We run a lot of events. Talks, panels, breakfasts, demos, our own Hub8 Connect series. Last year 87 events happened across our two Cheltenham buildings, and 9,500 people came through Hub8 MX alone.
So it’s an odd thing for us to say. But most of the useful connections we see don’t happen at any of them.
They happen in the queue for the kettle. They happen when someone overhears half of your call and says, on the way past, “we had that exact problem last year.” They happen when a person you’ve nodded at for six months finally asks what it is you actually do.
Why networking events are hard by design
Networking events ask you to do the most difficult version of meeting someone. Introduce yourself to a stranger, at speed, in a room where everyone has a reason to be there. Explain your business in a sentence. Work out within thirty seconds whether this person is useful to you, while they’re doing the same to you.
Some people are brilliant at it. Most of us aren’t. And even if you are, there’s a limit to what a five-minute conversation with a stranger can produce.
There’s also the framing problem. The word networking makes the whole thing transactional before anyone opens their mouth. Everyone knows why they’re there. That knowledge sits between two people and makes an honest conversation harder to have.
What working near people does instead
Proximity does the same job, slowly, without anyone having to perform.
Three things make the difference:
Repetition. You see the same faces on Tuesdays. Nobody has to make a strong first impression because there’ll be a second one, and a fortieth. Trust accumulates without effort.
Low stakes. A conversation by the coffee machine costs nothing. Nobody has prepared. Nobody is pitching. So people say true things about what’s going wrong in their business, which is where most useful help starts.
Incidental discovery. At an event you meet people who came for the same reason as you. In a shared building you meet an accountant, a publisher, a robotics engineer and a brand agency, none of whom you’d have sought out, several of whom turn out to know exactly the thing you need.
That last one matters more than it sounds. We have 60 companies across our two sites and they are not all in tech. The useful answer is often sitting on a different floor, in an industry you’d never have thought to ask.
So why run events at all
Because proximity has one weakness. It only introduces you to the people already in the building.
Events bring in everyone else. They’re how someone in Gloucester or Bristol or London ends up in a room in Cheltenham, and how a member meets a person who was never going to walk past their desk. That’s the whole reason we run Hub8 Connect, and it’s why we host part of Gloucestershire Tech Week rather than keeping the space to ourselves.
The two do different jobs. Events widen the pool. Working near people turns a name into someone you’d actually ring.
The practical version
If you’re at an event, stop trying to meet everyone. Two real conversations beat twenty business cards, and the follow-up matters more than the room did.
If you’re in a shared space, the advice is smaller and duller. Take your laptop to the kitchen occasionally. Ask the person next to you what they’re working on. Say yes to the thing you’d normally skip.
None of that is a strategy. It’s just being about, regularly, in a place where other people are also about.
That’s most of what a coworking space is for. The desk is where you sit while it happens.
Hub8 has two sites in Cheltenham, at Minster Exchange in the town centre and on the Gloucestershire College campus. If you’d like to see either, book a tour.
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