How to Expand Your
Network in
Unusual Places

Every filmmaker and creative professional has been told to network. Go to industry events. Attend screenings. Join the local production community. Connect with people on LinkedIn. All of that is true and none of it is wrong. But the most valuable professional relationships I’ve built over 15 years in production rarely came from the places I expected to find them.

They came from a conversation at a hiking trailhead with someone whose company needed video. From a brewery tasting room where I met a marketing director who became a long-term client. From a volunteer project I did for a nonprofit that led to three introductions that changed the shape of my business. The conventional networking advice isn’t wrong — it’s just incomplete. Here’s what the rest of it looks like.

Show Up Consistently to Things You Actually Care About

The most reliable networking strategy I know isn’t networking at all — it’s showing up consistently to things you genuinely care about and letting relationships develop naturally from shared interest. A running club. A woodworking class. A local sports league. A book group. A volunteer commitment.

The reason this works is trust. People do business with people they trust, and trust develops through repeated exposure in low-stakes contexts. Someone who has seen you show up reliably for a year in a non-professional setting has a much stronger basis for trusting you in a professional one than someone who met you at a networking event where everyone was performing their best professional self.

In Colorado this is especially true. The outdoor community — hikers, climbers, skiers, cyclists — is enormous and overlaps heavily with the business community. Some of the most significant professional introductions of my career have happened on a trail or at a trailhead parking lot. The shared experience of being outside together, usually having just done something physically demanding, creates a particular kind of openness that a conference room rarely achieves.

Volunteer for Things That Put You in the Room

Nonprofit work is one of the most underrated networking environments in existence. Not because you should do it for networking reasons — you should do it because it matters and because giving your skills to something worthwhile is valuable in itself. But the secondary effect is real: nonprofits tend to attract people from across every industry and career level, united by a shared cause rather than a shared profession.

I’ve shot pro-bono video for nonprofits in Colorado and walked away with relationships that turned into paid commercial work, referrals to major clients, and friendships with people I genuinely admire. The work itself also becomes part of your portfolio and your story — it signals what you value, which attracts the kind of clients who share those values.

Go Deep With Vendors and Collaborators

The people closest to your work — the colorists, sound designers, rental houses, location managers, catering companies, post-production facilities you work with regularly — are one of the most overlooked networking resources in production. They work with dozens of production companies and know every client relationship in the market. If they genuinely respect your work and enjoy working with you, they become advocates in rooms you never enter.

The investment here is simple: treat every vendor and collaborator like a partner rather than a service provider. Pay on time. Say thank you specifically. Refer business back when you can. Show up to their events. The relationships you build in this direction often generate more referrals than any amount of deliberate networking.

Be a Connector, Not Just a Collector

The most networked people I know aren’t the ones who collect the most contacts. They’re the ones who actively connect other people. “You should meet so-and-so — I think you’d genuinely get along and I could see you working together.” That kind of introduction costs you nothing and creates an enormous amount of goodwill. People remember who connected them. That memory compounds over years into a reputation as someone who adds value to any room they enter.

When you introduce two people who go on to work together well, both of them remember you as the person who made that happen. Over time, being known as someone who makes good introductions becomes one of the most valuable professional assets you can have.

Talk to People Who Are at Different Stages Than You

Most networking advice implicitly pushes you toward peers — people at roughly the same career stage doing roughly the same work. There’s real value in that. But the relationships that have most shaped my thinking and my career have often been with people at very different stages: mentors who are twenty years further along, and people who are just starting out and asking questions I stopped asking years ago.

The conversations with people earlier in their career are genuinely valuable in both directions. They see things with fresh eyes. They ask questions that force you to articulate things you’ve stopped examining. And they become, over time, the next generation of the industry — the collaborators, clients, and peers of the future. Invest in those relationships early and they pay dividends for decades.

The Common Thread

All of these approaches share something: they’re based on genuine engagement rather than transactional intent. The best professional relationships are the ones where both people feel like the connection is real, not manufactured. That authenticity is felt immediately and it’s what determines whether a conversation becomes a relationship or just an exchange of business cards.

Show up for real. Care about the things you care about. Be genuinely useful to the people around you. The network builds itself from there — in the places you least expected, with the people who end up mattering most.

Two climbers on a Colorado trail — some of the most valuable professional relationships start in places like this, where nobody is there to network.