Committee Member Networking

Take the Leap!
Have you ever felt alone, like you and or your company are the only ones struggling with your type of fiduciary questions or concerns? While from time to time that may be true, more often than not other people have been in your position or are currently struggling with the same issues. Now that you know you are not alone, what can you do about it?
How about getting out of the office? Not just out of the office, but out and about in a productive way. Who says networking is just for sales or specific job titles/departments? Not ProCourse, we encourage our friends and clients to get together with their peers to network. We also like to create peer networks when the time, people and topic are right.
Industry conferences provide a great opportunity to expand your network. Of course, conferences may have related expense that need to be included in that annual irritation some people call a budget. A few worth looking into (besides our annual events) are RESOLVE, Plan Sponsor Council of America and Plan Sponsor. There are other conferences out there that might have topics that you are looking for so get to your Google and start searching. Be careful to filter out the noise on Google. I was doing research online as I was preparing for this blog and when I googled “client networking” and “peer networking” the first several pages were computer references. So I recommend that you don’t follow in my footsteps.
Fiduciaries are tasked with great responsibility and can feel overwhelmed at times. Getting together with colleagues or peer networks can help Fiduciaries learn, grow and teach. Keith Ferrazzi provides a great quote “The currency of real networking is not greed but generosity.” Sometimes your network will want to learn from you and will consider you the subject matter expert. Be generous with your knowledge and it will come back to you many times over.
So how can you find a peer network for Fiduciaries? Reach out to your Advisor, your existing peer network, or post on Craigslist. Whatever works for you, I just encourage you to take that leap.