To achieve success in any business undertaking, your products and services must meet the expectations of your customers and the general public at large.
As a business owner you must constantly try to improve your production processes, operations and service delivery methods if you want to remain relevant in the market place of ever increasing competition.
Improvement in your business can only come about through the acquisition of new skills and knowledge for efficient and productive use of scarce financial, material and human resources.
Therefore, one easy and sure way to acquire useful knowledge for growth and success in business is through networking.
Networking in business, is all about associating with other people in the line of business you belong for acquisition of useful knowledge and experience.
Through one-one encounter or through reading resource materials you can start networking with other successful entrepreneur in your chosen business.
The benefits of networking with other successful entrepreneurs are.
Networking will open your eyes to how most successful companies you see today all started from a humble beginning.
You will know the challenges successful entrepreneurs went through and how they overcame such initial challenges.
The mistakes they made as a result of making wrong decisions and choices and how they remedied the various situations.
You will also discover lots of valuable business ideas and secrets that will motivate you to set higher and achievable goals for your business.
And above all you will gain useful experience that will help you grow your business and also make money.
Below are the different ways through which you network with other successful entrepreneur in your line of business.
You can network and learn useful ideas from other successful entrepreneurs when you read business books, journals, magazines, attend business seminars, trade shows and exhibitions.
Online social networking sites like facebook, twitter etc are good places for networking; there you will find people you network with for useful business ideas.
You can join any online social networking sites of choice here; Lists of top online social media sites
Join relevant business associations and bodies controlling your market segment, this will bring you in contact with people who can assist you with valuable ideas for business growth.
Here are some successful companies you can model.
You will discover that nearly all of the big companies you see today started from a very humble beginning as small business concerns but today they have grown to become multi-billion Dollar businesses.
 You too can gain some useful lessons from how they started and how they grew to become successful and very great.
1.   APPLE COMPUTER INTERNATIONAL.
This company was founded 1974 by two friends Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak both of them college dropouts. They created a personal computer called Apple one, a computer without keyboard or power supply. With just $1,300 the production Apple computers started and within six years of operations the company recorded annual sales of $1billion.Today apple is leader in the mobile consumer electronic market Producing, selling quality products like Apple TV, iPods and iphone and with annual sales running into billions of Dollars.
2.ÂSIEMENS AG.
The company was found by Werner von Siemens and J.G Halske from a small backyard workshop in 1847 in Berlin Germany and today as become a world leader in cutting-edge technologies with well above 400,000 employees and with presences in over 90 countries.
3. PEOGEOT AUTOMOBILE.
The Peugeot family of France started this company from a very humble beginning inn 1880 and now a globally respected company having more than 150,000 employees and with network of branches in about 159 countries.
4CISCO SYSTEMS INC.
This company was started in by a couple Leonard Basack and Sandra Leonard in 1984. Both were at that time computer science department laboratory staff of Stanford University USA.
One day while at work they both discovered a way of sharing information with each other by connecting their computers to each other, though their departments were about 500m from each other.
With this valuable idea they started business and they had to sell the only house they have to raise the initial capital required.
Today CISCO systems Inc is now the world largest computer networker with annual sales of over $35 billion.
You can use Google search engine and find out detailed information on the companies listed above and many other successful companies.
No body has all the knowledge and experience needed to build a successful business.
Therefore, you need to look out for those individuals or organizations that are ahead of you in business to learn from there mistakes as well as successes.
There are lots of successful people and businesses around your city and country to network and learn useful lessons from.
All you need do is to humble yourself and approach the owners of such companies for help and it will surprise you the amount of free consultancy service you will get.
In this article I have talked about the importance and countless benefits derivable from networking with successful individuals and organizations in your line of business.
Therefore, I believe that as you network with successful entrepreneurs in your line of business you will acquire lots of valuable knowledge and skills that will help you grow your business faster than you anticipated.