Last week I went to a Women in Business networking breakfast, hosted by our MPP, Lisa MacLeod.
Although I network online all the time using Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, I have not done too much business networking in person in recent years.
Oh, I have my elevator speech, and I talk to everyone about what I do for a living, but I don’t actively seek clients in my own area. In fact, as a virtual assistant, I have purposely built a clientele that is located away from my hometown.
There are reasons that I have done that, of course. Prior to being an internet marketing virtual assistant, I was focused on the hospitality industry, working mainly with variable costs in restaurants and bars.
I worked from my own home office, and could compile, analyze and report on the data from my own office, I found that the clients I was working with preferred that I was on their site more than I thought I needed to be.
So, for many years I still travelled back and forth from my office to restaurants … and also needed to be available at some crazy times of day, being that the restaurant industry is not open ‘regular office hours’. I worked many holidays and weekends, and although I was very good at what I did, sometimes it just didn’t seem like it was worth it.
When I decided to swap my hospitality clients for online clients, I made a conscious decision to work with people whose offices or businesses I could not possibly drive to. Harsh? Probably. But it wouldn’t have worked for me otherwise.
Now I have established myself over the last three or so years, and am comfortable with setting my own work boundaries … and so I am finally getting out there in my own city!
Needless to say, the breakfast was great, and I enjoyed meeting many women who are running their own businesses like I am.
I learned from going to FoVA last year that getting together with people who understand my line of work is an invaluable source of support for me. That’s what this breakfast did as well, and I am sorry that it took me so long to realize the benefits I could gain by networking locally.
I will definitely look forward to the next networking meeting, wherever it is!
