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BNI & The Power of One
BNI 785: 20 Members and Only 45 Second Weekly Presentations?
00:11:43
We are back answering your submitted questions. This episode we discuss why a chapter may only be doing 45 second weekly presentations when only 20 members and how to approach the leadership team about it.
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- [00:39]
Tim
Welcome back to bni the Power of One. Thanks for joining me again today. Back with your show. Submissions, questions, topics submitted@bnipowerofone.com before we get into today's I want to thank everybody who reached out. Let me know that the last podcast cut off abruptly. That has been fixed. Thankfully it wasn't a recording error, it was an uploading error on the site that we used to host each episode. So didn't have to be re recorded. But I did see after that it cut off at like two minutes, two and a half minutes. So if you want the other nine minutes that remaining, maybe you do, maybe you don't, you should be able to listen to it now and it should be the full episode. So I know a few people reached out. I appreciate that because otherwise I would not have caught it. All right, so today we are hearing from Raymond out in Cape Town, South Africa. Hi Tim, I love your podcast and your weekly presentation. Coaching is unique and very helpful. I have, contrary to your advice, I admit, changed chapters. After nearly 10 years in one spot, I had become stale and needed to press reset. My new chapter has only 20 members, but they limit us to 45 seconds and an 8 minute featured presentation. This seems to be mainly due to a lot of extra verbiage added to the meeting, making it rather salesy. How do I suggest. How do you suggest I approach the topic with leadership without standing on toes? Although I'm rather experienced in bni, having helped every leadership post over the years, I'm new to them. All right, so this is a great question. So first of all, my bet is that it wasn't the extra verbiage that cut the meeting short. They're adding extra verbiage because otherwise the extra verbiage didn't cut your weekly presentation short by 15 seconds. They're filling in the extra time they have because they're only using 45 seconds instead of a minute and they're only using one eight minute featured presentation. So the real question here, which I can't answer, is when did that start and why? So just to give you a few examples, it could have started years ago when the chapter maybe was larger, maybe the chapter was 40 members or 50 members or what have you and it was necessary for them at the time to cut back weekly presentations. Maybe it started because of some other reason that or some leadership team in the past that started it because they felt like that was the right thing to do for whatever reason at the time. So what happens in BI is chapters will make changes sometimes necessary, sometimes because somebody just felt it was necessary, even if it was ill advised or what have you. And then the chapter adopts that change and then it just becomes part of who they are. So I've said this on previous podcasts, right? We've had a lot of chapters over the years who will have something that they've added into the meeting that when we tell them or work with them on, hey, you know, we should really change that or we shouldn't do that, or why are you doing that? Kind of conversations, it's met with resistance, like, well, that's who we are. That's how we've always done it. That's just, you know, I know we're different, but. And when we asked the question, the follow up question was, okay, well when did that start and why did it start? Most of the time they have no idea. So we had a chapter, you know, years ago, who used to instill a break in the middle of the meeting. And which is just kind of crazy when you think about it. The meeting is only an hour and a half. Okay. It's shorter than a movie. We're all adults, we can make it through an hour and a half. But they had a break. It was like a coffee break. And when we said, hey, you know, we don't really have time to instill a break. Why are you doing that? It was met with a lot of resistance. But when we asked, like, okay, well, when did this get started? Nobody in the room was a member. When it was implemented by, you know, one person joined while they were doing the next person. You know, there's turnover throughout the chapter, but it was implemented so many years prior that literally nobody who was a member at the time of this conversation was a member when it was. It was just the way it always had been. And so they were, they were kind of pushing against the advice with no historical precedent on why the break was even there. So that could be the case here. It may not be the current leadership team that's that implemented it. They're just continuing what's always been. So should it be that way? No. So anybody listening to this? If you're in a chapter of 20 members, you should be doing full minute weekly presentations and potentially and at least a 10 minute feature presentation. And you should still be ending early. Okay. Because if we got 15 minutes of networking, I'm just gonna, I should probably pull up my calculator and do this just because it's been a minute. But if we got 15 minutes of open networking, we've got 20 minutes of weekly presentations and we've got a 10 minute feature presentation that's literally only half the meeting. So what do you got left? Right, you've got president welcoming everybody. You've got VP reports, you got the treasurer's report, you've got the membership committee report. If each of those took a minute. So you got president, vp, membership committee, secretary, treasurer, say you education coordinators. Three to five minutes. Let's give them five minutes, that's nine more minutes. We've got our I have portion of the meeting which really should be about 30 seconds or less per person. But even if you did a full minute per person, you're only at 74 minutes. That still gives us 16 minutes in this meeting. Right. So there's a lot of time in there for verbiage disorientation like all the other stuff. So I bet they're just filling in time. I don't think it was, hey, we need to get all this extra salesy voting. Let's cut the time now. As a new member to the chapter, I think your concern about stepping on toes is legitimate and you shouldn't. Okay? It's just not a place of strength to come in. You definitely don't want to be like, hey, I know I'm new here but I've been a BNI member for 10 years. Or you know, we all of our team members who are not full time employees or so director, consultants, ambassadors are all members of the chapter. We tell them the worst thing you can do is go to your chapter members, your fellow members and be like, well I'm a director. So let me tell you how it is because no matter what follows those words, it's not going to be heard the way you want it to be heard. So my suggestion is to request a one to one with your chapter's director or managing director or whatever that title is, or the person is in your region and ask for advice on your membership through a regular one to one. Those are great people. I mean the fact that a lot of members don't take advantage or, and I don't know that it's not purposeful, I just don't think it's kind of out of sight, out of mind a little bit. Maybe some, some people make assumptions that they can't or shouldn't or what have you. You should be requesting one to ones with directors and ambassadors in your region. You should definitely be requesting a one to one with, you know, those in charge of your chapter because they're part of your chapter. In that sense, they're the ones who are helping the leadership team and, and are responsible for that chapter in that one to one, I would suggest that you then say, hey, you know, one concern I have is our chapter's not large and yet we're cutting time that I feel like we have plenty of time for. And let them do the approach to the leadership team. Let them have the conversation with around, hey, you know, why are we doing this? When did it start? You know, I think you, you should have enough time to be able to do it. It's not that they cut a tremendous amount of time off, but it adds up. It adds up. I mean, 15 seconds is, is a long time when you really like, if I was to do 15 seconds of dead air right now, you would all think the podcast shut, shut off like last one did, right? 15 seconds is a long time. In 15 seconds over 50 weeks is. What is that? That is 12 and a half hours. Is that right? 15 seconds times 50 divided by 60. Yeah, it's 12 and a half hours of talking time. That's not right. 12 and a half minutes. 12 and a half minutes. Hours would be crazy. You don't even talk for. You don't even talk for 50 minutes. So yes, it's 12 and a half minutes. So in your case, you know, that's 12 more than 12 extra weekly presentations added up. So I don't. It's a, it's a good amount of time. It's not the end of the world. It's not like you're getting cut in half. But I think your concern is right. I don't think that there's any reason for the chapter to only be going 45 second weekly presentations at 20 members. My bet though is that was implemented well before and people in the chapter might not even know why and it should be adjusted back. But the person who's right to have that conversation would be the director or whoever's in charge of the chapter. So, Raymond, great question. Hopefully this is helpful in helping get that changed for you and appreciate you listening all the way in South Africa. I believe I'm going to South Africa next May, not This May so May 2026 for your national conference. So I'm super excited about that and as always, appreciate everybody listening. If you're finding it helpful, leave a review, go to bnipowerone.com Leave your questions and topics and I'll talk to you.