This Rainmaker is Full Up
This is how one aspiring rainmaker learned a lesson the hard way. To understand it, you have to know a little bit about the built environment industry.
On every corporate move from one building to another, and especially to a new site on which the company constructs a new building, a gaggle of firms make their money. There are building and real estate owners, lawyers, real estate brokers, and flocks of architects; civil, structural, electrical and mechanical engineers; interior designers, endless construction prime and subcontractors, furniture dealers, building material suppliers, and telephone systems suppliers.
Almost every project requires at least one of each of these categories. Many moves also require smaller, specialty firms, such as archeologists, moving and elevator and acoustics specialists, and many others. Not wanting all of this gaggling flock to show up, honking and hissing on their doorstep everyday, the company’s real estate managers keep the plans to move a secret for as long as they can.
With so much money at stake, so many kinds of firm and so many firms within each kind, and with so many secrets to figure out, one would expect that there would be well established networks sharing information and introductions. And there are.
One aspiring rainmaker, working for an engineering firm and trying to develop new business, got wind of a firm planning to move a 50,000 square foot office between suburbs. This knowledge gave him a chit to offer to a small number people in his market. He chose to give it to the most successful architect in the region, who achieved this status through his rainmaking prowess.
That architect, whom I will refer to as Thomas, thanked him and took him to lunch at his club, and asked him about his business and the projects the engineer had worked on. Thomas, an old pro and a charmer, knew all the right questions to ask. The engineer felt that Thomas would include his firm on one of its pursuit teams in the near future. He believed he was moving up into big-time business development, and it felt good.
When he learned two weeks later that Thomas had included his competitor on a team pursuing a 100,000 square foot office project, he felt betrayed. He felt that Thomas had used him to get the 50,000 square foot project and was now dumping him for another engineering firm.
But, that belief was misinformed. Thomas realized that he owed the engineer and planned to return the help given when the timing was right. He put the other engineer on the 100,000 square foot project, because his debt to that person was great and went back many years. Thomas is what we at Harding & Company refer to as the full-up contact. Full-up contacts are almost always old hands at networking. They have huge networks and both give and receive many leads. It’s hard for a newcomer to break into the full-up contact’s clique for giving and receiving referrals, because to do so, he has to push out an entrenched competitor.
The answer is to focus your attentions on other people who are coming up the learning curve as you are. Catch enough rising stars early in their careers and pretty soon you will be the full-up contact making tough choices about where to dole out your favors.
Does that seem like a long, slow process? It may be, but to win at networking you have to pay your dues.
