I went to a large networking event in the evening.
There is a Twin Cities based group that puts on events which I have attended before. They are a paid group. You can visit once for free and after that it’s $35/event or pay $495/year to go to as many events as you like.
They have been around for a year and tonight is their free 1 year anniversary party. What is impressive to me is that they have grown to 400 paying members in that year and put on 4-6 events a month in different parts of the city.
I found parking and went to the event space and checked in. They had reached capacity of 250 people for the event and I don’t know if that many people showed up but it felt like well over 150 in a somewhat narrow upper floor event space. Probably too many people for effective networking but I made a few good contacts. There are 4 in particular I’m very interested to speak with more.
Two were finance people who could possible use my help. One focuses on helping people get business on LinkedIn. Like what I’m doing. He was doing free LinkedIn profile evaluations and I had him eval mine and he gave it very high marks. There’s probably some ways we can work together.
The last one is part of a business that makes customized products like mugs and gift cards. I probably have some affinity to that due to my past business. (Ok, I really do have affinity there). But there business had the wrinkle of making it easy to place orders on the go like when you are selling door to door or when you meet someone unexpectedly which is how a lot of sales happen. I think they are doing some really interesting stuff and I could see it working with some potential clients I have.
So it was a valuable event to attend.