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BNI & The Power of One
BNI 788: Should I Allow Him to Put In TYFCB?
00:17:01
We are back answering your submitted questions! This episode we are asked about crossing the line with referrals and TYFCB
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Tim
Foreign welcome back to B9 the power of one podcast. Thank you for joining me again today. We are back with your show submissions, questions, topics submitted at BNI Power of One appreciate everybody who continues to go there and submit them. And as the same with this questions asked to be kept anonymous. We're happy to do that as well. Typically if you have the question, others do even if they don't. Sometimes the questions are some interesting stories and and can teach us all something. So today's was asked to keep be kept anonymous, which we will do. Says hi Tim, a big fan of all three of your podcasts, which I think he just means the three different types that we're doing on here, which I appreciate. Recently had an accountant who I know from another B and I chapter come in to pay for work of a nonprofit that we have as a customer for years. I've never even knew he was involved until now. We met this nonprofit back in 2017 and our contact is a very dear customer. Hold on now. The accountant wants to put in a referral so he can log the the significant thank you for closed business. I kind of know your stance on fudging stats, but how do I handle this? It is no skin off my back to accept the referral and log thank you for closed business, but I think it's just plain wrong. Okay, so your, your last line there where you say I think it's just plain wrong is 100% accurate. It is absolutely wrong and for lack of a better term, a little gross that somebody would even think about doing. So just to reiterate for everybody how I interpret this question, the member submitting it has had a client for eight years that happens to be a nonprofit and a fellow BNI member from a different chapter, but a B and I member came in to pay for work for that nonprofit, meaning that person is probably on the board or something. The person who's had the nonprofit for as a client for eight years didn't even know that person was involved. Does now. And the person who's involved in the nonprofit wants to say, hey, let me put you, Let me put the nonprofit in as a referral for you so that I can get the thank you for closed business. Yeah, that's. That's a no go. Okay, that just does cannot happen. Let's go back. What should we be tracking? See, and this is coming from like the I. This part drives me nuts because bni, if you were to say, hey Tim, you're a BNI guy as a franchise owner and everything else would be the ones being like, hey, put it in. Because it increases our total. Thank you for closed business. And when we talk about how much business our members have done, it only increases that number. So from like a marketing standpoint, you know, we have things to lose by you not putting it, but it's just not an accurate thing. And I'm that way. On every data point there is, do not inflate data for recognition purposes. Make sure the data is real. And listen, people play games with data at every level of this organization. And I would bet it's at every level of every other organization. I'll give you a case in point. We have in the United States a report that comes out every single day that shows franchise owners how they are comparing to all the other franchisees. Franchises, some of those are not franchisees, some of them are corporately owned regions or whatever. But all the franchises, how they are doing compared to their peers. And it's tracks all kinds of data points. It's ranked on growth, are your region, is your franchise growing, and at what pace compared to others. There's a lot of recognition that BNI does around that rightfully not saying they shouldn't. And so it can get a little competitive. You say, where is this going? Every year at the end of the year, there will be people who will purposely either inflate or deflate their membership counts. You can say, okay, how do they inflate them? They are processing apps that aren't complete. They are. We had a question about that. It was from a different country, but. Right. Pushing through applications. They might, you know, push over a startup group that's not quite there yet. Whatever. They might do things to increase their number if they feel like, hey, I'm in the running for some recognition, top five, top three, whatever. So, or, or they, they won't drop members maybe. Right. Maybe they'll hold off on drops so that they don't. That's a way to inflate your number is if you don't drop people that you know are gone, how do you deflate your number? You don't process applications that are approved, that are paid for, etc. Until the new year. Why would anybody do that? Well, if you're not in the running for quote, unquote recognition, then they will hold off because when the new report comes out on January, whatever, second or third, all of a sudden, the way the report works, it locks in your start number. Right. So locks in my start number. Oh, now I'm going to process these 20 applications and boom, I'm up 20 members and I'm leading the way. So my point is, like every level, people will gamify and play with the, with the numbers and they're all wrong. And I don't really care about the recognition piece myself. It's a matter of what is a report like a POMS report or a power of one report, or this daily report that we get on our end meant to do. It's meant to give you insight on how you're performing either individually or collectively. So Power of One is an individual type of report, though you can use it collectively too. If you look at averages and stuff. The POMS reports, a collective type of report, but also individual because you can go by member. Right. The daily report, all these things allow you to see where am I performing well, where am I not, where do I need to improve, what are my results based on my current activities. Right. And what do I need to change to either to increase those results? Well, when you put junk in, you get junk out. And so in this case, if you're putting in a referral and then somebody else is getting the, you know, the flip side, thank you for closed business, that has ramifications. The one referral that the member gets to put in isn't that big of a deal, like one time because it's just one referral in the Palms report. So your number goes from, you know, 10 to 11 or whatever. But the thank you for closed business is a big one. And this one says it's significant because now that makes it look like we're producing so much more for so many more people that isn't happening. And so, you know, it's the same thing. Like you might say, well, who cares about holding on apps until the beginning of the year? I mean, I don't. But think about how growth happens in bni, growth is a lag to the activity. This is important for you as listeners, as members and stuff to realize that, like, if you want to grow, you know, your network, you got to be the actual tangible growth comes from all the work ahead of time. So every day you delay inviting. Every day you delay scheduling the visitor day, every day you delay doing these things, delays and delays and delays the end result, because there's a time between inviting to getting them to show up, to getting them to enjoy the meeting, to getting them to apply, to getting them to approved and all that kind of stuff. So in our business, the same thing, if all of a sudden I've got 20 member growth, I got to be able to look back and say, what generated that? And if I'm looking back and being like, oh look in January, grew by 20 members, but didn't really because it was in November or December, which meant the activity was in September or October. It could be misleading in strategies. It could be misleading in all kinds of things. All for like feign recognition. We had it, we had it once so bad. This is how people get competitive that when I was national director, we had someone not drop members so that they could get recognition in one year, then ask to back date the drop. So then they dropped them in the new year, so they started really low and asked to back date the drops back to the previous year so that they didn't start so low, but didn't want it to affect the end of the year's last. The previous year's numbers because they didn't want to lose the recognition. Like, it's just crazy. It's crazy. And I only tell you that story because it's crazy on every level. So you gotta guard it, you gotta guard it. You gotta just. How do you handle. You just tell them this isn't a referral that happened in bni. So let's not put in the referral and thank you for closed business. Because it is misleading, it is not real. It's straight lying. And it can have some unintended consequences. I don't know, I guess I'm just a. Because like you said, no skin off your back. Like who? Whatever. It really isn't like the end of the world type of topic. But it to me speaks volumes, you know, I don't know. When somebody comes up to me and they want to, they want to do something like this, it makes me question so many other things. Like if you really willing and want to lie about your BNI statistics, which in the grand scheme of things are insignificant to so many other thought parts of your life and business, like the data of it. What else are you lying about? Or are you willing to lie about, right? To me it's more of a. Like when that happened to me as national director, I was just immediately like, what else are you hiding? Like that we're having this type of conversation. When I see it so clear as day, it's like, what are you doing? You know, I mean like why is the recognition really that important that you are willing to delay satisfaction for members or cheat the system for what? I don't know this any purpose of it. Just don't do it and don't fall in the habit of doing it. Because it's also like Once you start, where does it stop? It just keeps happening. And unfortunately it's the downside of what is a core value of bni. Recognition is a core value. It's important. It's just unfortunately that, you know, it's got a dirty side to it when people really want to go after it. There was a book trying to remember the exact Think like a freak. Fantastic book. I feel like I've talked about it before in the podcast in that book is written by some economists, freakonomics guys, and they talk about problem solving and thinking from problems from a. A different way. And they talk about like gamifying and how gamifying has never really worked. Like when you incentivize certain activities. So historically like doesn't work. They talked about how back in, when Britain you saw in India, there was stories about how they didn't like the rattlesnakes so they started paying for rattlesnake skins and people to hunt rattlesnakes. Well, what happened was once you started paying for dead rattlesnakes, people started rattlesnake farms so that they could raise and thus then kill the rattlesnakes to get the money. They talk about same thing. There was like a, there was like tax credits for certain elimination, for the elimination of certain pollutions that companies could get. So companies actually started over producing it so that they could then eliminate it to get the tax credit. Like whenever we do recognition pieces or incentives or anything like that, people will gamify. They, they will, they will cheat. It's just kind of like a historical thing. And I think that comes into play sometimes with BNI because of that core value of recognition. It's, it's unavoidable. There's always going to be people who will do it. And I think I generally would be on the side of this person would be like, you know, whatever. When people do it, it's just, you can see it, you know it. But that doesn't say then mean like it's okay to do it yourself. Right. And the only way it can be limited or potentially even stopped, I guess is if we don't allow it to happen when it does involve us. So yeah, we don't do that in my regions. We don't hold back apps, we don't hold back drops, we don't do those kind of things. If we ever earn recognition, we're super proud and super happy for it, super grateful for it. If we lost because of, you know, whatever few members, then the person who beat us, beat us, like that's Good. Good for them. You know, we're not going to be first place every single time. I don't generally. Also, by the way, on another full tangent on this as I'm kind of ranting through, other people know too, right? Like, if you were to do that, there's going to be other people who kind of would figure it out. And so, like, again, in the BNI side of it, just to take the focus off the member here, like, when franchises do those things, other franchises know they're doing it. And maybe nobody stops you because they can't or doesn't care or whatever. But don't kid yourself that when you get found to be doing those things, a lot of people start asking questions, right? About you, your character, your ethics. Like, those kind of things. You could put a lot at risk for something that seems meaningless. And at the end of the day might be because people like I do start asking like, well, what else are you lying about? What else are you hiding? What else are you doing? What else? Right? And once those questions start creeping in, hard to get them out. Hard to get them out. So be very careful with that as well. So end of it, tell them, no, we're not doing that. Not putting in. You didn't refer the nonprofit to me. So you don't get to put in the referral. And because you don't get to put in the referral, you definitely don't get the recognition for the thank you for closed business. Because that's not how this works. Keep the data as clean as possible so that you can use the data in a clean way to get the, you know, the answers you really need or want to make the improvements you need to do. Have a good one.