Biggest isn’t always best! – Review of The Doyle Club

Several people had recommended that I attend The Doyle Club networking group in London so, having achieved an invitation, I travelled up to London with great expectations. The event is free, with no membership, and includes a basic meal. When I attended it was a nice bowl of Chilli, which you can eat whilst still networking. 

The Doyle Club is probably the largest property-biased networking event in London, if not the UK, which attracts around 200+ people per event, and meets every first Thursday in a large bar near St Paul’s. Now for some people those sorts of numbers would be quite intimidating but in most cases, the larger the event, the better the welcome to make new attendees feel comfortable.  

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case when I attended last month. When I arrived there was a table near the bottom of the staircase to the bar with a large champagne bucket and a sign asking people to leave their business card – and that was it! 

The event starts at 12pm and continues on into the evening if people decide to. I arrived just after 12 and the room was already busy and it seems that regular attendees turn up at a variety of times, presumably to suit their work commitments or capacity. This means that the room is constantly busy but with fluctuating numbers and people. 

I approached what seemed to be one of the presenters of an earlier seminar who kindly helped me to find one of the organisers and I introduced myself as a new member who had travelled up from Brighton to be there. I was given a brief run through of the rules which are very simply, if you see someone on their own, talk to them, which in itself is a good rule to have. Unfortunately, the impression I got was that the only people doing that seemed to be new members! There was no attempt by the organiser to introduce me to anyone and the rest of the attendees were mainly in groups of half a dozen or so people, mainly in circles at the bar and to break into a conversation was quite difficult. The impression it left me with is that there was definitely a large number of people there, but most of them seemed to be mates with each other who regularly meet up on the first Thursday for a few beers so from the networking peon of view, not the best event by a long way. 

I did have a small handful of good conversations and made one or two connections, to whom I can be of more use to them than they can be to me, so overall a bit of a disappointment considering the time and effort I’d put in to getting there and the large number of people in attendance. 

Now as most people know, I’m a great advocate of being consistent with your networking and you can’t just attend somewhere once and expect it to work, so I will definitely be going up again shortly, however, first impressions do count and if I was less experienced and of a nervous disposition, I probably wouldn’t be going again. 

Review by NetworkU