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Sam, Welcome back to BNI Power of One. Thank you for joining me again today. Getting a little extra episode in tomorrow. Back with our weekly presentation coaching episodes. So excited to get back to those reviewing people's weekly submitted presentations again under this the theme of being strategic. That's the most important skill set we do at our BNI meetings each week. It's important that we're being as effective as we possibly can be with those weekly presentations. So if you haven't ever, now's the time. Write it up, work on it, submit it, get the review so that you are continuing to, as I said, be as effective as possible. Back to your question submitted@bnipowerofone.com today we're hearing from Brian in Charleston, South Carolina says our chapter has had several members become very comfortable speaking to products and services that are outside their seat. While there are a few issues there, my largest concern is that it's preventing us all from thinking about potential members that could fill those open seats. Can you talk about any experience where this has shown up and more importantly some best practices for coaching this focus forward. So first of all, thank you for submitting the question Brian as always, anybody can submit your Questions topics@bnipower of1.com and there's a lot of cases where this happens. I can tell you an extreme story from many, many, many, many, many years ago back with paper slips and how we track the attendance and pre like BNI Connect even we had a person who this was actually more in like the sub category but it'll give you kind of the same concept person who was a B and I member in chapter A was going to be I chapter B so much because they didn't have their seat in chapter B that the chapter not only didn't invite for anybody to take that seat, they actually sent this person a removal letter when they didn't show up for three weeks. So that's like an extreme example of it. But yes, when, when we speak on additional categories and I nobody's doing it like with an intention of hurting the chapter. So let's just start there. It's a very natural, normal kind of like well we don't have somebody here so and I do that so I'll talk about does negatively affect the chapter because once somebody starts talking about something like that, you know, we're all under this, you know, belief and process and structure that says, you know, when a member's talking about that's like their seat so we don't invite for it. And so naturally your fellow Members will not invite for it and it will hold the chapter back from potential growth and adding people into those categories. Now does that mean the chapter can't grow at all? No. I mean there's probably numerous opportunities for the chapter to grow. But as your chapter does grow and adds more, more and more members, this becomes even a bigger challenge of because your opportunity to add more professions gets limited. Right. Like our chapter of 109 members has less opportunity to add new professions than the chapter of 20 members. So if you have 109 members and people are speaking across categories, it's, it has an even bigger negative impact, but it's a negative impact on all levels. Sorry, trying to clear my throat and stuff. So that's problem number one. Problem number two is it's not the most effective use of your members time when they're actually doing it. And so this gets into again our theme around being strategic. You need to be utilizing your BNI membership to grow the part of your business that you have the most passion around and enjoy doing the most and want to grow. So again, there are a lot of companies and a lot of professions that are offer a lot of different services. Okay. And I was in one when I was a member. I, I was licensed in both. I call it the financial insurances, which is life disability, long term care, that kind of stuff. And license to sell, you know, investments and annuities and those kind of things. And so those are kind of in a lot of chapters and in theory should probably be two separate seats, right? There should be the financial insurance side of things and then there's the investment side of things. But I could do both. And I technically was licensed to do health insurance and I could have gotten additional licenses to offer additional products if I wanted to. Most accounting firms now are offering financial services beyond accounting services. And they might be offering bookkeeping services and they might be offering the investment side and then they have their insurance licenses and so forth and so on. Most insurance companies do commercial and personal and also do the financial stuff and like, so there's a lot of just examples of how companies can add additional services. That doesn't mean we like all of them or that we have a passion for doing those things. I never talked about health insurance because I wouldn't. I just had no interest in that. So even though I could do it and you know, and if a client came to me and was like, hey, I want you to sell me this life, this health insurance product, I could do that from a standpoint of what part of My business, am I really looking to grow? Not just grow my business in general. What's the part that I really want to be growing? Because it brings me the most joy, I have the most passion, it's the most lucrative. Whatever the reason may be, I should be hyper focused in niching myself to that in my BNI chapter. It doesn't mean that in all other aspects of my life I don't sell those other parts or whatever. But if I'm in bni, I should be utilizing this opportunity to niche myself in the area that brings me the most passion. And that's probably the seat ideally that they originally joined under and now they're just crossing lines because there is nobody else there talking about it. Again, I don't think they're doing it to purposely negative affect the chapter, but it's just oh well, you know, nobody else does this so. And I do that. So I'm going to talk about that today. A lot of that comes also from a lack of strategy in terms of a marketing plan for their BNI membership. From a, a strategy of weekly presentations. It's it happens kind of like oh, I'm going to talk about this today. They haven't really planned out how to utilize this amount of time that they have in their BNI meetings, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a lot of nuance to why this happens. What, what it isn't is because they're trying to hold the chapter back. So coaching on this really comes down to coaching members on what is it that you're really trying to get out of your BNI membership specifically. So you know, when you say hey, why are you here? A lot of people will be like because I want to grow my business. All right, what does that mean? Is there an area of your business you're really trying to grow? Is there a part of your business that brings you the most passion or that you enjoy the most or that you or you specialize in? And those kind of drilling down to what is it they inside their business they really want to grow and then explaining and coaching why it's important that they hyper focus on that as their seat in bni. Not because lets the chapter grow, which we'll talk about in a second, but because it takes that kind of focus and consistency in order to grow that part. So give me another example of this. When we do advanced MSP trainings in our regions around weekly presentations, one of the part is looking at your goals and making a marketing plan for them. Meaning like how often am I going to talk about it? So I did again, the financial insurances. So life, disability, long term care. I knew that I wanted 50% of my goal to come from the life insurance focus. So from a weekly presentation standpoint, I know I need to talk about life insurance 50% of the time at minimum. And that requires me to be tracking when am I talking about life insurance and everything else to ensure that I'm hitting 50% of my time, not and not 80% of my time and not 30% of my time. I knew the other 50% of the goal I wanted to split between disability insurance and long term care. So same thing, I got to ensure that I'm investing at least 25% of my time in disability insurance, not 40% of my time and not 10% of my time, which can happen when you don't track what you're talking about and can happen if you don't plan what and when you're going to talk about them. And so the coaching and the training around this is if you want to grow this segment of your business, or let's say it's these two segments of your business that are inside your seat, you need to have a strategic plan of how often, when are we going to talk about those things and what's the most strategic way to do that. It's not just going into advancements be stuff, but it's not, oh, if I'm going to talk about life insurance 50% of the time, I'm going to talk about life insurance every other week. It's more like I'm going to talk about life insurance six months of the year and I'm going to break it out into four or five week segments so that there's consistency and blah, blah, blah, blah, that's being strategic with it. This point, this question is at the high end of we haven't even figured out exactly what I want to be growing my business in yet from my BNI membership. Once I know that, then I can get more strategic down the line into what we're talking about and we will talk about on, on podcasts here. The chapter side of it is coaching around while. While you can do 15 different things, if you love two or three of them, that's the seat you have. We need you from the standpoint of BNI to let others who might love the other things come in. That doesn't mean you, you will do business with them directly, but there's a very good chance you may. There's a very good chance you may but even if you don't, it is a giver's gain mentality, because you're giving every other member in the chapter the opportunity to have another individual or two or three in our group who will be helping them and vice versa. Right. So if we had a investment person in my chapter, I did invest, I could do investments. Now, fortunate for me, the investment person did not like doing the insurance side of it. So we were able to refer a little bit with each other. And, and so that worked out, but let's just say that wasn't the case. I may not have done direct business with that person, but by allowing that seat in and not fighting and not trying to cause issues and everything else out of the scarcity mentality that, oh my go, God, they're going to take business away from me, which didn't happen either. We could talk more about that in detail, but my fellow members knew, all right, I'm giving up this part or I'm allowing this, you know, this person to join not for my benefit, but for everybody else's benefit. And because of that, that increases my credibility with everybody in the chapter and increases my profitability as well. Right. That's the giver's gain part of it. And, and now all my other members had one more person who brings in, you know, so many contacts and so many opportunities for them to get referrals from it. If I stand up and try to fight it and be like, hey, you know, this isn't going to help me at all, and really. Or if I start overstepping my seat and hold the chapter back from getting it intentionally or not, I am negatively impacting every other member in that chapter because I'm holding back their opportunities. So coaching on it is kind of two front from a chapter standpoint, why is it important that we niche ourselves? It's because it increases the opportunities for everybody else. We can grow this chapter. We can specialize. We can get more contacts in here that are going to help everybody else in the chapter and not equally. You know, I mean, we talk about that. Not every new member joins equally, helps every single member in the chapter in terms of referral production, but they help a segment and then we bring in somebody else who helps a different segment and so forth and so on individually. Why it's important is so that you can focus and have clear strategies to grow the part of the business you really want to grow. And that is difficult for a lot of people to spend some time thinking about because unfortunately, you know, most will look at these are all the things I'm doing and I can, I want to do all of them because I just got to grow the business overall and don't ever even ask themselves what's the part of the business I really love mostly doing. And if I were to not focus as much time on the parts I don't, that gives me more time to focus on the parts I do and I might be able to grow the overall business and be happier along the way. That's the kind of internal individual coaching that needs to happen for people to be able to see that. Because. And present company included, at first I didn't see that. Right. That's something you have to talk through and have somebody coach you on. So a little bit long winded answer. But you're, you're, the fact that you're seeing it's great. Most chapters don't even see it, or a lot of chapters don't say, I shouldn't say most, but a lot of chapters don't even see it when it's happening or have the concern when it's happening. And it does hold the chapter back and it does hold the individual member back. I just. So I do firmly believe that. So I would utilize your support team. There's so many different variations now of titles and stuff, so it's hard for me whether it's your executive director, director, consultant, chapter coach, what have you, whoever is in the region from a BNI standpoint, you know, have this conversation with them, see if there's a presentation that could be done at the chapter. You come up with a strategy internally on how to address this topic and see if you can get your chapter moving in the right direction. It'll be a slightly slow change. You know, if you do an education moment on it, it's not going to immediately stop. You're going to have to have some consistency of message on it. Your chapter is going to have to talk about and say, okay, you know, hey, going forward, we're going to really make sure we are paying attention and holding each other to our seats. We understand from time to time somebody might cross a line accidentally. If that happens, you know, this is what's going to happen. We're going to sit down and talk to you, just let you know if it continues to happen, this is what can happen. That's where you really want to work with your director or executive director or what have you. So, Brian, thank you for the question, really good question, an important question. And for everybody else, if you're finding value again, share the podcast, Leave us a review. Submit your Questions go to bnipowerofone.com I hope you have a great day. Sam.