I had been thinking about this post for a while: networking and friends, and friends and networking. Or, to put it another way, professional contacts and friends, and friends and professional contacts.
In all the time I have been practising professional networking, I have moved back and forth in both directions: I have worked professionally with some of my friends from university, my master’s, my family and so on, and with some of my professional contacts there has been such good chemistry that we are now friends.
It is something I simply love.
On the one hand, with your friends, your real friends, the ones you trust, why not work or collaborate together? If you are serious and professional, it will work.
What’s more, when you hear about a professional opportunity and you have a good friend who is out of work or wants to change jobs, how could you not recommend them first, right?
If someone asks me to recommend an advertising creative, an architect, a good saleswoman or a journalist, I will certainly turn to my friends first, provided they fit the bill, of course.
Friendship is for life, which is why I think it is important to look after it well within your closest circle of friends and never lose touch. The RAE (Royal Spanish Academy) definition of friendship: “Personal, pure and disinterested affection, shared with another person, which is born and strengthened through contact.”
This is the best example: my classmates, with whom I did my degree in Barcelona more than 15 years ago. Even though I live in Madrid, we have never lost touch, and we have as much fun as on the very first day every time we get together. Only Joan is missing from the photo.
Toni Sanglas is a direct marketing ace. He has worked at the leading companies in the sector, teaches marketing and now runs his own agency, Sinergias de Marketing.
Oscar Forrellad is co-director of Cala Montjoi Ciudad de Vacaciones, a family business that rocks.
Moving on to the professional side, many of my former colleagues with whom I have had an excellent relationship, many clients I have got on well with and many professional contacts I have met at various events have become part of my network of “FRIENDS” with a capital F, in the broadest sense of the word.
FRIENDS with whom I share interests and hobbies, who call each other often to see how everything is going, whom I worry about or who worry about me or my family, and with whom I get together for lunch, go hiking in the mountains, spend a weekend in a country cottage, play a game of padel and so on.
That is why I try to look after and keep up all these professional contacts who have become friends, just as I do with the rest of my lifelong friends.
It takes very little to keep in touch: just a phone call, a message, an email, or trying to meet up now and then to see how things are going, or inviting them to an event (a cocktail party, a party, a business lunch, a concert, a football match, a premiere, whatever).
So nurture and look after your network of friends and professional contacts, because you will certainly have some wonderful times with them.
Happy Networking!
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