Hands up anyone who doesn’t prefer doing business over a friendly, frothy coffee?

Nope, thought not – me too. With the kids back at school, now is the time to get social with business, and I’m not talking about facebook, but actually meaning ‘talking’. To be honest, there is a serious note here as I’m quite concerned that this might be something this generation is losing the art of, and heaven only knows how the next generation will communicate – probably via some holistic app!

No, seriously, all my best business has been made over a shared coffee (or green tea in my case), and it’s always resulted in really great professional relationships that have lasted a long time. I recently met up with an ex client (who I’d happily worked with for nearly 10 years) after having not been in touch for some time, and we instinctively drifted straight back to where we had left off. Why? Because we were comfortable working together; we’d had many opportunities whilst discussing projects to slip some personal details into the conversation, you know – in years to come they’ll probably call it ‘the ancient art of chatting’. But that aside, I feel so many people forget that in business we’re not dealing with ‘the business’ but with ‘the person’. This is so important, and yet I still find too many just don’t get it.

And here’s the thing…

Work is always more productive when you’re relaxed. So maybe there’s an argument for slowing things down a tad in business – in a world where things have to be executed at pace, maybe that’s not the most productive way to go about it. I know there are times when the ‘deadline looming’ adrenaline rush does create some moments of genius, but on the whole if we took time to evaluate projects from the get go in a more relaxed atmosphere, I think the outcome would always be better.

So my advice is “Talk”, don’t run… it makes business sense don’t you think?