Funding by Networking is a culmination of common business practices

Funding by Networking is a culmination of common business practices to try and provide a funding solution to the local business. 

For those businesses, who already participate within business networking, they loosely know the perceived ethos of networking and as a result, accept what’s required as well as what can happen by being part of the business networking culture. 

Unfortunately as with everything perception is paramount and currently, there are so many different variants on the business networking model - which has now undoubtedly seen a negative impact and has now begun to dilute and affect its original proposed purpose and networking blindness and denial has kicked in. 

So much so that it now pays witness to the fact that many business networking meetings are seemingly becoming a closed shop and more of a clique, in effect a business within themselves – and this is without them realising that this is indeed the case in the eye of any visitor to their networking meetings. 

This combined with the fact that although many businesses will say that networking is vital to them, they do not treat it as so, instead opting to ignore the fact they may have booked a meeting as an attending business delegate but when the time comes they simply do not turn up offering any prior notification or reason. 

Of course, this can happen for many reasons and some of which would be genuine, however ultimately such actions undoubtedly show a lack of respect by them of other businesses, perhaps this is because they see no genuine benefit of business networking because of past experiences, or because they themselves have nothing at risk expecting things to be FREE. 

It’s sad to say that ‘business networking’ has played a big part in affecting the mindset of local businesses, whereby at first they were perhaps surprised at getting things for FREE, now it moved more towards more of the expectation of “it's their right to get things for FREE.” 

FREE food, FREE beverages, FREE referrals, and FREE funding - the list can be endless. 

On the subject of funding, for businesses – funding can still be hard to come by especially if the right criterion is not met, and again business networking is seen as a possible route to finance for those business delegates who attend to try and gain access to finance such as business development grants. 

However the FREE expectation and concept move into funding, and whilst funding is a big issue for many local businesses it's alarming how many businesses are reluctant to even put a penny of their own money into their own business – even though they have the ability to do so. 

Ownership of a business starts at the grassroots, and that includes the bad and good things about business, in fact, we all witness on a daily basis on social media how businesses take ownership of the good things. 

As already mentioned funding by networking meetings are a culmination of common business practices through which they are combining the benefits of business networking whilst engaging in the “Givers Gain” ethos. 

Businesses turn up because they have something at stake because they pay to attend, this feeds the delegates' expectations of the meeting of bettered networking opportunities, high numbers of attendance then allows one attending business to obtain sponsored funding.