Networking is way more important in business than most think.  Meeting new people, strengthening your alliances and growing your business is crucial to businesses both big and small and can be rewarding on a personal level as well as professionally. 

With the growth in home working, many new entrepreneurs and business owners can go whole days and and in some cases weeks without meeting or talking with people outside their family. Networking allows you to get out of the house or office and meet new interesting people, who all have something in common in a relaxed atmosphere. 

From a business perspective When you refer a client to a business in your network, you helping your client (who’ll get the product or service they need) the businesses you refer them to (who get a new customer), and strengthen your own relationships with your client and network by being a facilitator. You should do some networking because: 

• Very often, people will choose where to do business based on the recommendations of their friends, family and trusted co-workers.
• Personal connections are a brilliant way of building rapport. Any contact you have with a potential client, such as a phone call or an email to a potential client is much more compelling when you can say so and so suggested I call.
• In order to be successful, you need to grow your prospects,  since you cannot meet every potential client for your business in person you can instead spend the time to make good networking connections, and that in turn will result in many new clients.

I met a mechanic recently who attends networking events. He’d serviced the car of everyone in the room. I think that speaks for itself.