She Can See Who Has a Stake in Your Success. Can You?

On networks, community, and the business opportunities hiding in plain sight.

buildwithmatriarch.com

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There is something Nelle does when she looks at a business situation that she finds genuinely difficult to explain as a method — because it is not quite a method. It is closer to a perception. She sees networks of people and interests that others seem to miss. She sees who has a stake in a thing before anyone has told them they have a stake. She maps, instinctively, the ecosystem around an idea.

“I am always surprised that other people don’t see these opportunities,” she says.

When pressed on what she is actually scanning for — what her brain is doing when it scans a business situation and starts seeing connections — her answer loops back to the framework she applies to everything. Business is communication. And communication requires people.

“Who, other than customers, are you communicating with?” she asks. “Suppliers? Parallel services serving the same audience as you? The community? Competitors? All of them are part of your network.”

Most business advice treats the customer as the primary relationship and everyone else as peripheral. Nelle treats every relationship as a communication — which means every relationship has the potential to carry information in both directions, and every relationship can be made to work better by applying the rules of good communication. Appropriateness. Clarity. Purpose. What does this person want from this exchange? What are you offering them? Is it clear?

The event example she gives is illuminating. When she thinks about how to fill seats at an event, she does not think first about the audience. She thinks about who else has an interest in the event succeeding — parallel service providers whose clients would benefit from attending, community members who would be pleased to recommend it, people adjacent to the topic who would share it because sharing it reflects well on them. These people are not the audience. They are the network. And the network, activated correctly, can carry an event to an audience it would never have reached alone.

This is the thinking behind the connections column on the Trello boards she uses for advisory clients. It is not a contacts list. It is a map of everyone who has a stake in the client’s success — and an invitation to think about what each of them wants from the communication.

The skill, if it is a skill, seems to emerge from the same root as everything else in the way she works: the instinct to see people first, to read what they want from an exchange, and to make the exchange worth their while. The customer is one person in a network. The network is the actual opportunity.

She cannot teach the perception, she says. But she can teach people to ask the question: who else is in this conversation, and what do they want from it?

In a business landscape that spends enormous energy on audience-building — on growing follower counts and email lists and reach metrics — this is a quietly radical reorientation. The audience is not the network. The network is larger, more motivated, and more likely to act than any cold audience you could build with advertising spend.

You just have to learn to see it.

Which, in Nelle’s experience, starts with asking the same question she has always asked. Why would someone care about this? And then: who else might care, and for what reason?

The why kid at work again. The network was there all along.

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