How to actually meet business people in Hillcrest

Shirree Leone · 2026-09-13 · Hillcrest

If you run a business in Hillcrest, you already know the problem. You know your customers, you know your suppliers, and you probably know a few people who do what you do. But the person you actually need, the accountant who understands your industry, the supplier who can finally fix the thing that has been bothering you for two years, the client who would be a perfect fit, is somewhere out there in the Upper Highway area, and you have no idea who they are.

The strange part is, they are usually closer than you think. Not a stranger, but a friend of a friend. Someone your neighbour plays golf with, someone your bookkeeper also does the books for, someone who was standing at the same school gate as you last Tuesday.

So the real question is not how to meet more people. It is how to find the handful of people who are already standing one step away from you, and how to get properly introduced.

Why the usual advice does not work

The standard advice is to network more. Go to more events, hand out more cards, add more people on LinkedIn. Most business owners in Hillcrest have tried some version of this, and most have quietly stopped, because it does not work very well.

Here is why. A room full of people who all want to sell something is not a network, it is a queue. Everyone is waiting for their turn to pitch. You leave with eleven business cards, you email three of them, one replies, and nothing comes of it. That is not a failure of effort, it is a failure of design.

A business card is a record of a meeting. It is not a relationship. And in a place like Hillcrest, where the business community is small enough that reputation travels fast, relationships are the only thing that actually moves work between people.

What works instead: someone introduces you

The most useful thing that can happen to your business is not a lead. It is an introduction.

There is a real difference. A lead is a name and a number. An introduction is someone who knows you both saying, in effect, "I trust this person, and I think you two should talk." That one sentence does more work than any amount of cold outreach, because it carries a little bit of existing trust into a relationship that has not started yet.

Anyone who has received a warm introduction knows how different it feels. The reply comes the same day. The meeting is easy. Nobody is guarded. You skip straight past the part where you have to prove you are not wasting their time, because someone they already trust has vouched for that.

Ubuntu, and why it is the right idea for a business community

There is a Zulu word for the idea underneath all of this, and South Africans know it well. Ubuntu. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. A person is a person through other people.

It is usually explained as a philosophy of community, and it is, but it is also a surprisingly accurate description of how business actually works here. Your business is not something you built alone. It is made of the people who gave you a chance, the ones who recommended you, the ones who paid on time when they did not have to, the ones who told someone else you were worth calling.

Applied to a business community, ubuntu means something quite practical. You give first. You make the introduction because it is useful to someone else, not because you are owed anything. And then, because you are part of a group of people doing the same thing, introductions come back to you from directions you never expected.

Give, connect, grow. Not as a slogan, but as the actual mechanism.

So what does the technology actually do

Every networking group in the country has a WhatsApp group and a spreadsheet, and both die within a month. Hillcrest Business Connect runs on My Most Trusted instead, and the difference is worth explaining properly, because it is not a directory and it is not a chat.

Think of it as the memory nobody in the room has time to keep.

When you join, you sit through a short conversation with Gemma, who walks you through setting up. She wants three things from you. What you do, who your best customer looks like, and the sentence that ends up doing most of the work: what should people think of you for. A plumber who answers the phone after hours. A bookkeeper who is good with restaurant chaos. Once that sentence exists, the rest of the community can act on your behalf without asking you first.

Your circle on the platform is deliberately small. You add the people you would vouch for out loud, and nobody else, one at a time, confirming each time that you genuinely know them. There is no import button, and there is no growth hack. Most people arrive because a member spoke for them, so the whole thing is stitched together out of relationships that already existed before anyone downloaded anything.

Because every member has said what they need and what they are good at, the system spots matches you would have missed. It will point out that the woman who did your neighbour's shopfit is looking for exactly the kind of client sitting two seats away from you at the last meeting. You did not have to hold both facts in your head at once. You just agree, or you do not.

Then it writes the thing. A real introduction, in your words, explaining what each person brings and why the two of them should bother. You read it over, change whatever sounds unlike you, and send it from your own WhatsApp or your own email. It takes about a minute, and it reads like a person wrote it, because a person approved every word.

There is a panel that shows you, on anyone's profile, exactly who the two of you already trust in common. So the awkward cold approach becomes a request to a mutual friend instead, which is how business in the Upper Highway area has always worked anyway. The only new part is that you no longer have to guess who that friend is.

When nobody in your own circle fits, you can ask the wider network. Type what you are after in ordinary words, a signage company in Pinetown, an attorney who understands small franchises, and it will search every member and show you the chain of people standing between you and them. A Hillcrest business can reach somebody in Cape Town, or Okinawa, through people who each vouched for the next one.

At a meeting you check in with a QR code, and your phone shows you who else is in the room and what each of them came looking for. Hand over a business card and you can photograph it. The details get read off automatically, along with a short note about the company pulled from their own website, and that person is in your circle before the coffee has cooled.

Afterwards it does the nagging. Thank the person who introduced you. Find out whether the two people you put together ever actually met. Follow up gently on the one that went quiet. Every introduction you have given and received sits in one list, which is more than can be said for a drawer full of cards.

All of it works in English, Afrikaans and isiZulu, including Gemma.

Three rules, and the reason behind each

Communities like this one fail in predictable ways, so a few things are fixed.

There is no pitching, and no round of thirty second commercials. Selling at people in a room is the behaviour that ruined networking for everybody, and if that is your plan you will find this slow going, deliberately.

Giving comes before receiving, in that order. The introductions you make for other people are the reason yours arrive later. Members who only ever ask are easy to spot, because the platform records who gives.

Everyone is a real, verified person, and most were vouched for on the way in. When an introduction lands in your inbox, you know a human being decided it was worth making.

What a month in the group actually looks like

Quieter than you would expect, and slower to start.

The first few meetings are mostly learning what everyone really does, which is rarely what their job title suggests. Somewhere around the third one, people start asking the room for help out loud, and the answers start coming back. An introduction gets made. Two people have coffee. Occasionally it becomes work, occasionally it becomes a friendship, and both of those are wins as far as this group is concerned.

Nobody is chasing a leaderboard. The measure is whether, a year from now, there are ten people in Hillcrest who would take your call.

Will I get referrals from it?

That is the hope, and for many members that is what happens. But referrals in Hillcrest Business Connect are never forced. Nobody counts them, nobody has to bring a lead to the table, and nobody is given one seat per trade. Members introduce each other when they genuinely know someone who needs what the other person does, and the referrals follow from that.

If you are in Hillcrest and this sounds like what you have been missing

Hillcrest Business Connect is a local business community for Hillcrest and the Upper Highway area, built on exactly this idea. We meet in person, we know each other by name, and we make introductions for one another, with a platform underneath that does the remembering and the writing so that we can do the meeting.

It is part of the My Most Trusted network, which has 89,942 people in its Trusted Universe as of October 2026, so an introduction that starts in Hillcrest does not have to end here. But it starts here, with people you can actually sit across a table from.

If you have been meaning to get to know the business community around you, and you would rather do it properly than collect another stack of cards, come and meet us.