Business networking in Perth rewards patience more than most owners think. Ando Chong on the long game of trust, and why the room is not the point.
I grew up in Singapore. Twenty six years there before Perth, and the thing that took me longest to translate was not language or regulation. It was pace.
Business relationships there are built slowly and deliberately. Nobody is in a hurry, because everybody understands that the relationship is the asset and the transaction is just something that happens along the way. You invest in it for years before it returns anything, and both parties know that is how it works.
Then you arrive somewhere that measures a networking event by how many cards you collected, and it takes a while to work out what is going wrong.
Because people arrive at a room with something to sell and a two week horizon.
They collect contacts, follow up twice, get nothing, and conclude that networking does not work here. What actually happened is that a transactional approach was applied to something that only compounds over years.
Perth rewards patience more than most Australian cities, because it is small, dense and extremely connected. Reputation moves fast here in both directions. That is either an enormous advantage or a real exposure, depending on how you conduct yourself over a long period.
There is a local shape to this worth naming.
The market is small enough that everybody eventually meets everybody. The contractor you treated poorly in 2019 is the operations manager of your prospect in 2027. That is not a rare event here. It is the normal course of a career in this city.
There is also a strong culture of directness, which is entirely compatible with building trust and is often misunderstood as the opposite. Being straight with people builds trust faster than being agreeable. What breaks it is not directness. It is inconsistency between what you say and what you do.
And relationships here are often built sideways rather than upward. Through industry bodies, suppliers, subcontractors, other owners. Some of the most valuable relationships I have came through people who were never going to be clients and were always going to know the right person.
You give first and you keep no ledger. An introduction, a referral, a piece of information, an hour on someone's problem. Not as a trade. If you are counting, they can feel it, and that is not a relationship, that is an invoice with better manners.
You stay in contact when you need nothing. This is the whole discipline. Anyone can call when they want something. The person who checks in twice a year for six years, having asked for nothing, is the person who gets the call when a serious opportunity appears.
You are reliable in small things. Reply when you say you will. Turn up. Do what you said. Trust is built almost entirely from unremarkable follow through, which is why so few people accumulate much of it.
You protect the relationship over the transaction. Sometimes that means telling someone you are not the right provider, or referring work away. Every time I have done that, it has come back, usually years later and larger.
For a long time I treated relationships as a function of doing good work. Do the work well, the reputation follows, the relationships happen.
Partly true. Also incomplete. Good work is the entry requirement, not the differentiator, and there are rooms worth being in and people worth knowing well before you need them.
When iQuest was in trouble after the boom, what mattered were relationships built years earlier, before there was any reason to think they would matter. That is the argument for the long game in one sentence. You cannot build trust in the moment you need it. The building has to have already happened.
Pick five relationships. Not fifty. Five people you respect, who operate in or near your world, who you are genuinely interested in.
Then invest in those five for three years with no expectation attached. Send them things. Introduce them to people. Ask how their business is going and listen to the answer.
Business is a marathon, not a sprint. Relationships are the longest part of it, and they compound exactly the way money does. Starting late is expensive. Starting now is the only option available.
Usually because the approach is transactional and the time horizon is short. Relationships that generate opportunity are built over years through consistent contact when nothing is being asked for.
Choose a small number of people, contribute without keeping score, stay in contact when you need nothing, and be reliable in small things. Perth is a small market where consistency compounds quickly.
Both can work, but the format matters less than the approach. Someone who attends one group consistently for five years will outperform someone who attends five groups for six months.
Years. Most relationships that produce significant opportunity were built well before there was any reason to expect they would.
No. Being straight with people builds trust faster than being agreeable. What damages trust is inconsistency between what you say and what you do.
Anderson Chong, Founder of iQuest Consulting and Business by Design.
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