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BNI & The Power of One
BNI 860: Can They Both Speak About It?
00:08:04
If two members each offer a similiar service(s) outside of what their BNI "seat" is can they both speak about it in BNI?
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Sam Foreign welcome back to BNI and the Power of One. Thank you for joining me again today. Back with your show. Submissions, questions, topics submitted at bnipower of1.com Today's question was requested to be left anonymous, which is perfectly fine as you if anybody who's listened knows so so if you want to ask a question you're worried about being, you know, targeted or known, you can leave it completely anonymous and trust me, if you have it, somebody else probably does as well. So today's is about people with similar seats or competing businesses outside. So it says if two people choose seats but both people do something similar outside of those seats, can this be done? I was under the impression that you can only talk about what your seat is. For example, a CPA does bookkeeping, another CPA in the chapter maybe does tax returns, but both can do CFO work. Can they both also talk about cfo? I always thought it's only the seat they hold. So it's a good question. And there is a lot of quote unquote overlap depending on certain professions because you should be joining BNI for your niche. What is it that you really want to be focused in on and growing? So another example of this would be all your insurance based stuff, right? So you have the financial insurances, life disability, long term care, we've got the property casualty insurance, we've got the business insurance, we've got the or commercial insurance, we've got the health insurance. A lot of those will do multiple, will cross multiple of those lines. Then you add in like your financial advisors who probably also do life insurance, et cetera, et cetera. CPAs now do financial advising, CPAs now do life insurance, so forth and so on. So this can go across many, many different professions and contact spheres and categories, etc. So what's the answer? The answer is when it comes to bni you only talk about what you are for lack of a better term approved for in the chapter. So in this example CPA that does bookkeeping, if the bookkeeping is the seat they took, that's all they talk about in bni. Whether that's in a weekly presentation, whether that's in a featured presentation, whether that's in a one to one, you should only be focused on the area that you applied for and were approved for. I what drives me a little crazy is sometimes people will apply for a seat, know they applied for that seat with the intentions of talking about six different other things too. You applied for a specific seat, the chapter approved that specific seat and chapters that Grow and do really well. Do force people to niche because you want people to be specialized, you want to give more opportunity for people to join the team. Because even if these two. So in this example, CPA1 and CPA2, will they do business together? Unlikely, not impossible. Seen plenty of them where that does happen, but probably unlikely. However, everybody else in the chapter now has two people. They're building relationships with two people's worth of contacts. They're networking towards two people listening to their weekly presentations, two different sets of contacts to get referrals from. So that's kind of the giver's game mentality. This was when I was a member. I did the life disability, long term care. I was licensed to do investments and everything else. We had somebody else in the chapter that did that. So it can work out where they work together. But even if that's unlikely, it's the benefit of everybody else. So when you expedite that out, that's how a chapter really grows. It's how the network really grows for everybody. That's how more business gets done. A lot of your large, large chapters, you'll notice, have many specialties. Maybe it's in the law area. They'll have multiple attorneys, all doing different types of law, specialize in different things. Those attorney offices might have others, you know, partners or whatever, associates that do some of those things. But it gives back to everybody else. So when you decide to join a chapter and whether it's, that's the only seat they have and you decide to take it, or you know, you decide to niche yourself, once you apply and you get accepted, that's what you're locked into. You do not want to be trying to then say, oh well, but I also do this on the side because it adds confusion, it adds competition, it adds conflict. And even if there's like the example where, let's just say I'll just use these ones because it was in the question, let's just say a CPA joins to do tax returns and then they keep talking about how they also do bookkeeping. There's no bookkeeper in the chapter. What's the harm? Well, the harm is they'll never be a bookkeeper in the chapter. And so the rest of the members get held back a little bit on their networking opportunities. And there are plenty of bookkeepers out there who only specialize in bookkeeping and don't do taxes, etc. Etc. So you could find one that actually could be profitable for the CPA as well in that scenario, but may never happen. Because they're, they're now taking two seats. So again, to summarize, you should be joining BNI for the to niche yourself. You should be joining BNI to get the type of business you really want to be getting. Not just anything you could be getting. That's internally. Two is once you've been accepted and you have a specific seat, you have to stick to that seat. Inside BNI doesn't mean outside. BNI doesn't mean like with your clients, just in weekly presentations, in featured presentations, in one to ones, those kind of things. Stick to what you, you agreed to, you applied for, you got approved for. Because it does. Like in this case, if you got two people now who both do something else on the side and they're both talking about it, that's adding confusion, it's adding conflict. It's not going to help anybody in the chapter. In fact, it probably could in, in some cases really, really hurt the chapter. So hopefully that answers your question. I really appreciate you submitting it as always and with everybody else, same thing. Go to bnipowerofone.com Leave your question there and we'll get to them as fast as we can. I appreciate everybody else. If you haven't yet, leave us a review, share the podcast, help other people find it that helps the show and I will talk to you soon. Sam.