I attended a Greenville Chamber of Commerce breakfast a couple of days ago at the Commerce Club of Greenville,SC. This was one of many networking opportunities that our business is taking advantage of. This month we officially joined the Greenville Chamber and have already taken advantage of an educational seminar and a power networking meeting. We have meet people and possible potential clients we would not have other wise meet.

Another local group we have been very active in is Professional Network Connections. I’m the vice-president of education for the Upstate Christian Business Network* of PNC and my wife, Heather is also a vice-president of education for the Upstate Executive Women’s Network* of PNC. PNC is an excellent group and each small group is non-competitive in terms of your particular industry. Each meeting provides an educational topic and opportunity to network with other professionals.

In the later half of 2006 we became actively involved with the Upstate Entrepreneurs Forum. I serve on the organizing committee and the goal of the group is to turn visionaries in the Upstate of South Carolina into successful entrepreneurs. If you are a business owner or have a dream consider becoming a part of the U.E.F.

Finally I want to mention our participation in the Greenville, Spartanburg, Anderson Technology Council. The GSTAC is a large group composed of smaller groups focused on networking and career development in information technology. Within the GSATC Groups we have been involved with the Linux Users Group, Greenville Area Security Professionals, Upstate Carolina PC User’s Group and the Greenville Mac User’s Group to name a few. I was great to attend the GSATC monthly learning lunch yesterday. I was able to meet some great people at my table and heard a very innovative speaker, Micheal Bolick of Selah Technologies. His business is a complete different industry from our but I got some great ideas about future projects and business strategies. You can read about his company in a recent Greenville News article. If you are curious about how you and your business can get involved in any of these groups let me know and I’ll give you some additional information.

We hope to network with more and more people and businesses in 2008 in order to grow our company. What other networking opportunities in Greenville or the Upstate of South Carolina would you like to share? Please leave a comment.

*Some of the meeting locations and times mentioned in the links above may be out of date. Please contact me or one of the contacts listed on the linked sites for the most up to date meeting information.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 8:02 am and is filed under Greenville,SC, Innovation, Organization, Tips, Upstate,SC, marketing, networking, social networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.