14/08/2026
The Art of Building Relationships That Last
Most people treat relationship building like a numbers game. Collect enough contacts, attend enough events, send enough DMs, and eventually something useful will fall out of it. I have never seen it work that way. Every relationship that has actually moved my career or my businesses forward started small, stayed honest about what it was for, and grew on purpose rather than by accident.
Define the relationship before it defines itself
The first thing I learned, often the hard way, is that a relationship with an influential person needs a defined purpose. When someone asks me to mentor them in a specific area, capacity building, people management, whatever it may be, that becomes the shape of the relationship. The problem starts when that shape quietly expands without either side agreeing to it. A few months in, the same person is calling me about their marriage, or asking for financial help. Each time that happens, it puts a hole in the ship. And eventually the other person starts to pull back. They see the call coming in and they let it ring out, even when they are free to pick up.
The fix is simple but rarely practiced. If the relationship needs to grow beyond what it started as, say so out loud and let it be mutual. One of my mentees came to me years ago asking for help with self-worth. Nothing more. Later, after watching how I ran my own family, he asked me directly if I would also guide him through relationships. We talked it through and agreed on it together. From there I walked with him through his first relationship, through a breakup, through the stretch where he stopped believing in himself and the picture he had of what love should look like had fallen apart. He is getting married in a few weeks. That relationship held because neither of us left its boundaries to guesswork.
Do not show up as a taker
The second mistake is even more common. People show up to a relationship as a taker. Every call is about what they need next. In 2017, when I was just starting out in professional speaking, I watched a speaker at a conference who completely blew my mind. Weeks later I found him on Instagram and sent him a DM. I did not ask him to mentor me. I told him what I was willing to give him first, even though it was something I already had someone else handling for me at the time. Three days later he replied and invited me to his office. When I asked him why he responded to me out of the hundreds of messages he receives, he said he had looked me up and felt it would be worth his time. But I think the real reason was simpler. Most people reach out to influential people with their hand out. I reached out with something to offer.
The relationships inside your business matter more than the ones outside it
This applies just as much inside a business as it does outside one. A ship does not sink because of the water around it. It sinks because of the water inside it. As a founder, you cannot stay involved in every email, every design, every customer call forever. At some point you have to outgrow that and hand it off to a team that can represent you correctly. If that team is not aligned with you, they will sabotage your business without even meaning to. A prospect calls in, gets a rude or careless reception from someone on your team, and you will never know how much that single interaction actually cost you.
I have found something true across every kind of organization I have been part of, religious, political, or business. Whatever values a team lead carries are a mirror of the person above them. If you are lackadaisical, dishonest, or unreliable, your team will become the same, and they will pass it down to whoever works under them. You can have the best strategy meeting in the world on a Monday morning. If the culture inside your team is broken, it will eat that strategy for breakfast.
Networking is not the same as building a relationship
There is also a difference between networking and genuinely building a relationship, and I think it comes down to energy. The state you are in when you meet someone, how present you are, how positive, often determines whether that connection grows into something real or just fades into a contact saved in your phone. I met a man at the airport about five years ago. Our flight got delayed, we started talking, and I mentioned my son's upcoming birthday. We ended up at a bookstore together so he could pick out a gift. We exchanged contacts. Today we co-own three companies together. That did not start as networking. It started as two people actually paying attention to each other.
Not every connection is meant to go that deep, and that is fine. Some people stay at arm's length. Some become close. The skill is in paying attention to what matters to the other person, looking for overlap in your paths, and letting the follow up conversations tell you where things should go.
Develop yourself before you develop others
If I had to hand down one principle to the next generation of founders and executives, it would be this: develop yourself before you develop others. Before you bring people onto your team, you need your own path cut out. You need to know your core values, what you will not compromise on, before you let others into the building. If you do not have that clarity, your team will fill the gaps with their own guesses. Is excellence negotiable here? Can we bend the truth to close a deal? Some of those guesses come from good intentions, but they will not always represent you correctly. This is the one thing I would go back and fix first if I could.
The relationship that shaped how I work
I have been working professionally since late 2008, when the economic meltdown pushed me out of my first job in insurance marketing. Since then I have run a music education business, taught computer science, worked in IT, moved into facility management, then learning and development, and eventually became group head of human resources, all within one organization where I spent over half of my 18 years of work. The chairman I worked under there had the strongest influence on how I run business today. He taught me to take the work seriously, right down to returning a call promptly. He also taught me to look after my people generously, so they have no reason to be distracted by things outside the mission. That is why, in my own companies today, those of us working directly together do not really have starting and closing times. We are still building toward the point where we can afford to slow down.
Where this all leads
Relationships, whether with a mentor, a team, or a stranger at an airport, are built on clarity, generosity, and consistency. Networking gets you a contact. Intentionality gets you a relationship that compounds over years.
