Who are your top five business connections?

Utopia Computers director Craig Hume asks in this opinion piece: who are the people you spend the most time with around your business and how can they help improve it?

I recently came across a concept that suggests you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with in matters related to your health. The idea is that if you hang around with people who run lots, enjoy swimming and eat well you too will be more likely to do the same. 

This got me thinking, perhaps the same could be said for our IT businesses? What if I was the average of the five people I spend the most time with talking about Utopia?

So I came up with a list of the five people I thought I spoke to most often about business. Looking at their names on the piece of paper, I was struck that I am surrounded by extremely positive business minds. I could see that they all shared my enthusiasm for entrepreneurship and innovation.

Some could be said as to be bigger risk takers while one on the list could even be thought of as being a little cautious, importantly I am open to take advice from any of them and all could be considered to be successful in their own right.

Now, I am certainly no Steve Jobs, but I do feel that I have found a modest amount of success running Utopia. More so in the last five to six years than before, is it just that I have learned from my mistakes, or is it that I have opened myself to a larger group of business minds, by regularly attending business events in and out of my own industry?

It goes without saying that the top five people I have around me are talented business types and that I would happily consider myself to be the average of these people. Perhaps if I hung about with the likes of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg I would be achieving stratospheric success?

Or to look at it the other way, if I didn’t have any great business minds around me to fire ideas off of and become inspired from, perhaps I would not have climbed to where I am today?

Last week I had some drinks with a friend I met through Network Group. He is incredibly talented and shared with me an idea he is working on. It is fantastic and I genuinely believe he will change the marketplace his product is being launched into. However, I can promise you that if he wasn’t out networking and making new connections as well as firing ideas off his peers, he would not have come up with the brilliant product he now has. 

My question to you is this: who do you speak to most often about your IT business and are they helping push the boundaries of where you are going? If not, then consider spending time with your local Chamber of Commerce or attend more trade events like the ones PCR run. 

Running with the Lions is certainly better than with the gazelles. 

About the author

Craig Hume is director at Utopia Computers.