How staying in touch built trust, opportunity, and long-term success.
If you had told the 29-year-old version of me that the people sitting next to me in an IT office in 1998 would still be part of my professional world in 2026, I would have laughed.
And yet, here we are at our Christmas party last year. Five of us – my husband (yes, I married one of them!), three contractors, and me. We all met in 1998. Twenty-eight years later, we’re still working together.
We didn’t plan that.
What we did, without really thinking about it, was stay in contact.
Not in a calculated way. Not “networking” with a hidden agenda. We simply maintained relationships. We checked in over the years. We stayed interested in each other’s journeys. We didn’t let the connection disappear just because our roles or locations changed.
So when I needed contractors for my business, I didn’t start from scratch. I already knew people I trusted. I knew how they worked. And when the timing aligned, I knew who to call.
Your qualifications matter. Your experience matters. But relationships are often the bridge between where you are and what’s next. When you stay in contact over the long term, you create a ready-made ecosystem around you. When you need something, you usually know someone. When someone else needs something, they think of you.
I can’t overstate how much this has shaped my growth.
If I could go back and give my younger self one piece of career advice, it wouldn’t be about chasing another certificate or mapping out a perfect five-year plan. It would be this: maintain your relationships. Stay interested in people. Don’t disappear just because your roles or locations change.
Twenty-eight years later, you might find yourselves building something together again.
This idea isn’t just personal experience. In the Forbes article The Currency of Connection: Why Relationships Are a Critical Driver of Business Success, the author argues that relationships are not a soft skill or a “nice to have,” but a form of real business currency that compounds over time. That’s exactly what this photo represents for me. None of us were thinking about future commercial alignment back in 1998. We were simply building genuine connections. Nearly three decades later, that currency is still in circulation. Trust was already there. History was already there. And when opportunities aligned, we didn’t need to start from zero.