CEO INTERVIEW

Brock David

We meet David Brock, more commonly known by friends and business contacts as Brock. When he founded networking group Your Partnerships nearly five years ago, it was only meant to be a little hobby. How times have changed!

Your accent kind of gives away that you’re not from these shores. How did an American come to be in Cornwall?

I’m retired US Navy. I met my wife while I was stationed up in London through mutual friends. And we went back to the States and got married. And then I was posted to St Mawgan.

My wife is from the Kent area, so the whole plan at the time was when I finished with the military, was to get on the property ladder and go back to Kent or Surrey, something like that. But after six months of being in Cornwall, we didn’t want to go anywhere else. I was stationed at St Mawgan for four years and retired about 15 years ago. So, we’ve been in Cornwall now 19 years.

Networking is not selling Being fair about it, the FSB to each other, wasn’t really doing anything it’s relationship at that time. The Cornwall Chamber were doing a few building things, but not a lot. And apart from a few pockets here and there, there just wasn’t much else going on. To begin with, our networking group was only designed to be for mid Cornwall and just one or two meetings a month, that was the plan.

What was your first venture after leaving the Navy?

When I came out of the military I was running hotels and resorts, which happened to me by accident. I had a friend I knew through the children at the childcare centre on the base. And she invited me for coffee to talk to a hotel owner about something. And next thing is I’m running hotels and ended up working in the hospitality for about nine years.

My job in the military was in logistics, but they moved me into public affairs and community relations. So, I’ve always pretty much been a ‘people person’. But the thing with the hospitality industry is I was soon working 100 hours a week. I don’t mind, I’m a workaholic. But I never got to see my family. So, I stopped everything and started volunteering at the Cornwall Air Ambulance, which had just started up.

And then I was invited for lunch by some business people who had an idea about me running a networking group in Cornwall. That had not been on my radar whatsoever. I’d been to about three networking meetings in my entire life before that. So, I had a look about what was happening with networking around Cornwall and everything at the time. And it started off just as a little part time hobby. We had this conversation in late 2017 and the first meeting was the following January.

Do you have vivid memories of that first meeting?

That was a quite a funny experience. It was up at the Victoria Inn at Roche. So, I said to Steve, who still runs it up there, can I book your little conference room upstairs which takes about 20 people. And he said we could also have the conservatory as back up, just in case. I didn’t think we would need it, but 67 people showed up for that first meeting. So, it was a good thing we had the backup room! It was a shock, an absolute shock. They just kept coming through the door!

And remember, this was just going to be a little hobby, that’s all it was ever supposed to be and it’s gone crazy!

When did it stop becoming a hobby? When did you see the beast it could be?

It’s just happened over time. As we were going along in Cornwall and moving into new areas, then I had a gentleman come over from Devon to a meeting because he’d heard about it. Remember, we started out as Cornish Partnerships. But then he started his area, Devon Partnerships. And then we started getting interest throughout the south west going up into Somerset. So, in 2019 we rebranded as Your Partnerships. And then, of course, we all know what happened in 2020.

That must have been tough, running a networking business in lockdown?

It was interesting because I got very lucky just before lockdown when I met a person who had done a lot of online networking. So we were already set up by accident.

And I thought, the best thing we can do is make it free access for everybody. And by June 2020 we were holding 63 meetings a week! We had ambassadors in South Africa, all over Europe, Australia, New Zealand, USA, Canada. It was just nuts.

There seems to be a Your Partnerships meeting going on somewhere all the time.

Pretty much. There’s usually four or five things happening a day. Online has drawn down significantly since we’ve come out of lockdown, because people like to be face to face, but we still do about one a day. And we just opened up in Reading as well. But our strength really is from Bristol down to Cornwall. That’s the core and the large part of that core is still definitely Cornwall.

But not just new areas, we’re always looking at new types of meeting, industry specific meetings.

We’ve just started a Women in Business group and we’re in conversation of possibly a Men in Business group as well, to concentrate on health care needs of men.

Does networking change much outside of Cornwall, in terms of the style and vibe?

It goes back to that original meeting with those gentlemen who asked me to think about starting a networking group. I did a lot of research on it, and it’s never really worked for those BNI-type larger networking groups in Cornwall. So the conclusion I brought to that is exactly what you’re alluding to, that if something’s ‘cookie cutter’, then it only fits if it fits. Right now we have people volunteering to be ambassadors in London, which is a whole different beast. So we’re working on the London project as we speak, about what that will look like, what will work for them, because it’s not going to work there like it works here.

In hindsight, I guess lockdown must have helped your business, with the online meetings engendering great loyalty.

The answer is, yes. The number of people who’ve said to us we’d given them a reason to get up. That human interaction became such a bonus for so many people.

Why does your model appear to work so well?

I think it’s just because it’s open, honest and friendly. And by just talking to people and asking what they like and what they don’t like. And one of the things they didn’t want is to be tied to contracts. So our core business is x amount per month for online and x amount for being a full member, and no contract. I see trends all the time where a person will get excited and join, be an active member for a few months and then quit, because they’re too busy. Then, and you can almost time it, six months later you’ll see them back again because they’re not so busy anymore. They remember how they got busy - by talking to everybody. So that’s fine, let them come and go as they as they need.

How do you strike a balance with number of events you have? Having so many, is there not a danger of spreading the jam too thin and numbers drop off?

I wish I had a magic answer for you. Sure, we have peaks and troughs and we have closed down some meetings, but not very often. We’re open to suggestions from members and will try anything to see if it works. The women’s networking came that way, as did our new health and nutrition meetings. That’s exactly why the title is Your Partnerships. Whatever the network wants, it’s not mine, it belongs to the network.

We’re open to You’ve gone beyond from suggestions from just being a business group, haven’t you? There members and will seems to be social group try anything to see element, as well. Can mixing business with if it works pleasure be a difficult thing to do? Smart branding people might say Your Partnerships is ‘networking your way’ for the reasons I’ve already said, but I like the tagline ‘we like to have fun, but we want to get shit done’! It’s not a social group, but it is approachable. Going back to that London experiment, London is all about ROI, so the focus is different. They need to see results today. Whereas in Cornwall, and most rural areas to be honest with you, it’s more building the relationships. Relationships in London and the big cities is still important, they have their trusted network as well, it’s just done with a bit of a twist.

How many members do you have now?

We have 4,500 members totally. But as I said, we don’t have contracts and every single meeting also allows you to have guests. Some guests might attend only once every three months, some 10 or 12 a month, which is not cost effective. To be more cost effective you should be a member, but it’s what they choose to do. So active paying members, that’s about 1,200.

What is the typical type of Your Partnerships member?

Around 85% of our businesses are startups, small SMEs and micros. But then again, that’s the makeup of the business scene in the UK. I would say a typical business is someone newer to an area, whether it be here or Plymouth or wherever it might be, trying to get established and build a network. That’s one type. And the other ones, of course, are the bigger players in the area that want to be seen. And one of the things we do pride ourselves on is as soon as we hear about a need, we’ll connect them. An example of that would be if I have a new member that says I really need a website, so I will then connect them with every single website developer in our membership that fits their criteria.

It can be a lonely thing running a small business.

Yes. Many might just be sole traders. It’s nice when they come to an event. Some will tell me they can’t take on more business, but they want to come to an event just to be around people and just to bounce ideas off. And that’s the biggest thing with networking, I don’t care where you go, the more help you give, the more help you’ll get back.

You’re probably too modest to agree, but without you Your Partnerships probably wouldn’t be anywhere near as successful as it would. Just your energy and enthusiasm. Do you never get weary?

I have no idea how to answer that! I’m not going to take any credit, I give it all back to the members.

I actually get energy from it. I’ve always been a workaholic, I love it. If I’m awake, I’m working. But at the same time, it doesn’t feel like work. I don’t feel like I work a single minute. There are certain things, like with any business, I want to grow to the next level, so I can dump some of the admin things, things you typically enjoy doing less. I now have an admin assistant which helps, but it’s also my personality, I just can’t let go of stuff either. part of the motivation, she married a navy man. I’m not supposed to be at home. She changed the locks anyway! But Warren D’Souza helps me out in

I listen to lots Cornwall all the time. And we have 57 of people to learn Ambassadors now all helping run the various lots of things meetings. All these people are taking a little bit of the load off me. We share it together.

Does that stem from the early days, when you were in the military?

There’s probably a bit of that. Who knows, who knows. I just keep doing it the only way I know how.

I always call it a hobby that just got out of hand!

Simple as that.

After leaving the military, I couldn’t stay home, my wife would have killed me. That was

With new meetings up in Bristol, Reading, London and everywhere, you must rack up the miles!

The van does do some miles, that’s for sure. But it’s what it needed after sitting around during the pandemic. I got my van delivered two weeks before the first lockdown. We said at the time that you got three or four months to the tank. Now it’s about three days!

I try to get around to as many meetings as I can around the country to support the ambassadors but they’re the ambassador, it’s their meeting, so I sit back as much as possible.

The ambassadors wasn’t even my clever idea. It was from one of the members, John Pomeroy, who said you need ambassadors because you can’t be omnipresent, you can’t be everywhere. And he said, then it would be really nice when you come in, because we could say “look, there’s a guy that started it.” That was the part I didn’t like, because it’s just not my personality. It’s not about me, it’s about the network.

And you let these ambassadors be their own people. No presentation training as such?

We just do the general stuff about what they want their meeting to be like. We’ve got one ambassador who always loves to do thought provocative questions. We’ve got other ones that literally just do social networking with no structure whatsoever, it’s just getting people together. So yeah, it just depends on what we’re doing.

One thing I would like to do more of is social events, gigs, comedy, theatre, things like that, where you can take the whole family. It’s not really a networking event as such, but mixing business with pleasure. Networkers are going to talk business, no matter where they are. You could put them at a wake and they’ll still find a way to talk business.

Your business is your family as well, of course. So if there’s a nice event that we’re doing, and you’re bringing your friends, your relatives and your neighbours, they just happen to go “what is this Your Partnerships stuff all about”? They might be an independent taxi driver, I don’t know, it might mean X, Y, or Z, so if it turns into business turns into business.

You’ve enjoyed fantastic success in relative little time.

We’ll be five years old in January, with two years of pandemic thrown in the middle. And now people are talking about economic decline, blah, blah, blah, but as with anything in life, that also brings opportunity, so you just have to have to roll with the changes.

Do you get many people who come to just the one meeting and never return?

Of course and we try to follow that up. But there are some people who have said over the years, “it’s just not for me”. And the opposite. We’ve a few face to face networkers that could not stand the online and literally tried a couple of times and then let me know, “It’s just not for me”.

You can’t build the same type of relationships online, I don’t care when anyone tries to tell me. The other thing, and I hate to I hate to say it but it’s just the truth, but online also attracts a lot of sellers, Networking is not selling to each other, it’s relationship building. It is selling eventually, but it’s through that whole process.

But I guess networking is not for everybody?

No and that’s important to understand. I would estimate it’s only between five and 10% of businesses that will ever network. It can be easily dismissed. Once a month we do a networking workshop, because a lot of people don’t understand enough about how to leverage it.

You must also get people in the face to face meetings, who are there purely to sell. Salesmen sent by their boss to sell, sell, sell!

And it can be quite intimidating for first timers, walking through that door when everyone else knows one another. How do help those people?

We know when someone’s new because they’ve taken a guest ticket or whatever. We make sure to be looking for them and welcome them. And then also whenever an event is going on, always be looking around, this is really a bad way to put it, but looking for the wallflowers, those looking in from the outside and bringing them in. Here’s a little networking tip for anybody. If you see someone new, take someone you know over to the new person or bring that new person to a you and introduce the new person to the person you know, talk all great things about this person that you know, and about how they help people, find out about the new person, and then walk away. We do and then we retrain them. But another thing I always say, every time we open a meeting we open two doors. We open the front door, let everybody in and greet them and we open the back door because anybody who is there just to sell to the room, they can just keep going through the room and go out the back door because it’s not going to work.

Are most people at the meetings the business owners and managers rather than salespeople?

You get a real mixture. And it’s real funny because sometimes the business salesman or even the some of the lower managers actually network a lot better than the owners. A lot of business owners just aren’t comfortable networking. A good example of that is we’ve got a really good business owner who does very highend techy work. The problem that she has is her techie guys are all of that type thing, they have that type of personality, there’s no way in the world they want to network. But then she tries to get BDM salesmen to go sell what they do. But because it’s such a high in tech, trying to get a salesman to understand all of it is hard as well. So we’re doing this experiment, we’re actually trying to have one of our hypnotherapist members to talk to a couple the techies who might be able to be okay at networking and help them break that barrier. It’ll be interesting to see how it works.

We’re always looking at new types of meeting

And the reason that’s important is because the person you helped by telling how great they are, they’ve got a new conversation, the new person has been welcomed in which is most important, but then the person that you talked well about, well, they’re going to they’re going to want to repay you for that kindness! Then the new person will think, what do you do, and will then seek you down! It’s interesting and it absolutely works.

You really are a networking guru aren’t you!

(laughs) You just see what works and what doesn’t work. I’m no genius, you just pick it up. I’m interested in people, that’s all. I listen to lots of people to learn lots of things. Every day’s a school day, as I say, I used to have an old saying, you learn something every day, right? And just have fun with it. That’s the main thing. Just have some fun. And that’s what works. Don’t take life too seriously, because nobody gets out alive.