If you try to calculate the business case for networking, you will never do any networking.
Measured hour by hour, it always looks like a loss. No contract signed. No offer received. No promotion secured. Just another coffee, another conversation, another name on a list.
And yet, leaders who keep showing up in those conversations know something. They know that networking is not about efficiency. It is about faith. Faith that relationships precede results. Faith that trust takes time. Faith that serendipity cannot be scheduled.
Think about it: if you need to prove the immediate cause-and-effect of every coffee chat, every professional event, every reconnecting message you send, you’ll stop before you start. Networking rarely rewards you on the same day you invest in it. It’s not a transaction. It’s a relationship practice.
That’s the problem with treating networking as a cost-benefit analysis. You will always conclude the ROI is too low. Because the return shows up in ways that are impossible to forecast and on timelines you can’t control. I have benefited from:
A conversation I had five years ago resurfaced last week in the form of a referral.
A casual introduction at a conference opened a door six months later when I didn’t even know I’d need one.
A reconnection after 17 years with a former colleague sparked a collaboration I could never have budgeted for.
The real business case for networking is that it builds optionality. It multiplies your access to opportunities, perspectives, and trust before you know you’ll need them. It helps you navigate the unpredictable.
The irony is, the moment you need your network, it is too late to start building one. A network is not an asset you acquire when necessary. It is a community you nurture when unnecessary.
So why do we struggle with it? Because it feels unproductive. Because it resists measurement. Because it asks us to embrace uncertainty in a world that tells us to maximise certainty.
But that is precisely its gift. Networking stretches our sense of time and loosens our grip on control.
It invites us to invest in what might never pay off, and in doing so it keeps us open to what could.
The business case for networking will never close neatly on a spreadsheet. It closes in moments of recognition, in doors opened years later, in opportunities we could not imagine until they appeared.
If you insist on certainty before you reach out, you will never reach out. If you dare to risk a little inefficiency, you may just find yourself richer in ways that figures never capture.
Is your networking a calculation or a conversation with the future?
Please contact me here if you would like to discuss how you may go further in this topic through Coaching.