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Carol Deckert - Netweaving / Networking Expert
Hi Everyone! My name is Carol Deckert and my passion is networking and
especially netweaving! Let me tell you how that happened!
My entire background is administrative. When I graduated from high school, I became a Secretary, something I always wanted to be. From secretary to
administrative assistant, executive assistant to assistant to the President, I worked my way through life, doing what I needed to do to increase my salary and to ensure my position with a profitable company. Then in 1989, terror struck...my employer, a 50+-year-old, family-owned company went through a transition of two bankruptcies and a buy-out. I continued my employment with the company through the first two transitions and during the third one, my position was eliminated and I found myself unemployed for the first time in my life. When I went to the Unemployment Office to file my claim, it was one of the lowest days of my life as the Unemployment Counselor told me I was unemployable – my skills were too high and no one would ever pay me what I was worth! At 42 years old, I
was told to start over!
Thanks to my wonderful husband who encouraged me to take the time I needed to research and start my own business, I developed a secretarial service from my home (this service today is known as a Virtual Assistant). I had absolutely no money saved for this venture as I was not planning to be unemployed so I did the only thing I could think of – start attending community and business events and tell people what I was doing. Thankfully while I was employed, my boss encouraged me to be the company’s “face” at the local Chamber of Commerce and when I needed to network, I was slightly familiar with what I had to do and where I had to go to find people to network with. Meeting people, sharing stories, exchanging tips and ideas, helped me to build my first business. I soon had a nice-sized company operating out of a commercial location with ten employees! I was very involved in my community and attended almost every business event I could find. Most people would chuckle and tell me that everywhere they went, there I was and my response to them was that by them seeing me everywhere, I was doing exactly what I planned! You see, whenever they physically saw me, even if they didn’t remember me at the exact time they needed help, they remembered what I did and it usually turned into business for me.
Unfortunately health issues put me back home again in 2001 but I still wanted to be involved, wanted to be out networking and talking with my peers. Since I was unable to do that, I turned to the internet and started searching for ways I could work from home. I found LinkedIn in 2004, opened my account and built my profile and then didn’t know what to do with it. It just sat there. It wasn’t until 2006, when I realized that I had something useful sitting on my computer that I returned to LinkedIn. I got involved in some of the forums, asking questions, posting comments/ answers where possible and was thrilled when my number of connections started to grow.
I am an Open Networker, meaning that I intentionally accept all invitations to connect. I believe that strangers are only someone I have yet to meet – so the way to get to know these people would be to have them in my database and to begin slowly to get to know them. I personalized each and every request for a connection and asked some questions. Depending on their response, or even if they did respond, determined at what level of communication they were listed in my database.
In 2007 I opened my very own networking group offline and continued to network online. I decided to become a Networking Coach so that I could help others learn to do what I did, save them lots of time and heartache, by teaching them how to network efficiently and effectively. I found the more I read and the more I learned about networking, the more passionate I became. Today, I am proud to say that I have more than 6,700 first-level connections in LinkedIn and approximately 1,800 “friends” on FaceBook and almost 2,000 followers on Twitter! The numbers are not the important factor, however, you do need the numbers before you can accumulate quality connections, because not every connection will be a good one for you. In the process of expanding my knowledge base, I learned about Netweaving, the practice of Paying It Forward. Helping others get what they need and/or want, with no immediate personal expectation of payback is an
awesome way to network.
My work is not yet done; I’m excited to be sharing these practices with online and offline businesses and entrepreneurs. I’m looking forward not only to working together, but in growing together, helping one another become successful and in doing that, my coaching business will also be successful.
Carol's Website
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