help with tax planning, an estate planning attorney to make sure that Uncle Sam doesn’t take most of what he builds here since he’ll surely want to pass along his legacy. He’ll probably also want to supplement his estate with some life insurance. After he’s making money, or even as his company grows their number of employees, he’ll need someone to help with healthcare benefits and a financial advisor to help with the 401K. Oh, and if he was trying to figure out what the growth opportunities are here, he’ll need a marketing plan and some ongoing marketing support to help the company to be successful. That single immigrant business investor just created a business for themselves and 12 other professionals, and I’m sure I could come up with more if I kept going. So what would happen if these 12 professionals were to join forces, and not give up their regular businesses but rather create a new, combined online presence as a 1-stop shop for foreign business investors? Perhaps they could offer joint webinars and maybe even an online learning academy with classes on how to invest in the U.S. They could promote to all of their contact lists and across all of their social media channels, and before you know it, they would likely have at least a 10x increase in the number of people who know about what they do.
If you think starting something with eleven of your closest networking partners is too much of an undertaking, then start with one. The point is to start something. Rather than wait around for the olden days to return, make something happen today. And who knows? Maybe someday my grandkids will think that driving across town to networking events and spending an hour of your day to commute back and forth from a one-hour coffee meeting was about as efficient as the milkman dropping off bottles of milk each morning in his horse-drawn cart.
Let me close with a quote from Mother Teresa. “Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.”