Things I wish I Knew When I Started My Career

Part 1: Build (and keep in touch with) a network

You may not know it yet, but the fact that you are reading this article is probably due in large part to my efforts to improve in this first (and in my opinion, most important) thing I wish I knew when I started my career. When it comes to building a network, the challenge is not meeting people, the hardest and most important thing is keeping up with people. Just because something is hard does not mean it is complicated. Keeping up with someone simply means that at a somewhat regular interval you re-establish some form of connection with that person, it could be a phone call, email, coffee/lunch, or some other form of physical or social activity. The hard part is that if your regular connections with someone provide no value to that person and thus only cost them — in time, mental bandwidth, money, etc. — you are actually breaking down the relationship and not building it up. Eventually that person will not give any more. Your outreach has become a burden. To keep from becoming a burden, you need to provide value to your connection. That value can come in many forms. Information, inspiration, and/or entertainment, are great categories of value to try to provide. So where do you, dear reader, come into this? Well in 2017 when I started The Acorn, my weekly Raleigh commercial real estate newsletter. One of my main goals was to use the newsletter as a way to provide information and value to my friends and other people in my network. It has proven to be a fantastic way to grow and maintain connections in Raleigh. My only regret with The Acorn was that I did not start sending it out in 2012 when I first started getting interested in Raleigh commercial real estate!

This article originally appeared on The Acorn, my weekly Raleigh commercial real estate newsletter. If you are interested in saving time and staying up to speed on real estate in Raleigh, you can subscribe to The Acorn at www.OakCityCRE.com