Reaching out to old contacts is less awkward than it feels: most assume you're too busy for them and are glad to be invited back in. Lead with warmth and their world, never a pitch. I teach a formula for this, and my response rates run 30 to 40% against the 1% a typical sales email gets.
Send a short, warm note that leads with them and offers an outcome, with zero pitch attached.
Old contacts already trust you, and research finds reconnected ties deliver fresher insight than current ones.
List ten people who know your work and haven't heard from you in a year. Write to two.
Nobody wants to hire a consultant. They only want the outcomes in their business.
Leah Neaderthal, Smart Gets Paid
Reconnecting feels awkward because you're imagining how the note looks from a version of them that doesn't exist: someone tracking your silence, suspicious of your motives. The real person on the other end is busy, thinks well of you, and has assumed you're too busy for them.
Your clients and past clients know how good you are, which is exactly why they talk themselves out of reaching for you: she's probably booked, she probably doesn't even do this work anymore. Your note doesn't interrupt them. It gives them permission.
The research backs the feeling being wrong. Levin, Walter, and Murnighan studied executives reconnecting with contacts they hadn't spoken to in three or more years, and found dormant ties proved as valuable as current ones, and often more valuable: "Insights from dormant ties tend to be more novel, and more efficient to get, than those from current ties." Two things made it work, and you already have both:
Say something short and warm that leads with them, and follow a structure so you're never staring at a blank message. The one I teach, the Shoulder Tap Formula, builds the note from five parts:
That's the shape that gets my 30 to 40% response rate. Notice what's missing: any pitch, any apology for the silence, any paragraph about you. It's the same posture as posting without sounding salesy: give first, ask small. The whole note reads like a colleague sticking her head in the door, and that's precisely why it works.
Reconnect first with the warm people just below the surface: past clients, former colleagues, and the people who already know your work. I call this digging the potatoes, because they grow six inches down, right within reach, and no farm expansion required.
They're one good reason away from hiring you again, and they're the people referrals already flow through. Add one extra ingredient for them: remind them what you offer and that you have room. They assume you're booked solid, and a plain "I'm taking on one more project this fall" turns that assumption into an opening.
Every job change relocates someone who trusts you into a new company with new problems and new budget. The trust travels with them.
People you almost worked with, where the timing was wrong and the respect was real. Timing changes.
Reaching out to strangers has its own etiquette, and it comes second, whether you do it yourself or pay an agency to do it for you. This list first. The potatoes are closer than you think.
Look, I know what the hesitation is made of. Reaching out feels like asking for something, and you were raised to never impose. So let me flip the frame: done right, reconnection is offering something. You show up warm, you lead with their world, you put an outcome on the table, and you make the next step cost twenty minutes. Nobody experiences that as an imposition. Most people experience it as the most useful email they got that week.
And this is not chasing. Chasing is pursuing someone who's gone cold on a live deal. This is a peer saying hello with something to offer, from the same level, with no grip on the outcome. If they're not interested, nothing was lost, and you're back on their radar anyway.
The women I work with put off this exact activity for months, and then one afternoon of notes produces more real conversations than a quarter of posting. The warm lane was sitting right there the whole time.
The Academy is where I teach the full formula, with a room of women doing the same work.
No, and the gap might be the asset. The reconnection research found long-dormant ties deliver the freshest insight precisely because you've each been in different rooms since you talked. Trust doesn't expire on a schedule, and neither does respect for your work. Write the note as if the gap is normal, because to them, it is.
No. Nobody was keeping score, and an apology turns a warm hello into an awkward accounting. Open with warmth and relevance instead: the memory of them, the reason it's today. "It's been too long" as a passing beat is fine. A paragraph of guilt makes them manage your feelings, which is the opposite of a gift.
Some will, and the note still did its job: you're back on their radar, warmly, with no strings. One friendly nudge a couple of weeks later is plenty, and then let it rest. This works as a steady practice across many people, never as a campaign aimed at one. The next note to someone else matters more than the silence from this one.
Don't lead there. A note that exists to extract a referral reads as a pitch no matter how it opens, and people feel the difference immediately. Reconnect to reconnect: warmth, their world, something useful. Once the relationship is warm again, the people who love your work refer naturally, and the ones who ask "how can I help?" have just answered your question for you.