Progressive Partnerships: The Future of Business by Laing Callum

Progressive Partnerships: The Future of Business by Laing Callum

Author:Laing, Callum [Laing, Callum]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781331859
Published: 2016-04-05T21:00:00+00:00


And on – Bangkok Young Professionals

The third networking event I set up was probably the most interesting one. It came about when Karin, who ran a small PR company, attended one of my events and suggested that we set up something with a broader appeal than my current events. My current events at that point were the Networking for Success Business Breakfasts that started at 7:30am, which was enough to put off most people in Thailand, and of course MobileMonday, which was fairly niche. Karin and I decided to set up another event targeting the people we wanted to meet, and also the people who had the broadest appeal to the sponsors we wanted to talk to at the time.

The American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) had just launched something called American Young Professionals. To their credit, AmCham had noticed that almost all networking events available at the time were attended by men between forty and sixty -- something I had noticed but failed to capitalise on, and there was a whole young demographic being excluded.

Karin and I liked this concept, but thought it should be even more inclusive, so we sat down and tried to figure out what was missing from the events we attended. One of the things about being an expat and travelling the world is that I’ve seen way more commonalities between countries than differences, and before long it becomes hard to understand why people are so jingoistic about their countries. We decided to be open to all nationalities, and not just that, we were actively going to encourage Thai nationals to attend. It seemed nuts to us not to combine Thai networking events and expat networking events when we were all trying to do business together.

We liked the idea of a youth focus. Both of us were in our late twenties at the time so it made sense. It wasn’t that we had any problem with the older generation – after all, generally they held the money – it was that we had noticed many of the networking events attended by the forty to sixty demographic were not actually about building networks. They were about maintaining networks.

Finally we decided having an event that was 90% men was ridiculous. Women didn’t enjoy being at these events and didn’t come back. Getting men involved was easy, so we were going to focus our activities on getting at least 50% women to each event. This was an underserved demographic, and if we could create a networking event where women could enjoy themselves, they would be more likely to come back and bring their friends.

It was this key idea that led us to explore using connections and entertainment as our drivers to attract attendees. The event became Bangkok Young Professionals, and for many years was one of the most consistently popular networking events in the country.

We discovered an interesting side effect that probably should have been obvious, but wasn’t until it happened. With 50% women, the vibe of the networking events changed significantly.



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