Coffee, Conversations, and Why Your Network Is Your Greatest Asset

What Two Decades of Authentic Relationships & Connection Have to Do With Building a Business in Your 40s and 50s

Tamika Curry, Ph.D., Founder and CEO, Morse Regent

There is a lot to be proud of when you are building something new. The excitement of a strong vision, a brand coming to life, a business taking shape from nothing into something real and meaningful. I have always played the long game in everything I do. I already know what I want Morse Regent to look like at year one, at year three, at year five, and even at year ten and fifteen. That clarity is energizing. But what has somewhat surprised me most about these past few months is not the strategy or the framework.

It's the conversations.

I have always loved a good transformation. In an earlier season of my life, one of my favorite things to do was to take a space that was practically unlivable and turn it into something beautiful, warm, and inviting. A room where people could walk in, exhale, and just be. I see building Morse Regent the same way. You start with a vision, you do the hard work of construction, and slowly something worth gathering around begins to emerge. And just like those early home renovations I have loved, the best part is not the finished product. It is what happens in the space once people start showing up.

People have been showing up. And I am so grateful.

Building something from the ground up demands precision over pace. Every hour is a deliberate investment, not a reaction. And somewhere in that discipline I reclaimed something I had let slip away in the past 3-5 years before. The ability to be fully present in a conversation. Not from a place of being over scheduled but as an intentional act of building something I have long dreamed of for years.

Some of these conversations have started over a simple cup of coffee, in person at a favorite breakfast spot or virtually with someone I have not seen in a while. Some have stretched into ninety minute lunches or dinner that neither of us planned to stay for. There have even been happy hours with former colleagues that turned into the kind of honest, unguarded conversations you can only have with people who have been in the trenches with you for years. There have been neighborhood walks where a chance encounter turned into an exchange of ideas neither of us was expecting. Every single one of them has mattered.

The Rooms I Have Been In

I have always been grateful for being in some remarkable rooms over my career. But the COVID pandemic slowed down some of those intentional professional gatherings a few years ago. However in this building season, I have been excited to attend a diverse and variety of curated events. The Chief Women’s History Month fireside chat and dinner. The Mayor’s Keeping It 100 Inaugural luncheon. The African American Chamber of Commerce women’s empowerment breakfast. The Fitler Forum, which deserves its own article and probably will get one. A dear friend’s book launch. Coffee and conversations with old friends, new friends, and everyone in between. And of course, always enjoy events with my sorority. These are just a few. There are too many to name and every one of them worth naming. Philly Tech Week is coming up and I am already looking forward to what conversations that will open.

Not New. Rooted.

What I want to be clear about is this. These are not new relationships. Over the last twenty-five years, across every season of my career and my life, I have had the privilege of building and sustaining relationships with people from all walks of life and all kinds of spaces. Healthcare leaders and educators. Artists and musicians. Community builders and culture keepers. Women leaders at Fortune 500 companies and beyond. People I met in boardrooms and people I met in community centers. People whose work looks nothing like mine and whose perspectives have made mine sharper for it. Those relationships did not pause while I was busy. I kept them. I tended to them. And now, stepping into this new chapter, they are showing up in full, reactivated and expanding in ways that remind me why I invested in them in the first place.

Morse Regent is being built inside that web of trust, not in spite of the absence of it. That distinction matters to me.

The Research Agrees

It turns out there is research to support what many of us who started businesses in our 40s and 50s already know instinctively. On The Oprah Podcast earlier this year, Oprah sat down with Jürgen Ingels, founder of Clear2Pay and serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and founder of SuperNova, whose book Start, Grow, Sell caught Oprah’s attention. He pointed to research showing that the optimal age to start a business is 45. The reason is not energy or ambition. It is network. It is experience. It is the relationships you have spent decades building. As Ingels put it simply, in life it matters what you know, but it matters far more who you know. The accountant you already trust. The colleague who knows how to sell. The people who let you move faster and smarter than someone starting from zero. The network is not a bonus at that stage. It is the foundation.

Relationships Are the Strategy

Here is what I know to be true after twenty-five years of building relationships across sectors and spaces. In B2B consulting, and really in any service business, you do not get in the door because of your website or your framework or your credentials alone. You get in the door because someone who trusts you opens it. Relationships are not the soft side of building a business. They are not the nice-to-have that you get to once the real work is done. They are the strategy. They are the infrastructure underneath everything else. The organizations I have worked alongside, the leaders I have sat across from in the hardest moments of their organizations’ histories, they did not call because of a LinkedIn post. They called because of a relationship. Because of a history of showing up, of delivering, of being trustworthy when it was inconvenient to be. That is what actually builds a business.

So this article is a pause. A moment to honor the coffees, the dinners, the happy hours, the walks, the virtual check-ins, and the rooms I have been privileged to be in. The relationships that are the real infrastructure of this business. More conversations are coming. More rooms to be in. And I am excited about who is being built alongside all of what we are building at Morse Regent.

The work matters. The framework matters. But none of it moves without the relationships underneath it.

Morse Regent is a turnaround advisory and interim executive leadership consulting firm partnering with mission-driven organizations, particularly those in healthcare, behavioral health, and education, at pivotal inflection points in their financial and operational performance, so that the organizations doing the most important work in our communities can continue to make the impact they were built to deliver. If any part of this resonated with you, let's talk.

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