After months of this community asking, last week I brought together a group of thirty women from this community to meet live and in person in NYC.
The format was the same as what we do here in Chicago. It’s nothing complicated. You show up, you learn a small lesson and you connect with the people in the room. You put out into the world what you actually need help with right now and often times, you walk away with some kind of connection to actually help.
This event was somewhat small. I wanted to test it out to see if women in the NY-area really wanted these events before I get a huge room. Truthfully, we probably could have used a bigger room. But the goal of the event wasn’t to be big to begin with.
The goal was to facilitate deeper relationships among the women in Dear FoundHer…And, what happened in that room is the whole reason I built this community in the first place.
Many women traveled from out side of the city. Some stayed in NYC the night before, a group of them went to eat dinner at Shukette (one of my favorites.) After the event, there were women that left together to go get lunch before heading home.
I also watched women who walked in as strangers leave with a new connection, potential partnerships, and strategies from me and my special guest, Melissa Rosenfield, from IFP Communications. What transpired, were the kind of thing you can’t fake and can’t rush. The feedback afterwards was some of the best I’ve ever gotten from an event, and I think it’s because all everybody in that room wanted was to be surrounding by amazing women. And that’s exactly what happened.
I’m not trying to run the biggest networking community for women in business. I’m trying to build the most effective one for women 40 and over, so they can grow their businesses and live their lives the way they actually want to live them. You don’t get there with surface-level relationships. You get there with deep ones, and depth only happens in a room small enough to actually see each other.
I’ve spent this whole month talking about networking. What happened in NYC is the version of it you can see with your own eyes. But just as I always say: I need you as much as you need me. And this month proved it, because I learned lessons about my own network that I wasn’t expecting at all.
For years, I said yes to everything. I often share the story that it wasn’t until I started saying no that my business actually started to grow. But in the beginning, I never wanted to turn down a single opportunity because it all felt like it might matter someday.
I thought that was how you built a network, with volume and presence. Never burning a bridge by saying no.
What I understand now that I didn’t then: saying yes to everything is not a networking strategy. It’s a people-pleasing strategy with a networking budget.
The relationships that have actually changed my business, came from investing deeply in a few specific things with a few specific people. These relationships came from working hard, getting to actually know a contact and truly investing in our connection.
As you heard on the podcast this month, Liz Lange didn’t dress every pregnant woman in Hollywood. She faxed the specific ones who would change the trajectory of her brand. Steph Weibring didn’t try to be everywhere. She found two friends with the right audiences and asked them to share her work. Christine De Wendel, who’s on the show today, didn’t network her way across a room. She spent 15 years building genuine expertise and relationships in a specific space, and those relationships raised $145 million.
The through-line in every single story we told this month, and the through-line in that room in New York, is the same: it’s not about more relationships, it’s about better ones.
Today’s quick win is actually a quick audit:
I want you to look at the relationships you invested in most heavily in July. Not the ones you were obligated to maintain, but the ones you chose. The coffee dates, the check-ins, the collaborations, the people you reached out to as a genuine customer or fan.
Now ask yourself: are these the relationships that are going to matter in 12 months? Are these the ones you’re investing in because they’re genuinely right, or because you haven’t stopped to ask the question?
If the answer feels uncertain, that’s not a problem. That’s information and it’s important that you use it.
Your network doesn’t need to be bigger. It needs to be better tended. And the first step in tending it better is knowing which relationships are actually worth the investment.
That’s the work of August. And I’ll be here for it.
See you Thursday, that’s the month’s final Deep Dive. The complete SWEEP networking module, how every pillar of the framework maps to a specific relationship strategy. It’s for our premium subscribers and it’s the best thing I’ve written this month.
Lindsay
TODAY ON THE PODCAST…
She spent over a decade scaling two of Europe’s most successful tech companies, reaching the C-suite along the way. Then she moved back to her hometown and nobody knew her name. That tension is the heart of this episode of Dear FoundHer, and it sets up one of the clearest examples of starting a business after corporate you will hear this year.
Host Lindsay Pinchuk talks with Christine de Wendel, co-founder and U.S. CEO of Sunday, the digital checkout platform used in over 3,500 restaurants across the U.S., U.K., and France.
Lindsay and Christine talk candidly about networking for women, credibility, and why making a career pivot later in life can be an advantage instead of a setback. If you have ever wondered whether starting a business after corporate means starting from zero, Christine’s story offers a clear answer: the experience, relationships, and skills you have already built still count. Press play to hear how she used them to help raise $145 million for Sunday.
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