When Garett Seney ’10 M’13 graduated from Endicott, the economy was still reeling from the 2008 financial crisis, so the sport management major laced up his boots and pivoted—right into Uno Pizzeria & Grill.
Seney spent a year at the Concord, N.H., chain before returning to Endicott for his master’s in education, but it was during his bartending stint that an idea began percolating.
“I was sick of hearing my friends say, ‘Well, the alumni at my school hooked me up [with a job],’” he said.
While the Endicott College Networking Group has existed on LinkedIn for some time, Seney saw a market for a more targeted alumni business referral network that would help Gulls get ahead in their business ventures, recession or not.
A few years later, Seney, who has worked as a Loan Officer with Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation since 2016, was chatting with Mike Hicks ’12 about how easy it was for alumni at schools like Boston University or Harvard to network. Those larger, older institutions are known for their expansive alumni networks that reach around the world.
Founded in 1939, Endicott only became a co-ed institution in 1994 and was only beginning to build a more expansive and diverse alumni population when Seney and Hicks graduated. While the College was established with the goal of preparing women for the workplace, discrimination and sexism often stymied women from fully reaching their career potential until the 1970s and ’80s. Despite societal barriers, many Endicott alumnae informally engaged in networking and keeping in touch over the years, succeeding in their career paths and beyond. And, as the alumni population has continued to grow, a more robust network has begun to blossom.
“And so we thought, ‘What can we do to make that alumni network, help each other out, but also help newer grads in careers they may not have thought about?” recalled Seney.
So, in 2018, the Alumni Business Referral Network was born. Seney and Hicks partnered with Endicott officials to create a group modeled after Business Network International, the world’s leading business referral network, which boasts 300,000 member businesses in 75 countries.
Tyler Johnson ’18, a Financial Advisor at Northwestern Mutual who now co-leads the group with Seney, learned about the newly established Alumni Business Referral Network in an Endicott newsletter.
“I was newly graduated and starting my career in the financial planning space, signed up, and was accepted for the first meeting,” he said. “Coming in fresh out of college, in a career where most 22- or 23-year-olds don’t think about financial advising or the importance behind it, it was a way for me to be exposed to like-minded people that are in a demographic that has more appreciation and need for what I have to offer.”
Once Hicks began trickling out of the group while pursuing a new career, Johnson explained, “Garett and I started to take control of the group together, and continue to grow it as we’ve been doing.”
Catering to business professionals whose work relies on networking—industries such as real estate, mortgage, insurance, and financial services; digital marketing; and real estate and injury law—Endicott’s Alumni Business Referral Network has now come to a place where recommending business and making introductions has paid off.
The group meets once a month and hopes to expand into the Hartford, Conn., and Portsmouth, N.H., areas.
Johnson noted that the group hopes to align with more campus initiatives like Spark Tank. “Our doors are always open,” he said. “Ultimately, we want to groom recent grads that are taking a step into the entrepreneurial world and give them some exposure to this group—similar to how I came into it as a 22-year-old. Having a group of referral sources that wanted me to succeed was super helpful.”
“Every meeting seeing alumni helping alumni and passing referrals, the group continuing to grow, it makes me feel great,” Seney added. “In any industry, you need multiple streams of referrals, and so to have not only that stream but also good people that you trust referring your business? That’s a double-edged reason why this group is so great.”
To learn more about the Alumni Business Referral Network, contact Chrissy Dahlheimer at cdahlhei@endicott.edu.
