On this episode, Bella speaks with Gelie Akhenblit, CEO/Founder of NetworkingPhoenix. They discuss the importance of networking, "do"s and "do not"s when going to a marketing event, and best practices for following up. “Networking is finding friends with professional benefits” Gelie Akhenblit (CEO / Founder of NetworkingPhoenix) has revolutionized the way Arizona’s professionals, small business owners, and entrepreneurs network in the Valley. Founded in October 2008, Gelie left her corporate position in order to launch her vision as a tech startup. This startup, NetworkingPhoenix.com, created a democratized platform for local networkers to connect online and in person through mixers, business events,  and local educational partners. Since its inception,NetworkingPhoenix has skyrocketed in popularity and has become one of the most visited websites in Arizona with nearly 40,000 members and growing. Subscribe To The Show: Transcript: This is episode 58 of Bella in Your Business. Welcome to Bella in Your Business, where Bella will discuss anything and everything about your pet sitting business to help you land on target. So get ready, Bella's got your chute. Let's jump. Welcome to Bella in Your Business. My name is Bella Vasta, your host, and today I have a friend with me. Her name is Gellie Akhenblit, and she is—my gosh, I don't even know how to introduce her. She's amazing. I've known her for almost a decade. Interestingly enough, we met through a boy. He connected us, and Gellie has started an incredible thing that Phoenix is very, very fortunate to have. It's called networkingphoenix.com. She's going to tell you her story today, but we're going to talk all about networking. So I want you to listen up if you are that pet sitter who shies away from those networking meetings or those lunches or those breakfasts or those mixers, because today we're going to give you lots of awesome tips to help you. Without further ado, Gellie, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, and I love that introduction. So I came from the former Soviet Union, but I ended up in Phoenix, Arizona. The majority of my life I’ve spent in Phoenix. After going to college here and doing the traditional thing, I had two jobs out of college, and I was like, you know what? This whole job thing is not for me. I couldn’t handle it. I’d been working since I was fourteen, but what I didn’t realize was that I was a little hustler, a little entrepreneur, and I never knew it. I didn’t have anyone to guide me or explain to me that being an entrepreneur is a personality trait. During my second job out of college, it was absolutely horrific—for my soul, just to clarify. So I started networking to discover other opportunities and not so much other jobs, but just to see what it is that other people do for a living, what my options were. I was in my mid-twenties, so not working wasn’t an option. I started networking and realized that I was in love with it—completely addicted to finding people, hearing their stories, and connecting with them on a human level. It just does something to me. So I thought, how do I turn this into an entrepreneurial venture? How do I make money with this? I’d never taken a business class in my life. My background was marketing and communications, which I still use daily. I found holes in the market for opportunities. There were so many networking events happening every day, but there wasn’t a hub where they were all listed. I created one—a Word document where I copied and pasted events, different fonts, different colors. It was a mess, but people contacted me asking for it. Then it dawned on me in 2007—why not build a website? At the time, I happened to be married to a software engineer. I came home one night and asked if he could build me a calendar to list all the networking events. He took my vision and built an amazing online platform that, to this day, doesn’t exist elsewhere.