This is a guest post is by Sam Pearce, co-founder of Mum’s The Boss, a networking and support group for mums who work from home, run their own business or franchise, or who would like to set up in business on their own.

The group, founded in September 2008, runs monthly networking meetings, drop-in business surgeries and start-up events. We asked Sam to explain how Mum’s the Boss events work; to illustrate that networking events exist to suit almost any walk of life.

A year ago, when I was trying to get a new business off the ground, I found myself invited to some local networking meetings. However, with a business that was not yet making a profit and two young children aged 1 and 2, I wasn’t in a position to attend an early breakfast, expensive lunch or early evening event. Nor, if I’m honest, was I comfortable with the idea of networking with ‘proper’ business people – this was my first experience of self-employment and I still felt more ‘mummy’ than ‘entrepreneur’.

The creation of Mum’s the Boss

“I can’t be alone,” I thought – and, as it turns out, I wasn’t. So we set up Mum’s the Boss to target this niche, but growing market of ‘mumpreneurs’, setting up businesses from home, offering an informal, supportive, child-friendly environment to meet other mums in business, to learn from each other and to promote each other’s businesses wherever we can.

Bringing work and life together

While many women return to work after their first child, we had found it was often after the birth of the second child that the reality of commuting and double childcare costs really hit home. Therefore we tried to make our meetings accessible for mums, whatever age their children are – meeting from 10-12 to allow plenty of time for dropping off school aged children and providing a crèche so that babies and toddlers could come along too.

Another prohibitive factor for a lot of small business owners and start-ups wanting to network is the cost of membership and meeting fees. Therefore we purposefully adopted a low cost approach and secured local sponsorship to cover the costs of our venue.

Networking without the scary bits

The last thing that stops lots of people networking is, quite simply, fear – so to counter this we have adopted an informal, supportive style, with no dress code, no 1-minute speech and no 1-per-profession rule, encouraging people working in the same sector to collaborate rather than compete. We like to think of ourselves almost as a ‘stepping stone’ for complete novices towards traditional networking, where they can develop and grow both their business and their confidence.

But what I hope makes us really different is our welcome. I don’t know anyone who really enjoys walking into a room of strangers, or full of people already deep in conversation. So the first thing we always do when people arrive is offer them tea or coffee and homemade cake!

Facing challenges together

Now to some people this may all seem a bit twee but to us it is all about niche marketing – understanding our audience, removing the obstacles that stop this particular group of business owners from networking, and making it as pleasant and useful an experience as we possibly can. Working from home, and running a business around a young family presents its own set of unique challenges which are best understood by people in the same situation, so it is just as important for our members to feel just as able to talk about their families as to talk about their businesses. After all, for most of our members, their children are the reason they are in business.

Building relationships

And it is the personal nature of these relationships that make the connections so strong. We support, encourage and promote each other through a genuine desire to help. Our speakers, who are generally successful businesswomen, have all given their time freely to provide practical business advice as well as inspiration and motivation when our own is fading. Our business connections may be made over tea and cake, rather than expensive lunches, but the results are just as positive.

This post is part of a week-long series of guest posts on the topic of real world networking. Read all about it here: Online networking is booming, so why network in the real world?