Most networking
is busy work.
Not leverage.

I moved into personal training, performance coaching, and eventually into a role as Business Support Officer, Community Officer, and educator for SHAE — an AI health technology company — and the Precision Health Alliance, its coaching ecosystem operating across NZ, AU, and parts of Asia. I completed eighteen months of specialised training in personalised health and biotrend science.

Somewhere in that process, I was profiled as a Connector. Neurologically oriented toward relationship architecture. Right occipital dominant — rapid pattern recognition, fast and accurate first impressions. Natural capacity for connecting people, teaching, and sharing information that moves things forward.

I found out I was wired for this. So I made a decision — to pursue networking as a deliberate craft. Not as a box to tick. As a discipline, a skillset, and a place to grow into.

My MBTI is ENTP — the system architect. Someone who sees structural patterns, generates connections across domains, and builds frameworks others can operate inside. The Connector biotrend gave me the warmth and orientation toward people. The ENTP gave me the structural architecture underneath.

The problem was the room I was in when I tried to use it.

I joined BNI. The onboarding: learn the app, start referring. Mentoring consisted of process compliance — how to use the platform to make the group look good. No skill development. No frameworks. No system for actually getting better at this.

I committed fully. I attended every session, represented someone else's business, asked for specific referral help. The business owner I was representing was indifferent. He had me in the seat for optics, with no real intention of reciprocating. The group celebrated him. I paid the social price.

I watched a young marketer get quietly removed for struggling to make the commitment in his early months. Not helped. Removed.

I moved cities. Joined a second group. Committed to every single leadership session bar one. Subbed out within a month.

Sixty percent of members leave within twelve months. The exchange of value is structurally broken. The more you give in the early stages, the less you reliably receive — because the system protects those with established reach and provides no real mechanism for those still building it.

That is a structural problem. And structural problems have structural solutions.

Within three months of that second group, I had joined NOW Group. Six months later, I was running my own group. Six months after that, I took the COO role. Three months after that, I bought it.

Because I saw what was possible when the room was built correctly. And I saw the scale of what needed to be fixed across New Zealand and Australia.

The founding mandate was not complicated: develop networkers properly. Recognise the skills that actually make someone better at this — beyond presence and personality. Build high-trust rooms. Create systems that make the exchange of value visible and balanced. Engineer introductions with context, not just forwarded contact details.

NOW Group exists because of that experience. Every framework, every system, every standard we hold — it traces back to a room in Christchurch where a biological Connector was made anxious by a networking group.

If a room can do that to someone like me, it can do it to anyone.

Your network is a reflection of you. What is it saying? Book a call →