Blog · Alliances Between Businesses
How to Network with Other Entrepreneurs
Italy is made up of small and medium-sized businesses, and that's both its strength and its limit. None of them can do everything alone, and almost none has a structured path for allying with others. This article covers how to start — and where the DIY approach stops working.
Published 3 June 2021 · revised 16 August 2026
Why it matters
A fragmented fabric is a fabric that has to collaborate
Italy's economic footprint is made up of a myriad of small and medium-sized businesses that hold up almost the entire system on their own. That brings good things with it — real competition, a drive for quality, the need to keep improving — and a structural difficulty: in a global market, going it alone as a "small player" keeps getting harder.
Hence the push to join forces with other entrepreneurs, develop projects together, form groups. Sharing ideas and skills is at the root of any innovation, and there's no reason to stay out of it.
Strategic alliances
A union of forces for a set period, in which two companies cooperate toward a shared goal. It's a medium- or long-term collaboration, and it's formalised.
Two conditions, and neither is negotiable: mutual trust at the foundation, and time. Relationships that produce something aren't built in a hurry — make sure the other company takes that for granted too.
And then there's the question that closes the reasoning: the company you have a relationship of trust with — when the occasion arises, who will they refer?
In practice
Three ways to start tomorrow
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Use the right social networks
LinkedIn is where entrepreneurs find each other and make themselves findable: search by sector, skill, area. And stay active, because the search works both ways.
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Don't be afraid to ask
Stop and think about the people you already know. Some of them know someone you could use. Just ask — remembering it's a two-way street, and the question needs to be asked in reverse too.
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Organise the meeting yourself
Meetings are the best opportunity and also the rarest, because organising them costs time. Start small, with your closest contacts: whoever attends always wants to know who organised it.
One word at a time
Where DIY stops working
The three tips above work as long as your network is small enough to fit in your head. Then they stop, and it's not your fault: it's a matter of numbers.
The limit
Even assuming you know two hundred entrepreneurs well, the possible pairings between them number nearly twenty thousand. No one keeps track of which of those twenty thousand it would actually make sense to sit at the same table — and as the network grows, the problem gets worse fast.
This is the point where an alliance stops being a relationship and becomes a calculation problem.
What you need instead of memory
A declared map of who knows whom — in the discipline it's called the Relational Footprint — and a calculation that, on top of that map, proposes the right introduction. The result of that calculation is a match, and the two parties only sit down after both have said yes.
The Fourth Law applies here too: activating a person is addition, activating an organisation is multiplication — but only if someone inside the organisation is designated to receive it. That someone is the Referral Director.
Networking from memory works. Up to two hundred people.
The first step
Where your company stands, in one number
AIRA-SCAN© measures the relational capital your company already has: ten questions, three minutes, no registration. Your browser calculates the score and shows it immediately, along with the areas where you're losing the most points.
The extended report then arrives by email, and within one working day a person calls you: you look at the result together and assess whether the AIRA-DX© Stoic Analysis makes sense for your company. It's free and limited to twelve a week, so it isn't owed to anyone who does the check-up: it's decided together.
Would you rather just talk about it? The number is 0549 888808.