How valuable is your personal network?
How valuable is your personal network? The pandemic revealed that mine is awesome!
The pandemic hit home for us on March 13, 2020. I was just 10 weeks into setting up my consulting practice, I already had one client, and a promising lead for a significant project – one so large I couldn’t have tackled it alone.
Then schools closed and our five- and eleven-year-old kids came home. I knew that they wouldn't go back to school by Easter or even Christmas. After all, developing a vaccine takes months, then it takes more months to mass produce it, then it takes more months to stick it in enough arms to create herd immunity.
In addition the kids being home 24/7, my wife is on the city's disaster response team. Her work load went up to 60-90 hours per week.
I knew that if I tried to do everything, I'd end up doing one or more things poorly and probably burn myself out in the process:
Supporting my family and being present with them through the pandemic
Finding clients for my new consulting practice
Doing the work for clients
I couldn't drop my family.
If I dropped finding clients, pretty soon I wouldn't have much of a consulting practice.
So I explored letting go of doing the work for clients myself.
When new opportunities appeared, I would reach out to a colleague who felt like a great match.
And you know what? Over and over again, my colleagues said yes!
Some were semi-retired and glad to have a project or two to stay engaged.
Some had a day job but wanted to moonlight a bit.
A few, experiencing burnout from "full-time" nonprofit work, were drawn to the flexibility of a reasonable work schedule.
Even now, more than five years in, most of the talented people that work with me are individuals I've known for years – long before I'd even thought of opening a consulting practice.
If you'd asked me in 2019 about the size of my personal network, my introvert brain would have compared itself to the extroverts around me who know hundreds of people, plus their kids, plus their pets, plus where they went on vacation ten years ago. My brain didn't, and still doesn't, work that way.
But the pandemic truly revealed that although my personal network might be small compared to some extroverts, that network is strong, high quality, and very valuable!
What about you? Might your network be stronger than you suspect?