Community Is The Strategy
For the past three years, a co-working space called RUME2 was part of the texture of my working life here in Chichester. I was on the welcoming team. I knew the faces, I knew the regulars, I knew who preferred coffee over tea and which conversations would run long. RUME2 closed its doors at the end of April, and I have been thinking since about what places like that actually do, because their value is so easy to underestimate while you still have them.
What RUME2 did, and what every good workspace does, was put people in the same room without an agenda. That sounds like a small thing. It isn’t. Most of the connections that matter in business do not happen because someone set out to make them. They happen sideways, in the gap between things, when you are both waiting for a mug of tea to brew and you get talking. You cannot engineer those moments. You can only create the conditions for them and then turn up often enough to be there when they occur.
That space helped grow the Last Friday Club, the business community I co-founded back in 2016 with my friend Emily Perry. It supported my own business in ways I could not always trace (or even fully appreciate) at the time. And it did something for me personally that is harder to name, the simple steadying effect of having somewhere to go and people who know you when you get there.
Here is why this matters for anyone trying to make LinkedIn work for them and their business. The thing people get most wrong online is treating relationships as something you acquire rather than something you tend. They collect connections the way you might collect business cards at an event and then leave in a drawer. They measure their network by its size. And they wonder why a network of two thousand strangers produces nothing.
A physical community teaches you the opposite lesson, and it teaches it without you having to think about it. In a room, you cannot fake a relationship. You cannot connect with three hundred people in an afternoon. You are limited to the handful of real conversations the time allows, and those conversations are where everything happens. The constraint is the value. It forces you to be present with actual people rather than performing for an abstract audience.
When I work with founders (and their teams) on doing more with LinkedIn, I am really trying to recreate the dynamics of a good room. Show up regularly. Be genuinely interested in other people. Have real conversations rather than disposable transactions. Be the same person online that you would be over coffee. Remember what people told you last time. None of this is a LinkedIn tactic. It is just how community works, applied to a platform that too many people treat as a vending machine for leads.
For me, the online and the offline are not two strategies. They are one practice, carried out in two places. The Last Friday Club and a LinkedIn comment thread are doing the same job: bringing people into genuine contact and trusting that good things grow from there.
I miss RUME2, I miss the people. But the lesson it reinforced is portable, and it is the most useful thing I know. Community is not the warm-up act for business. Community is where the business comes from. Build the relationships, online and off, and look after them like they really matter. Because they do, and because everything else follows from them.
