One Friday night the primary system crashed. Not a glitch. A complete failure that would cost a multi-billion-dollar company millions if it wasn’t running by Monday morning.
I worked the problem for hours, then started calling every vendor number I could find. Most didn’t answer after business hours. The ones who did treated me the way you treat a stranger, because that’s 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’d 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 wasn’t 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’s the whole argument of the book, shown twice by the same person under the same conditions with two different outcomes.
| Attribute | Friday night crash | Later major crisis |
|---|---|---|
| Relationships in place | Zero meaningful ones after twenty years | Real relationships built over time |
| Who he called | Every vendor number he could find | A handful of people |
| How they responded | Most didn’t answer; the rest treated him as a stranger | A team of experts working within hours |
| Why they helped | They didn’t know him | Not payment; they were willing |
| How it got fixed | Determination and a couple of sleepless nights | Experts working the problem together |
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 do introverts have to learn networking twice?
Because leaving one industry for another resets it. When I left to become a writer I couldn’t network my way out of a paper bag in publishing. I knew nothing about book marketing, author platforms, or how any of that world worked, and none of the relationships I’d 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. Most networking advice doesn’t prepare anybody for that.
What was Richard Lowe’s 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’d never bothered to know.
What I didn’t 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 didn’t 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’s different in Networking Without the BS?
It’s a rewrite of Network Your Business to Prosperity and the territory has widened considerably.
The original was built around know, like and trust. That’s 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’s a chapter on why cold outreach isn’t networking, and then how to make it work anyway, because pretending otherwise helps nobody.
And there’s a chapter for introverts. It’s the chapter I needed.
What does know, like and trust mean?
People do business with people they know, like and trust, in that order. Jump straight to the sale and you’ve skipped the two steps that make anybody buy. The painter example puts all of it in one paragraph.
Your house needs painting and you’ve heard the stories about contractors who vanish with deposits or leave a job half done. You don’t want to pick somebody at random off a search result, so you ask your friend Bill whether he knows a good painter. That’s networking. 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. That’s 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 to grow a business. But turning up at an event trying to move products or services is doing it wrong, and it’s 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’s a functional change. People remember being helped considerably longer than they remember being pitched, and they tell other people about it.
The small, hard change in Networking Without the BS: ask how you can help instead of how you can sell.
Why do warm introductions carry more weight?
Because they arrive with credibility already attached.
People remember being helped considerably longer than they remember being pitched, and they tell other people about it.
Cold outreach starts from zero and has to establish that you’re 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.
Anthony Markey, who says 99.9 percent of his business came from relationships, has the simplest rule I know for building them. “Everybody’s worth a coffee. Everybody has something they can teach you,” he said on Leaders and Their Stories. Every warm introduction starts with a coffee somebody almost skipped.
The longer-term value is bigger than the immediate opportunity. Partners give strategic advice during difficult decisions, offer an objective view of something you’re 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.
My take
People like me avoid networking longest and need it most. I went twenty years in the industry without one meaningful professional relationship, and a dead system on a Friday night showed me what that costs. Skip the mixer tactics. Ask how you can help the person in front of you, then do it. Become the name somebody passes along when a friend asks for a good painter. It’s slower than pitching, and it’s the version that pays.
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 didn’t 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 doesn’t require being smooth and it doesn’t require being manipulative. It requires helping other people over a long enough period that they know it about you.
One Friday night the primary system failed and I had twenty years in the industry and nobody to call. I wrote Networking Without the BS so you build those relationships first.
