Find Your 9others

What do I really want? Is it fame, money, awards, self-satisfaction? Any of these things are perfectly fine, but you need to know what it is for you and for your business, and the most ambitious have something deeper.

A key aspect of getting your head around network maintenance is to understand your ‘tribe’. This has two parts to it: who are you, and who do you serve. You should have a handle on who you are and what you want by now, but the question of who you serve is something worth spending more time on.

Why am I doing what I’m doing? Ask yourself this and, when you have an answer, ask yourself ‘why’ again. Several times if needed. Ask ‘why’ until you can’t ask ‘why’ anymore. What you will find at the end of that journey will be a clear mission.

The hard thing about hard things: Building a business when there are no easy answers by Ben Horowitz (2014)

The point of maintenance is to keep the network alive by making yourself memorable (even the most striking haircut can’t manage that alone) and by always being in a position to seek, or indeed offer, help or other support.

Zero to one: Notes on startups, or how to build the future by Peter Thiel (2015)

One simple way to think about success, if it’s not already clear to you, is to think about failure and what that would look like for you. Not being able to work in this business in one year? Ten years? Being publicly shamed or embarrassed? Finding yourself back as an employee in a nine-to-five job?

What do I already do every day? What would I like to do every day? What would I like to stop doing? This triad of questions will really help you get to grips with the things that are actually taking up your time. Once you know that, you’re in a position to make decisions about what goes, what stays and what gets shuffled about.

We’ve had to take the vision and present it far and wide to get to where we are today. At the start this meant being incredibly proactive by going to networking events, handing out business cards,5 having follow-up meetings over coffee, putting ourselves forward to talk at events and startup groups and getting in touch with anyone we’d ever met who