Personal and familial networking could be a significant tool for creating and expanding a business organisation. It was used during the 1860s to create the Mackinnon group's Indian and Indonesian steamship enterprises, and in the 1870s to expand these operations into the coastal waters of the Red Sea and Eastern Africa as well as to initiate a steamship line between Britain and India. The group also called on its outer circle of friends and allies in a more moderate way to finance and support its on-going diversification into transport, manufacturing and tea planting within India (Chapter 9). However, the motives of individuals and family groups were not necessarily predisposed towards profit maximisation as the sole, or even predominant, purpose of business activity, and their approach to business affairs was suffused by values and attitudes which accorded merit and respect to other aspects of life – social, cultural, political and religious. Consequently, personal and familial networking tended not just to draw resources, information and influence inwards, into the family-run business organisation from outside, enabling it to sustain and develop its core competencies, but also tended to draw them outwards – into support of a range of activities outside the family's core business interests. Wealth generated through successful enterprise might be employed elsewhere than in the further promotion of the business organisation – in the pursuit of personal whims, hobbies or ambitions which, if permitted to be carried to extreme, could ultimately even endanger the family firm itself. Evidence of such influences at work can be seen in the way that, from about 1876 onwards, William Mackinnon began to engage in a form of ‘social networking’ that combined personal financial ambition, rather than ambitions for the family group as a whole, with the development of connections valued as much, if not more, for the prestige and social status they bestowed than for any monetary returns that might be forthcoming. The grocer's boy from Campbeltown now aspired to rub shoulders with, and win the approbation of, aristocratic figures whom he regarded as his social superiors.

By 1876, the immediate pressures on William Mackinnon from the opening of the Suez Canal – the need to defend BI and NISM from rival concerns, to renew their government contracts, to modernise their fleets, and to take the opportunity to launch two new steamship lines from London – had begun to ease.