From the Diary of
Peter Higgs
Chasing instant deals rarely pays off. Structured peer relationships, patiently built, actually grow a business.
“The main mistake I see is a common one and is also a great life lesson.”
Running a business with a turnover in the millions rarely feels the way outsiders imagine it. Nearly half of UK business owners say they have felt lonely or isolated while doing it, and most have never joined a network built to fix that. Peter Higgs has spent a career watching why.
The instinct, when the isolation sets in, is to go looking for the next deal. Pete has watched hundreds of business owners make that mistake, and he has a name for it, borrowed from the founder of the referral network BNI: hunting instead of farming.
Nearly three-quarters of B2B decision-makers say they trust a peer’s recommendation over anything a vendor tells them directly, ahead of search engines, review sites and company websites, according to a joint study by SurveyMonkey and Reddit.
Pete has built his career on both sides of that divide, in corporate boardrooms and in grassroots networking, before taking charge of bringing a global peer network to business owners who have never had one. What separates the two, he has learned, is the difference between growing a business and simply chasing the next deal.
The Room Everyone Avoids Until They Need It
Nearly half (44%) of UK smaller business owners say they have felt lonely or isolated running their companies. Only about a third have taken the practical step of joining a network to do something about it, found a survey by the Start Up Loans Company and YouGov.
That gap, between feeling the need and acting on it, is where Pete starts every conversation.
“The main mistake I see is a common one and is also a great life lesson,” he says. Business owners walk into a room looking for instant results. The room only works if they don’t.
From the Boardroom to the Forum
Pete did not start in networking. He trained as a chartered accountant, rose to finance director, and was made managing director of a division inside a multibillion-pound global corporation, before he chose family time over the corner office.
He built a children’s day nursery into one of the top one per cent in the UK. Then, after a divorce, he became one of only two independent finance brokers working with RBS, developing a leasing arrangement the bank adopted and took to market across Europe.
The 2008/09 financial crisis, when the government took over RBS, forced another turn. He set out to help local businesses grow instead, bought a BNI franchise within three months of first visiting a chapter, and grew it to four regions over the next nine years before selling it all to take the national role at Corporate Connections Global.
“The best exits are usually planned well in advance, not rushed,” he wrote on LinkedIn, announcing an event his UK team now runs each year for owners plotting theirs.
Farming, Not Hunting
The sales approach where they enter a room looking for instant results. Ivan Misner (BNI Founder) sums this up nicely as Farming versus Hunting. Too many people go immediately on the hunt to mitigate their risk, without building the relationships that will consistently deliver. Ivan coined the GiversGain phrase, whereby if you help someone else they will be more inclined to help you in return. I personally like the quote often attributed to Anne Frank that “Nobody ever became poor through giving.”
The mechanics follow from that. Pete builds small, confidential peer groups where members bring a problem or an opportunity and get the room’s honest read on it, not a sales pitch. The value, he says, is in what a room of people who have already made your mistakes can hand you before you make them yourself.
The Brand Nobody Had Heard Of
Bringing a twenty-year-old American networking brand into a country that had never heard of it was not straightforward.
The hardest part of the journey so far has been establishing a Global brand in a Country that has never heard of it. International results were there, but nobody cares until it’s demonstrated in their Country. The smaller growing businesses that had experience with Networking could appreciate the value, but larger Corporates were more used to Industry only connecting and had no experience of genuine relational networking. Once we had some of those larger businesses see the value it became easier to demonstrate the values to other sceptics.
Underneath that was a second, quieter lesson: that funding a national rollout personally, and building a team before he was sure he could afford one, cost him more time than he expected. “You learn a lot when you fund this personally,” he says, “and don’t have the luxury of a Corporate Bank account.”
You learn a lot when you fund this personally, and don’t have the luxury of a Corporate Bank account.
Why Business Owners Trust Peter Higgs
One recommendation on his LinkedIn profile puts it plainly: “He has a very calm way of bringing the right people into the room, setting the tone, and then getting out of the way so real relationships and deals can form.”
The evidence he points to isn’t only financial, though the financial case is real: his old BNI regions alone circulated more than £100 million through the local economy in referred business. The case he returns to has no invoice attached to it.
One such share was to help a family member of one of the members overcome some mental health challenges. By sharing with someone who had already steered through this with their own family member, the experience shared was able to help and signpost to professional support that ultimately was acknowledged as saving a life! This is a great example of learning from others and not just focussing on numbers. Indeed, how can you put a number on that result?
“Our focus on mental well-being remains paramount, understanding that strong business communities thrive on the holistic success of their members,” as he puts it on his profile.
Where Peter Is Now
Pete works from the West Midlands, running Corporate Connections Global’s UK operation and building the forums that senior business owners join once cold outreach stops working. What he wants the brand to become, in his own words: “the preferred place for business owners looking for excellent Peer relationships to help with the Growth of them as a person and also their business.”
The Playbook
The Peter Higgs Playbook: Farming Beats Hunting
- Farm relationships, don’t hunt deals. Show up for people before you need anything from them. The referrals follow later, not first.
- Borrow other people’s mistakes. Peer experience lets you learn a lesson in someone else’s business before it costs you in yours.
- Build the team early. Trying to do everything alone is the surest way to run out of time before you run out of ambition.
- Plan for mistakes, not perfection. Leave room to change direction when something isn’t working, rather than waiting for a flawless plan that never arrives.
- Prove it before you pitch it. Sceptical audiences change their mind after they see results, not before.
