You never know where a hello is going to lead!

Did you know that a lot of the well-known worldwide successful companies were not founded on their own? It was the joining of minds and discussing ideas that brought us some of the most famous companies in the world. Many of which we couldn’t imagine life without.

Steve Jobs cofounded Apple when he was 21 after dropping out of college. Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak launched the company from his family’s suburban California garage in 1976. And by the age of 23, he was a millionaire.

Larry Page met Sergey Brin at Stanford’s PhD program in 1995 BUT they did not become friends instantly. Later on they did become friends and found themselves working on a research project together entitled ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine’ this went on to become the basis for one of the most famous companies in the world – Google!

Evan Williams had been working at Blogger. Blogger was then sold to Google and while at Google Williams hired Biz Stone. They started out as rivals but quickly became kindred spirits, so much so that Williams left Google, Stone didn’t want to continue working there without him so he followed him. The pair were then approached by Jack Dorsey who had an idea he wanted to talk to them about. This idea turned into the famous microblogging site, Twitter!

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were childhood friends. They were inseparable. In 1977 they took a correspondence course in ice-cream making. After completing the course, the pair invested $12,000 and opened their first ice cream shop, Ben & Jerry’s!

If some of these people hadn’t been open to sharing ideas and building relationships, we may not have some of the most ground breaking technology and yummy ice cream we so dearly love.

In my own journey so far the phrase I keep hearing is ‘people do business with people they know, like and trust’ and from what history tells us, this is good advice. One of the things I love about being part of the Virtual Assistant industry and VACT in particular, is how everyone is so supportive towards each other and always happy to share ideas.

So I advise us all to get out there and build relationships, go to networking events, if you get chatting to someone be it on the train, in the queue at the supermarket, at a party or just walking your dog – be open as you never know where a hello can lead – someone could be writing about you one day!