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Sam. Foreign. Welcome back to BNI and the Power of One. Thank you for joining me again today. We are back with your show submissions, questions, topics submitted at bnipower of1.com so as always if you have anything go there and it'll be the same for the weekly presentations which we are going to get back to next week as well and appreciate everybody who continues to submit. You can do it. Also for business matters, you can do it for the weekly presentations or B and I whichever one you would like. One did come in and I'm and I'm jumping it right to the top of the list just because I do think it's pertinent but two because it is from my region. So that is one of the benefits of I guess being a member in my area. So this is from Win in one of our Florida regions says I have a question regarding context for your etiquette. We're looking to strengthen our sphere and increase referral flow, but we're debating the best way to handle quote unquote outsiders. Specifically, does it make sense to invite BNI members from other chapters to join our specific context for your meetings? In any scenario, referrals, education, etc. Or, or even on a consistent or one time basis. We want to collaborate effectively without creating conflict or overstepping chapter boundaries. I'd love to hear your thoughts on whether this is a recommended givers game strategy or if we should keep context for your work strictly within our own chapter roster. Thank you for all you do for the BNI community. So Win, thank you. Very good question and the answer is you should not try to cross contact sphere professions chapter to chapter. You do want to keep it within your own chapter and what you want to do is if you start identifying, hey, this chapter over here has a profession that would fit really well with what we're doing in our context here that helps identify the profession we need to get in. Okay, and this isn't from A oh well, Tim's going to say this because he wants us to grow our chapter kind of thing. It literally wouldn't work out well for you. We talked about the same thing with power teams, contact spheres, etc because what happens is you're opening up the opportunity. It's not so much a conflict chapter to chapter yet, but you will open up the opportunity for that to happen. As soon as, let's say their competitor does want to join your chapter or your competitor wants to join their chapter. All of a sudden now there's a rift either between the person you invited into your contacts you're meeting or between them and their new member. And so in that. And that opportunity can happen at any time. Right. So what we want to do is as a contact sphere, when we're working on it, there's two things that we want to be focused on. Number one is how are we educating each other to see and capture more of the opportunities that are in front of us. The idea of the power of contact spheres and why you want to develop your contact spheres, because these are the types of profession and people who should be seeing the opportunity to refer you more often than other members based on the fact that they're targeting the same type of audience. So you want to spend some of your time on strategically planning how to capture that opportunity. Right. So how do we really ensure that, one, I'm identifying the opportunities, but two, as I'm trying to bring them to you, I become more effective at that. So, hey, I tried to say this. It didn't work. Have you tried this? Those kind of things now, in certain professions, inside that context, where that can go to another level, that's where power teams come into play. The other level is when I don't have to wait to see something to happen. I'm literally trying to open the door for you every time I have a meeting type of thing. That is a much smaller group within the context viewers. So that's step one. As a context viewer, are we being as effective with each other as we possibly can be, and how do we become more effective? If not, the second thing you want to then talk about is who's missing? How do we amplify the results of this by bringing in the professions who are also targeting these people, but are not part of our committed group. So this is also why you don't want to bring in somebody who's not a BNI member in your chapter, because it comes down to commitment. Right? So if the idea is this context here we have, we want to further, further utilize. We want to amplify the results from this contact sphere. And we know that the more referrals that are coming into the contact sphere doesn't matter to who, the more opportunity there is for everybody in that group. And that group needs to be dedicated and committed to one another. If you pull Joe Smith off the street because he's in a profession that could fit that, but he's not in your B and I chapter and not willing to commit to being in your BNI chapter, he is by definition not as equally committed as the rest of the members in the group are. Because part of the strategy, or the main part of the strategy is utilizing the BNI chapter to feed into the contact sphere. So you guys are all committed to networking weekly and doing these weekly presentations and the one to ones with all of your fellow members to generate referral opportunities for yourself and thus the contact sphere. Because the more clients and potential clients you're in front of, the more opportunities that, to feed the contact sphere and then again further down, power teams. So you can't just pull somebody off the street and be like, hey, we're on this B and I chapter and we're committed to growing our businesses this way and we're going to bring you in to benefit from the work that we're doing on that side, knowing that they're not equally committed. And then you don't want to pull it from another B and I chapter because even though you could say, well, they're equally committed, it's just in a different chapter. It's true. But what happens when your profession shows up and joins that chapter or their profession shows up and joins your chapter and, and so forth and so on. So what you want to identify is who is missing and then strategically come together on how do we get that, that profession in? Maybe it's group inviting, maybe it's, let's say your contact sphere has six people in it right now and you want to get to 10. So we each are, we're going to each work on one profession at a time or the best strategy for any chapter growth. But contact spheres in particular is identify. If there's six of you, identify what are the six professions we're missing in each own one of them and commit to inviting and getting somebody from that profession into the chapter, thus into the contact sphere. Now your contact sphere doubles and it's no different than, you know, any network you're in in bni. There is a reason why, you know, you want your chapter to be larger. The larger the chapter, the more opportunities there are for somebody to find you a referral, you will become more efficient in your referral production. If you got more people out there trained on what to look for and listen for, you're gonna get more referrals. The contact spheres are supposed to be the next level above that because there are the opportunity to see those and hear those referral opportunities is greater. So the more people in my contact sphere, the more referrals I'm going to generate and then power teams beyond that. So it's a great question. And as we're starting to get into member Extravaganza time this spring, which is the biggest market opportunity of the year for your chapter to truly expand. I wanted to lead in because this, I just found this was really pertinent, not only because of the direct nature of the question, which is a really great question, I think, something a lot of people think about and do, but also as you're getting into this growth season and you're going, okay, the market is ripe for me to add people to my chapter. Who strategically should I be adding? That's what this is about too, right? You're identifying needs for your contact sphere. If you didn't have the needs for your contact sphere, you wouldn't be looking at other chapters or everything else. So instead of saying, oh, who can we bring in from other chapters? It's no, let's identify the need. We need a XYZ profession. And now let's strategically go get that as a team. And if you do that and you expand, you'll. Your, your results will expand because your contacts here just got bigger. The chapters results will expand because every member in the chapter just got another person to network with and train on how to look for and find referral opportunities. Everybody will win. And so we're going to start pretty soon here really hyper focusing on planning, being, being plan being strategic to capture the market opportunity that the spring brings all of us in this country and really around the world. And so we'll talk about inviting, we'll talk about all these things. I think this was just a, it kind of triggered it when it came in. And so I really appreciate the question when. I hope this helps. I hope it gives you some clarity. Always happy to discuss more and if you want to, if you have other questions, submit it. We can keep the conversation going on on the podcast as well. I think I've proven, and I, and I, I say this with all humility, but I, I'm open to debate too. If you find like, hey, Tim, I don't agree with the stance you took on this podcast and you want me to kind of answer back to that, send it because we will definitely do. Everybody will learn through that as well. It's happened before, so, but I don't think this is a controversial one in any way. So I don't think that'll be the problem. But hopefully when it did answer your question and, and for everybody else. So again, if you have questions, topics, forth, go to bnipower of1.com leave them there. I really appreciate all of that. This, we are on our path and on our pace to 2000 episodes. I think 2026 will be the year. And I appreciate all of you have a great.