Relationships are so important to every aspect of your business. I was thinking about one cardinal rule of relationship building that I truly believe in.

BUILD THEM BEFORE YOU NEED THEM.

I used to not think why I did that but spent some time this morning thinking about why I believe this.

What I came up with is if you don’t build in advance, the relationship will be a lot more transactional and much less like a real relationship.

Probably that’s OK for some areas for life. But for me, that’s unacceptable in so many ways.

It doesn’t describe how I want to work with people.

I find this is true on all walks of life including bigger companies where people are supposed to be incentivized to “work together”. If you’ve been in any company with politics longer than 5 minutes you realize that often people aren’t naturally incentivized to work together.

And this is why I like following this advice.