The Best Opportunities Don’t Always Start as Opportunities

Since the Costa Rica Summit, I have spent a considerable amount of time following up on conversations, researching companies I only had a few minutes to understand during the event, and learning more about people I did not have the opportunity to meet at all. That process has been interesting because the days after an event are very different from the event itself. During a summit, everything happens quickly. There are scheduled meetings, introductions, unexpected conversations, familiar faces, new names, and far more information than anyone can realistically process in a few days. Once it is over, the pace changes. You can look more carefully at who was there, what their companies are trying to accomplish, where there may be common interests, and which conversations might be worth continuing.

Naturally, part of that process involves thinking about opportunities. Some of the companies I am speaking with may have needs that align with what we do at Emberlight Global. Some Costa Rican businesses may be interesting partners or simply companies I would like to know better. Some of the international buyers who attended the Summit may eventually become clients, partners, or useful connections. Others probably will not. That is simply the nature of business development. What I have found myself thinking about, however, is how difficult it is to know which relationships will eventually matter, or even what form that value might take.

One of the most important business relationships of my career is a good example. It began roughly fifteen years before there was any business opportunity attached to it.

At the time, I was working as a project manager for an agency that supported a large brand. One of the people I worked with regularly was a project manager on the client’s team. We had a very good working relationship. We communicated well, trusted one another, and generally enjoyed working together. There was nothing particularly strategic about the relationship from my perspective, and I doubt there was from his either. I was not thinking about where he might work someday or whether he could eventually become a client. Emberlight Global did not exist, and I certainly was not maintaining a mental list of people who might someday generate business for a company I had not yet created. We were simply two professionals working together, trying to deliver good work and make a complicated client-agency relationship function well.

Eventually, as happens constantly throughout a career, our paths separated. I left that agency, he moved on to other things, and both of us continued through different companies, responsibilities, projects, and stages of our professional lives. There was no commercial relationship between us, and for many years there was no obvious reason there should have been one. Then, roughly fifteen years after we had originally worked together, he contacted me. By that point I was running Emberlight Global, which he had seen through LinkedIn, and the company where he was now working needed a team. He remembered our experience working together all those years earlier and thought of me.

That conversation eventually became the largest and most profitable client relationship Emberlight Global has ever had.

I have thought about that story many times because it would be very easy to draw the wrong lesson from it. One conclusion might be that everyone we meet should be treated as a potential future customer, because the person sitting across from us today might control a budget fifteen years from now. Taken far enough, that becomes the familiar advice to network constantly, maintain every relationship, keep yourself visible, and make sure nobody forgets what you do. There is probably some practical value in parts of that advice, but it is not what this experience taught me. In fact, I think approaching every professional relationship according to its possible future commercial value can make those relationships considerably less meaningful.

What made this particular relationship valuable was precisely that there had been no transaction waiting behind it. I was not building trust because I expected something later. I was trying to be good at my job. We worked well together because both of us had responsibilities to fulfill and because a healthy relationship made the work better. Years later, when an entirely different set of circumstances created a need, he remembered that experience. The opportunity did not emerge because I had successfully maintained a fifteen-year sales campaign. It emerged because, fifteen years earlier, we had done good work together and the experience had been worth remembering.

The longer I work, the more significant that distinction feels. We tend to think about professional networks as collections of contacts, but I increasingly think of them as collections of experiences. A LinkedIn connection tells me that two people know each other, at least in the broadest possible sense. It says very little about what happened when those people actually had to work together. The deeper part of a professional network is the accumulated memory of whether someone was reliable, how they behaved when something became difficult, whether they communicated clearly, whether they made other people’s work easier or harder, and whether they could be trusted when the stakes were higher than usual.

Those impressions can survive for an extraordinarily long time. People may forget the exact project plan, the original deadline, how many meetings took place, or what a particular deliverable looked like. They often remember whether working with someone was a good experience. They remember the person who helped solve a problem without creating unnecessary drama around it. They remember someone who took responsibility when something went wrong, or who remained calm when a project became complicated. They remember the colleague who shared credit, the client who treated the team respectfully, the manager who made difficult situations manageable, and, unfortunately, they also remember the opposite.

That matters because careers are not static. The people we work with today will not necessarily occupy the same roles five or ten years from now. A developer may eventually lead an engineering organization. A project manager may become a director or executive. Someone representing a client today may later join another company entirely. A colleague may build a business of their own. A person who currently has no reason whatsoever to purchase a particular service may eventually become responsible for exactly that decision. Companies change, priorities change, industries evolve, and people move through professional lives in ways that are almost impossible to anticipate.

Because of that, I think we often judge professional relationships far too early. Business development naturally encourages us to categorize conversations. There is an opportunity or there is not. The company fits the profile or it does not. There is budget, timing, authority, or some other indication that the relationship might progress commercially. Those distinctions are useful because businesses have limited time and need to decide where to focus their attention. But they are not the same thing as determining whether a relationship has value. A conversation that produces no immediate business may still become important later, and a relationship that never produces business at all can still be professionally worthwhile.

This is particularly relevant after an event like the Costa Rica Summit. During the event, everyone is meeting people with some form of purpose. International buyers are there to learn about capabilities, suppliers, industries, companies, or opportunities in Costa Rica. Costa Rican businesses are there to build relationships, explore markets, meet potential clients and partners, and understand where their capabilities might fit internationally. There is nothing wrong with that commercial purpose. It is one of the reasons events like this exist. But once everyone returns to normal work and the follow-up begins, there is a temptation to evaluate each conversation according to whether it appears likely to turn into something tangible.

I understand that temptation because I am doing the same follow-up and due diligence. I am trying to understand which companies might be relevant to Emberlight Global, where there may be genuine opportunities, and which conversations are worth continuing. I am running a business, so naturally I care about where new business might come from. At the same time, my own experience makes it difficult for me to believe that immediate commercial potential is the only useful measure. I know, quite literally, what can happen when a relationship that seemed completely ordinary at the time becomes relevant fifteen years later.

There is also a broader lesson here about reputation. We often talk about reputation as though it is something a company or individual deliberately constructs. We invest in websites, portfolios, case studies, social media, thought leadership, awards, certifications, presentations, testimonials, and increasingly sophisticated ways of showing the market who we are. All of those things can be important, particularly when someone has never worked with us before. They create signals that help people decide whether a conversation is worth having.

But there is another kind of reputation that is being built continuously and far more quietly. It exists in the experiences other people have when they actually work with us. Every colleague, client, manager, employee, vendor, partner, and collaborator leaves an interaction with some impression of what we are like professionally. Most of the time we have no idea where that impression will travel. Someone may recommend us in a meeting we never knew occurred. They may introduce us to someone years later. They may join another organization and remember that there was a person or company they trusted. They may also decide never to work with us again, and we may never hear about that conversation either.

In the case of our former client, when that project manager contacted me many years later, he had something far more valuable than a sales presentation from Emberlight Global. He had his own experience. He already knew what it had been like to work with me. That did not mean Emberlight Global automatically received the business, and it certainly did not eliminate the need to demonstrate that we could provide the team his company required. But the relationship began from a fundamentally different place. There was already a level of trust that no capabilities deck could have created on its own.

Technology has made the mechanics around relationship building more sophisticated than ever. We can identify companies that fit very specific criteria, research decision-makers, understand organizational structures, enrich contact information, track interactions in a CRM, automate outreach, personalize communications with AI, and measure engagement in ways that would have been difficult to imagine earlier in my career. I use many of those tools myself, and I see enormous value in them. What they cannot do is manufacture the history that exists when someone can say, from personal experience, “I worked with this person before, and it went well.”

That kind of credibility is accumulated through ordinary moments that rarely feel important when they are happening. It is built in the meeting where someone explains a difficult situation clearly instead of assigning blame. It is built when a commitment is honored even when doing so becomes inconvenient. It is built when somebody acknowledges a mistake rather than trying to hide it, when a team member is treated respectfully during a stressful period, or when a person takes the time to help solve a problem that technically falls outside their responsibility. None of those moments necessarily produces an immediate opportunity. Collectively, however, they become part of what people remember.

This has influenced how I think about the follow-up I am doing now. Some of the people I met through the Summit may become clients. Some may become partners. Some may introduce me to someone else. Some may simply become people whose businesses I understand better and whose work I respect. There may be conversations where nothing happens for years, and there may be others that never become commercial at all. I do not think that makes those conversations unsuccessful.

Sometimes understanding another company is valuable on its own. Sometimes you discover that two people you know should probably know each other. Sometimes you learn something about another market, industry, or business model that changes how you think. Sometimes a person remembers you simply because the conversation was thoughtful and there was no pressure to turn it immediately into something else. Relationships do not have to justify themselves through an immediate transaction in order to matter.

After more than two decades of working across agencies, clients, teams, and now my own company, I have become much more aware of how slowly some of the most consequential parts of a career develop. We naturally notice the visible moments. A new client signs. A partnership begins. Someone accepts a new role. A company wins a major project. What is much harder to see is the history behind those moments: the previous company where two people worked together, the colleague who made an introduction, the project that established trust, the conversation that initially appeared to go nowhere, or the positive experience that remained in someone’s memory long after everyone involved had moved on.

When I think about our largest client relationship, the most important part of the story is not that an old colleague eventually contacted me. It is that, fifteen years earlier, neither of us had any idea there would ever be a reason for him to do so. There was no way to plan that outcome, and trying to engineer it would probably have missed the point entirely. All I could do at the time was take the work seriously, treat the relationship well, and try to be someone another professional would be comfortable working with again.

That is something I am trying to keep in mind as I continue the conversations that followed the Costa Rica Summit. Of course I hope some of them create opportunities for Emberlight Global, and I will continue doing the work required to understand where those opportunities may exist. But I also know better than to assume that the value of a conversation will always be obvious today.

The best opportunities do not always start as opportunities. Sometimes they begin much more quietly, with two people doing good work together, building trust without thinking about what it might eventually produce, and leaving each other with a reason to remember the experience years later.