Playing With The Big Boys

First of all, I want to wish a very good friend of mine Happy Birthday. Over the years she’s provided me with a lot of advice and I especially couldn’t have gotten through Year 12 English studies without her encouragement and entertaining support! So Kylie, happy birthday - hope all your dreams come true for you this year!

Now, last week I spoke about the importance of networking so this week I thought I’d share a meeting I had on Friday with a friend of mine from IBM - Ben, to illustrate the fact that networking can happen anywhere, anytime, and doesn’t have to be so clear cut and boring.

Earlier in the week I received an email from Ben asking if I was free for a chat to discuss some new projects that IBM has on the radar for 2008. I responded saying that I would meet him in his office on Friday afternoon. He confirmed that he’ll meet me at his unofficial office - Kitty O Shea’s (a local Darwin pub) - talk about outsourcing reception services! Normally I’m not a pub sort of person but when Ben is concerned, I’ll throw out all my standards and meet him wherever because there is always an unwritten guarantee of a good time to be had by all those involved.

So we met up at the pub and started talking about opportunities for next year that we can work on, and his phone kept ringing and as it was pretty much the last business day of the year, he had to keep answering it. Turns out that he’d just closed a very big deal earlier that morning and his bosses wanted to know how it all went. In fact Ben’s been doing some great deals all throughout the year and I just had to find out what his secret was!

Ben’s only been in Darwin since January and to have achieved what he’s done within 12 months is amazing - considering that no one knew him up here when he first arrived. He said to me that he just spoke to potential clients to find out what their frustrations were and then he’d come up with solutions to those problems. Having the backing of a major multimillion dollar company like IBM would help, but I think the secret to his success is the way he spoke to his potential clients and then managed these introductions to build sustainable business relationships with them.

He’s always attending some sort of networking function, or hosting events that are always well attended by clients and business partners but he’ll go one step further and invite people to his unofficial offices and conference rooms like Kitty O Shea’s or Darwin Golf Club and focus on having a bit of fun outside the office. The by-products of these fun events are the massive deals he does, and he is living proof that 80% of the world’s business deals begin outside the office.

Earlier this month I also attended the IBM Christmas party, and they put on a grand show. Our bar tab was around $5,500 and Ben’s biggest worry was that we would not hit that mark, but in typical Territory spirit, we were more than happy to pitch in and help out a fellow ICT Industry colleague to achieve his key performance indicator for the night!

While we continued our “meeting” a few other key players in the NT ICT industry joined us and we shared stories about everything and anything that were fueled on by the amount of rounds that we had. Never in a million years would I have imagined a little guy like me would be sitting down with these guys and socialising. Now if I can just work out how to turn these acquaintances to potential clients!

So as you can clearly see, networking is not all clean and dry and you can really make it some fun. You can catch up with someone whom you met at a networking function for coffee or a drink and talk about anything other than work. Or if you read an interesting article that you think one of your networking companions would like, forward it onto them. Or you could be like Ben and throw a crazy party but you might need the backing of a big corporation for that - or a rich Uncle with more money than sense!

As for me, I can’t wait to see what Ben comes up with next year so all the best to you and your family for Christmas and New Year Mate and I’ll see you early in 2008!

Merry Christmas People!

Dream, Build, Inspire, Lead!

AJ~

Author: AJ Kulatunga

Category:

IBM, networking, build,