A strange and wonderful thing happened to me recently, someone I had met only briefly at a networking event six years ago rang my phone.
Six years is an awfully long time. I’ve been divorced, changed business address three times, house twice, and even gotten a tattoo.
The business has changed too. We’re more focused on strategy and growth than we were back then. But what’s most wonderful is that the person thought of me after all this time. I must have made an impression.
They needed support, they called me. I love that.
You never know…
We met once, at a networking event, in that foggy, over-caffeinated way people meet at networking events. We exchanged the right noises. We both moved on. Life happened. Businesses grew. And then, six years later, we reconnected.
This isn’t an article about networking paying off. It’s about something more uncomfortable and more useful than that.
It’s about timing, credibility, and what it means when someone remembers you long after you’ve stopped trying to be remembered.
The myth of the missed opportunity
The first instinct, when this happens, is to interrogate the gap. Why now? Why not then? Why six years of silence? Don’t you love me… (that last one might be made up for comedy effect)
But the instinct is rooted in insecurity. In the idea that if someone didn’t act immediately, the opportunity was somehow wasted.
But most decisions in business don’t work on networking timelines. They work on pain.
People don’t look for help when things are fine. They look when the shortcuts have stopped working, when the internal fixes have failed, when the spreadsheet optimism has finally run out.
Six years is not a delay. It’s an incubation period.
What they were actually doing for six years
The wait was nothing personal. To be honest, 99% of things are never personal.
They weren’t ignoring me.
They weren’t “forgetting to follow up”.
They were building something that eventually ran into a wall.
And when that wall appeared, they reached back not to the loudest voice, the cheapest option, or the last person they met for coffee.
They reached back to the person who had made sense at the time, even if they didn’t need them yet.
That’s an uncomfortable truth for people who chase leads aggressively. Relevance does not decay on your schedule.
The initial step matters
When the message came in, I didn’t reference the gap. I didn’t joke about the time. I didn’t ask what had taken so long.
Because this wasn’t a reunion. This was the first real conversation.
The mistake people make in these moments is turning curiosity into eagerness. Over-explaining. Pitching too early. Treating the contact as validation rather than information.
The only sensible response was calm interest.
Not Yes, finally.
Not Where have you been.
Just: Tell me what’s going on.
The quiet test that’s always happening
When someone comes back after years, they are running a test, even if they don’t know it.
They are asking:
Are you still doing the work?
Are you still grounded?
Are you going to make this about you, or about the problem?
How you respond tells them more than any case study ever could.
People don’t return to people who feel desperate. They return to people who feel steady.
Not a crocodile underwater, but a lily on a lake.
This is not about playing the long game for its own sake. It’s about understanding where trust actually lives.
Trust is not built in follow-up emails. It’s built in how you made someone feel about your thinking when nothing was at stake. To be honest, in networking, I am just trying to listen, respond and be taught. The ‘sell’ comes later, or hopefully never, instead replaced by a natural coming together of ideas.
I know I can come across strong, I am full of energy, but I try very hard to be a participant in a conversation, not a director.
That impression, I hope, sits quietly. It doesn’t shout. It waits until it’s needed. It’s being coherent enough, in words, thoughts and actions, so that when the right moment arrives, your name still makes sense.
Six years later, for me, that was the real signal. Not that they contacted me. But when they finally needed help, they knew where to look.
