This is a guest post by Marcus Taylor, co-author of Get Noticed and founder of TheMusiciansGuide.co.uk. If you want to contribute guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines and join our information sharing program.

For those familiar with Dale Carnegie, you might remember him saying, “85% of our social and financial success in life is attributed to communication skills”. This highlights the importance of meeting people and investing in your communication skills as a means to grow a business.

When I was writing my last book, Get Noticed, I carried out a lot of research around the concept of being in the right place at the right time, all the time. One of the key things I learnt was that in order to be in the right place you first need to identify who the people you’re trying to meet are – perhaps they’re investors, or yoga teachers, or maybe just people who have broken down boilers if you’re a plumber. Once you know who you need to meet, you can start to analyse where they spend their time, and only then can you begin to align yourself in their ‘zone of awareness’ to meet those people.

This is often not taken into consideration when locating a business, as there are seemingly more important aspects to location – such as distance from market, overhead costs, and proximity to a suitable workforce. However, for most businesses networking is a huge aspect of growth and creating word of mouth, so it’s enormously valuable to be located in a place that makes it as easy as possible to meet the right people.

There are several important considerations to make; the first is the city or even country that you want to locate in. Secondly, you will need to decide where abouts in the city, which will locate you within close proximity to the people that you need to meet. In most cities in the UK, such as Reading, there are options to locate either in the inner-city or outer-city suburbs, such as on Arlington Business Park.  Finally you will also want to consider the option of locating amongst other businesses, such as on a business park, or in a separate building.

If all conditions are perfect and you can locate in the city where the people you need to meet are abundant, and you live within a stone’s throw of the regular meetups and events where those people congregate, and ideally in the same building, then the outcome is that you will likely meet a larger quantity of people who can help develop your business.

Image Credit:- Sprengben