“It’s not what you know, but whoM you know.”
This old adage is truer now than ever before. If you’re motivated to become wealthy or be successful in any endeavor, your ability to curate and leverage resources is the key to success.
Now, this doesn’t mean that you cannot benefit from being an industry expert. The complication is that while expertise is often necessary to be successful, experts tend to be highly fungible. If your network is a well-oiled machine, you should be able to find knowledgeable, talented and very capable professionals without a problem.
When it comes to the private wealth industry—as well as many others—what distinguishes ultra-successful professionals is whom they know. This is true when doing everything from sourcing capabilities to sourcing business opportunities. Furthermore, in empirically dissecting the wealth-creating behaviors of self-made millionaires and even self-made billionaires, we find that a defining characteristic is their ability to connect people with people and people with projects, all while benefiting themselves.
While “networking” is readily embraced and extolled within the private wealth industry, what’s so telling is that relatively few professionals are particularly good at it. It’s rare to find professionals who are systematically identifying other people—from prospects and centers of influence to peers and providers—who can be leveraged to meaningfully enhance their businesses. When most professionals identify such individuals, they rarely put in the time and effort to develop the quality relationship that produces extraordinary results.
With unerring consistency, when professionals, irrespective of their field, focus intensively on their array of relationships—their networks—they usually find a treasure trove of new business opportunities that often translates into significant personal wealth. The problem is that very few professionals are adept at effectively evaluating and strategizing their relationships, making it impossible to derive the greatest benefits from them.
It’s important to note that professionals aren’t the only ones who tend to fail to strategically grow their networks and maximize their relationships. Segments of the wealthy also are often less than accomplished in this regard.
In a recent study of ultra-wealthy inheritors, for example, it’s clear that they have an amazing array of family ties, personal relationships and business connections. Many of them literally have the ability to connect with most anyone they want—and they know it. However, these inheritors admit to not knowing how to meaningfully benefit from their ability to access other influential and powerful people.
There’s no question about what professionals can accomplish with high-caliber networking. More than any technical prowess, effective networking is a significant driver of personal wealth. In other words, networking equals net worth.
