Growing My Social Capital

1) One person must be a domain expert in your industry. This would be someone who's engaged in the same type of business activity as you would like to be. They may own the same kind of company that you would like to own, or they may be a technical expert who knows a lot about the kind of product or service that you would like to produce.

     Tato is a Dominican native from one of the villages that I helped last summer with BLUE. He only speaks spanish and is 50 years old. Interestingly enough he does not know his birthday, rather only knows his birth year. Tato has lived in La Yaroa, Dominican Republic (pop. under 500) for his entire life. Tato is my domain expert because he is a local who has previous skills in manual labor and basic plumbing, both of which are essential for a successful water project. Tato was an extremely experienced and hard worker on the water project in La Yaroa and loved what BLUE did for his community. With some negotiation we convinced him to join our team. Tato will soon be a paid employee of BLUE because his skills, experience, approachability, and hard work will help expedite our upcoming water projects over the next few months. In recent months BLUE has made it a priority to hire hard-working, skilled Dominican locals to help lead our trips alongside us. Tato is a great asset for us because he not only has the manual labor experience for successful water projects, but also has connections in the country for parts such as PVC tubes, shovels, and water faucets for us to use when completing the water projects.

2) One person must be an expert on your market. This would be someone who is targeting your market with similar products services -- or knows a lot about conducting customer research in your area -- or represents a major piece of your market (this might be most applicable with B2B markets).

     Danny Rodriguez Sr. is the founder of LIFO. BLUE's parent organization. LIFO is a service organization that takes adults on service trips around the caribbean to complete water projects. Mr. Rodriguez is the market expert. While his LIFO organization has been successful and helpful to the community, it can be difficult to find a sustainable market when your trips are for adults (usually aged 25+). People's lives become busier as they get into their late twenties and beyond. Mr. Rodriguez provided us at BLUE with some valuable advice that the market audience of high school and college students could prove fruitful for a service organization. Danny Rodriguez Jr, the president of BLUE, gained a lot of valuable advice from his dad in order to jumpstart our BLUE organization. Mr. Rodriguez has been on dozens of trips with LIFO dating back over a decade and has helped with some BLUE trips in recent years as well. His experience on past service trips and constant feedback advice for us is really what will help us most.

3) One person must be an important supplier to your industry. This would be someone who is selling products and services to other organizations/firms in your industry. 

     Noel is my cousin. He works for Nestle's in Massachusetts. He is filling the supplier spot of my network. Noel's company will provide our BLUE Cocktail fundraiser with water bottles and sparkling water bottles. They will also be providing the 5 gallon water jugs that we use for drinking water during the service trips. I found this contact because of our most recent BLUE fundraiser. I remembered that my cousin was working in the water industry and his company was surprisingly willing to donate the water to us. I think it definitely benefits both sides. Hopefully this years partnership can continue to be a good sponsorship relationship for BLUE and Nestle's. We are working towards giving the world clean water and Nestle, one of our very own water-bottle companies, is helping us stay hydrated along the way.

Finally: Reflect. This experience requires you to do a little 'targeted networking.' How will this experience shape how you participate in any future networking events? Did this experience differ from your networking experiences in the past? How?

     I think this experience made it pretty obvious that targeted networking is very important in a business or organizational setting. When you are networking, you should try to be precise and purposeful and not waste a lot of time with networking opportunities that are unrealistic or that won't be very beneficial to you. I think that these three connections that I wrote about in my post will be very helpful in maintaining BLUE's success both in the US and in the Dominican Republic. Most of my networking in the past has been more social than business oriented. Thus, this assignment made me go out of my comfort zone a bit in establishing these business relationships.