Surbiton Business Community: a networking group that actually gets people in a room

A networking group that actually gets people into a room is rarer than it sounds, and Surbiton has one. On the first Friday of every month, Surbiton Business Community, or SBC to locals, holds a free meetup somewhere in town. The Duke of York and The Victoria are among the venues it has used.

Most networking evenings run on hope: you hold a drink and wait for someone interesting to talk to you. SBC has tried something rather more deliberate. In a trial format it calls Business Hot Seat, four members meet for an hour, and the whole hour goes to one person's problem, with direct feedback from the other three. Three people's full attention on your actual problem is the thing most networking never delivers.

Around the meetups, the group runs mastermind-style workshops and keeps an online directory of members, from legal and financial services to digital and creative work. It names its sponsors and partners on its own site, which suggests a group that has been going long enough to have relationships worth naming. It was also one of the groups behind the town's new partnership with the council, which we followed in Surbiton's town centre plan.

By the tests in how to choose a network, it does well. It's free, it meets on a fixed date, and it's built to produce something rather than leaving everything to mingling.

It's still only one evening a month, though. The rest of the time, the work is done by a complete listing online and one clear sentence about what you do, and the members who get most from a room like this have usually done that groundwork first. The town's other monthly fixture is a farmers' market that has run since 2009.

Surbiton is one of the towns on our page for businesses in Surrey and South West London, which sets out that groundwork in more detail.