You can set up as many networking events as you like, the few I have attended were full of desperate people desperate for business! The business people with contracts to hand out probably go elsewhere (freemasons)?
Never seems like a winning formula to me. I think if you've got contracts to hand out you probably have no need to attend anything you can just get on with your work, swear at your friends and colleagues ... sodumall because you da man with the pursestrings.
The system has not been thought through really.
You should pay the people making money to attend and then they can get the desperados to perform embarrassing tasks for them and then the big cheeses can pick the ones which amuse them the most. That would be brilliant but I think Simon Cowell beat me to it!
I'm not a cynic by the way I'm an optimist .... my glass is half clean
Brilliant!