The Best Investment I Ever Made Never Appeared on My Balance Sheet.

The Best Investment I Ever Made Never Appeared on My Balance Sheet

Welcome to the Mellow Madness update, a space for thinking out loud about strategy, leadership, and the systems that shape lasting value.

This week’s reflection was inspired by a thoughtful LinkedIn post by my friend and business associate, Catherine Dzvene. Her post prompted me to think more deeply about relationships and the role they have played throughout my career. While the reflections that follow are entirely my own, I am grateful she started the conversation.

There is something remarkable about a baobab tree. Nobody plants one expecting to enjoy its shade the following year. 

For years it grows quietly, almost unnoticed, before becoming a place where

travelers rest, children play, communities gather, and stories are shared. Long after the person who planted it is gone, the tree continues serving people they may never have known. The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that meaningful relationships grow in much the same way.

Modern business celebrates networking. We attend conferences, exchange business cards, connect on LinkedIn and make introductions because we understand that opportunities often begin with people. There is nothing wrong with that. Every meaningful relationship starts with an introduction. Yet introductions alone rarely change careers, build organizations or shape legacies. Those outcomes are usually the product of something much quieter and far less celebrated: stewardship.

Looking back over more than two decades, I have realized that many of the opportunities that shaped my career did not come from people I had met the previous month. They came from relationships that had been quietly maturing for years. Some of the people I still work with today are people I first met more than twenty-five years ago. We have watched each other grow from young professionals into founders, executives, advisors, and business owners. Somewhere along the way, the relationship stopped feeling professional and became personal. 

Many have become close friends. Some have become family in every way except blood.

What strikes me is that we never consciously discussed networking. We simply stayed in each other’s lives. We celebrated milestones, shared ideas, opened doors where we could and continued investing in one another long after there was no immediate commercial reason to do so. Looking back, I realise that what we were building was not a network. It was trust. Like compound interest, trust grows slowly and almost invisibly until one day its value becomes impossible to ignore.

Perhaps this is why I have never fully agreed with the idea that Africa needs to learn how to network. Long before networking breakfasts, professional associations and social media became fashionable, business across this continent depended on reputation. Traders travelled with introductions rather than CVs. Families recommended people whose character they trusted. Churches connected entrepreneurs. Teachers opened doors for former students. Elders vouched for younger professionals. Opportunities moved through trust long before they moved through algorithms.

 We did not call it networking because it was simply part of how communities functioned. Success depended not only on who knew your name, but on who was willing to place their own reputation behind yours.

That understanding has quietly shaped the way I approach my own work.

One lesson I have learned is that the size of the engagement should never determine the depth of the relationship. Increasingly, I find myself working with founders, boards, and leadership teams making decisions that will shape organizations for the next decade rather than the next quarter. Some of those conversations become substantial consulting engagements involving tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

Others begin over coffee with someone still trying to decide whether their idea deserves to exist. The commercial realities are very different, but my approach is not.

If I believe in what someone is building, I find it difficult to care only until the invoice has been paid. I enjoy making introductions, sharing ideas, celebrating milestones and connecting people who ought to know one another. I take genuine satisfaction in seeing good people succeed, even when there is no immediate commercial benefit to me. Over the years I have discovered that the invoice eventually becomes history, but the relationship continues writing its own story.

In many ways, that philosophy has become one of the most valuable assets in my career. The organisations I work with are rarely paying for a report or a presentation. They are making decisions that affect reputations, institutions and futures. Those conversations demand technical expertise, but they also demand judgement. More importantly, they demand trust. 

Trust cannot be accelerated by a proposal document or manufactured through a polished presentation. It is earned through consistency, generosity and the willingness to remain invested long after the immediate transaction has ended.

That is why some of the most meaningful opportunities in my career have arrived years after the original conversation took place. A former client joins another organisation and remembers our work together. A colleague from decades ago recommends me to a board I have never met. Someone I once helped without expecting anything in return introduces me to a founder looking for strategic advice. 

These opportunities rarely appear because I mastered the art of networking. They appear because relationships have remarkable memories.

The baobab reminds us of something modern business often forgets. Its value is not measured by how quickly it grows but by how many people eventually find shelter beneath it. Relationships work the same way. We water them long before they provide shade, often without knowing who will one day benefit from the investment.

We spend a great deal of time asking young professionals how they can expand their networks. It is not a bad question, but perhaps it is the wrong one. A better question might be this: Who would still think of you five years after your last conversation? That answer tells us far more about the quality of our relationships than the number of contacts stored in our phones.

Looking back, the best investment I ever made was never a stock, a property or even a business. It never appeared on my balance sheet. It paid something far more valuable.

Trust.

And trust, unlike interest, compounds through people.