One Friday night the primary system crashed. Not a glitch. A complete failure that would cost a multi-billion-dollar company millions if it was not running by Monday morning.
I worked the problem for hours, then started calling every vendor number I could find. Most did not answer after business hours. The ones who did treated me the way you treat a stranger, because that is what I was to them.
I sat in an empty office surrounded by broken computers and understood something. Twenty years in the industry and I had built exactly zero meaningful professional relationships. I was completely alone at the moment I most needed not to be.
The crash got fixed through determination and a couple of sleepless nights. The lesson was harder to shake. Technical skill was not enough. I needed people who knew me, trusted me, and would go out of their way when something went badly wrong.
So I started building relationships, awkwardly. Conferences where I made myself talk to strangers. Professional groups I took part in instead of merely attended. Following up with people when I wanted nothing from them.
Did the networking pay off?
A few years later another major crisis hit.
I made a handful of calls and had a team of experts working the problem within hours. Not because I was paying them. Because we had real relationships built over time and they were willing.
That is the whole argument of the book, demonstrated twice by the same person under the same conditions with two different outcomes.
The book on this: Networking Without the BS is relationship building for people who hate networking, written by somebody who had to learn it twice.
Why did the author have to learn networking twice?
Because leaving one industry for another resets it.
When I left to become a writer I could not network my way out of a paper bag in publishing. I knew nothing about book marketing, author platforms, or how any of that world operated, and none of the relationships I had spent years building transferred.
So I did it again. Writing groups, other authors, and a slow rebuild that eventually supported the new career.
The principles were identical and the application was completely different, which is a thing most networking advice does not prepare anybody for.
What was the first networking success?
An accident, and it took me decades to understand what had happened.
In college I was the classic introvert. Head down, work done, no asking for help unless I was desperate. Teachers and administrators barely knew who I was, and there was no reason they should have gone out of their way for a student they had never bothered to know.
What I did not know was that Mr. James, the department head, had been watching my friend Don and me working in the computer lab. Fred, one of our teachers, had started a company installing computer systems for businesses, back when computers filled rooms and disk drives were the size of washing machines.
Fred offered to sponsor a student to attend the biggest computer convention of the year. Mr. James recommended Don. Don did not want to go alone and invited me.
At that convention Fred took us to dinner with his business partners and four of the most influential people in the industry, the men who had designed the first programming languages for Digital Equipment Corporation. I had no business at that table. I landed my first job straight out of college as a startup’s first employee, and it took me twenty years to work out that this was why.
What is different in Networking Without the BS?
It is a rewrite of Network Your Business to Prosperity and the territory has widened considerably.
The original was built around know, like and trust, which is still the spine and still correct. What has changed is everything around it. Digital networking, virtual and hybrid meetings, using TikTok and Instagram, international and remote work, and three separate chapters on AI, including one on how not to network with it.
There is a chapter on why cold outreach is not networking, and then how to make it work anyway, because pretending otherwise helps nobody.
And there is a chapter for introverts, which is not a courtesy. It is the chapter I needed.
What does know, like and trust mean?
The painter example is the whole thing in one paragraph.
Your house needs painting and you have heard the stories about contractors who vanish with deposits or leave a job half done. You do not want to pick somebody at random off a search result, so you ask your friend Bill whether he knows a good painter.
That is networking. Not an event, not a business card, not a pitch. One person with a problem asking somebody they trust, and a name being passed along because it can be passed along safely.
Everything else in the book is about becoming a name that gets passed along, which is a slower and more useful objective than being memorable at a mixer.
Why is networking not sales?
Because arriving with something to sell is the fastest way to be avoided.
That sounds backwards, since most people network in order to grow a business. But turning up at an event trying to move products or services is doing it wrong, and it is probably annoying everybody in the room.
The change that fixes it is small and hard. Instead of asking how you can sell to this person, ask how you can help them. Instead of asking what you can get out of the relationship, ask what you can give to it.
That is not a moral position. It is a functional one. People remember being helped considerably longer than they remember being pitched, and they tell other people about it.
Why do warm introductions carry more weight?
Because they arrive with credibility already attached.
Cold outreach starts from zero and has to establish that you are real, competent and worth a reply, all before the actual conversation begins. A warm introduction skips that entirely because somebody the recipient already trusts has spent a small amount of their own credibility on you.
The longer-term value is bigger than the immediate opportunity. Partners give strategic advice during difficult decisions, offer an objective view of something you are too close to, and become collaborators on work neither of you could take on alone.
Several of my most successful ventures started as networking relationships that turned into mutual professional respect and then into something with a contract attached.
Who is Networking Without the BS for?
People who avoid networking entirely, and people doing it completely wrong.
Most business owners fall into one of those two groups, and both approaches limit growth in ways that are invisible until a Friday night arrives.
I did not write this as a networking guru born knowing how to work a room. I learned it the hard way through trial, error, embarrassing mistakes, and one very quiet office.
If an introverted computer guy can build meaningful professional relationships, anybody can. It does not require being smooth and it does not require being manipulative. It requires helping other people over a long enough period that they know it about you.
The Guides That Get Your Book Written, Published, and Sold
Four short, practical guides on writing, publishing, and selling your book, plus the occasional note when there's something worth your time. No fluff, no daily inbox clutter. Drop your email and they're yours.
We use MailerLite to manage our list and send these emails. Your address is used only to send you what you signed up for. We will not sell it, share it, or use it for anything else, and you can unsubscribe anytime.