When you begin thinking about your new and exciting entrepreneurial venture, you may feel somewhat like the citizens of Key West did many years ago – isolated. No matter which way you turn, you eventually come to the end of your limited community, and what you have is not enough.
For an entrepreneur, networking is finding and establishing relationships with business professionals with whom you can exchange information, ideas, and products; more importantly, you can claim these networks as trusted business colleagues. Networking is about building bridges not about collecting tolls.
A lot of successful businesses have tied business networking to their entrepreneurial success, demonstrating that networking is an important way to validate opportunities, connect to resources, and access information. Networking involves engaging with people by meeting and knowing them, with the potential to help you with ideas and opportunities on how to scale your business.
While any woman can, in theory, become an entrepreneur, not everyone is equipped to do so. Being successful in business requires several qualities and competencies, not all of which can be acquired at school.
Female entrepreneurs are often proof of this, exuding a strong personality that helps them overcome the various challenges and difficulties they face daily.
This is the very essence of the African woman: hope, courage and perseverance, values that are now making them an integral part of the economic, social and sustainable development of the continent.
According to the 2020-21 Women’s Entrepreneurship Report, in Africa more than 50 per cent of entrepreneurs are women with 70 per cent of them from the informal sector, with limited access to financial services.
So how exactly have female business leaders managed to stay focused and determined to build their companies even when the odds seem stacked against them?
One of the outstanding basis for their continued success is banking on networks.
Networking and leveraging your female communities are especially important in an entrepreneur’s early growth stages. Building these strong networks can not only lead to business growth, but also increased confidence which is something female leaders often lack.
In entrepreneurship, you rarely succeed if you work alone. Sensitive ears and razor-sharp eyes to business opportunities take the day. Networking exposes you to opportunities that you were unaware existed before. The wider your network, the higher the likelihood of hitting the right business opportunities to spur your growth.
One of the primary roles of networking is to find the right people or stakeholders for your business. Networking exposes you to different people, and you can randomly fall into those who match your business. When you meet such people, grab the opportunity and let them know about your business.
Networking also helps improve your confidence as an entrepreneur: By incessantly interacting with people with similar mindsets and business profiles, you are not only efficiently stepping outside your comfort zone but also creating and boosting irreplaceable social skills and self-confidence that you can implement anywhere.
All said and done, the constant factor to remember is that networking is a two-way street and just as often as you receive word-of-mouth referrals through your networks, you should also dedicate time to issuing them in return.
KCB Group CEO
