Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Sam, Welcome back to BNI in the Power of One. Thank you for joining me again today. Happy Monday. If you're in the northeast part of the country where we are probably buried in snow right now, but we're back with show submissions Topics Questions submitted at bnipower of1.com as always, if you have one, go there. Today's is timely because we've just announced in our regions that starting next week is our annual member extravaganza time. We we run ours March, April, May. The national member extravaganza is April May typically but we do some other contests and fun thing. So for members in my regions, you know, the first round of our bracket challenge starts next week, a week from today. So with that today's question, it came in from Chris in Coral Springs, Florida says our chapter is in growth mode, which is awesome. We have 16 members and as the education coordinator I've been going through the Power of One Growth series. My question is what is your take on an after hour event one week prior to the visitor days to invite visitors as well? I'm not in leadership, so maybe this, this makes sense. But it seems like we're taking away or even giving the person away out a way out of coming to the visitor day by doing this kind of like letting the air out of our sails. Sure, it's fun and they get to meet the team, but if this is it for them, they never get the meeting experience. Please advise. So this is a really good question. So the, the many, many, many chapters I hear look to do these social events outside the normal meeting, usually in the evening, as a way to hey, let's invite some visitors to that they can meet our chapter and they are fun and, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. The problem is they're highly ineffective. They do not help you really accomplish the goal you're really hoping to accomplish because the event you're inviting them to is not what you're asking them to ultimately join and be a part of. Okay. A evening social event is absolutely nothing like a week to week, morning and maybe afternoon depending on your chapter. B and I meeting, completely different purposes, completely different experiences, completely different structures. One requires no commitment. One requires a lot of commitment. So it's kind of almost like a bait and switch, right? Like hey, come to this social event, by the way, we want you to join this weekly hour and a half thing that we do at 8 in the morning. And so it's not, it's not going to help you accomplish the goal of expanding and for you guys to continue to expand the chapter at all. So should. Would I say you can't do it? No. Would I say you shouldn't do it? Not necessarily. It's an add on, but I don't think it's the right play. It's definitely not the right player strategy to achieve the goal of growth and adding people to the chapter. I get what you're saying. It gives them a way out of coming out of the visit. Maybe that's it too. If you're saying, hey, we're going to do the visitor day, but before we're going to do this thing as well, then that would be the case. Depends on some of the nuances of how this is being set up. But generally I would not advise using these types of meetings beyond just we want to do something fun outside of our normal meeting. And. And that would be the only purpose of it. Why I'd say it's timely is because of member extravaganza. This is the time of year your chapter should absolutely be doing a visitor day, if not multiple. Some regions will call it an open house. Some doesn't matter the title of it. It really doesn't. I don't think the title changes any result. I have not seen a single region change the title and suddenly kill everybody else who has a different title in terms of production from them. So it's all personal preference and, and whatever. But let's quickly discuss why it's so important. Why are these visitor days so important? And what is the actual purpose of a visitor day? So you might say, well, the visitor day's purpose, obvious, is to grow the chapter. Sure. But what it's really about is the cumulative effort and, and the power of that cumulative effort in a specific meeting. What I mean by that is when everybody in the chapter is inviting for the same meeting and you have a significant amount of visitors attending that meeting, you get the benefit of the increased energy, the increased fun, and the significantly increased visual opportunity for the visitor. Meaning the there's an instant value creation there compared to one off having visitors, you know, trickle in week to week to week to week to week. So what you're using it for is a strategy to increase conversion and to significantly, ideally significantly expand the chapter in a short period of time. And that's important too. Some chapters have fought that with like, well, if we had five, six, ten new members, all of a sudden we got all these new members and it's like, yes, but you need that in some, in many cases, because BNI in networking is all about time investment. So to get the results from the expanded chapter, let's say we know a chapter of 20 is not going to produce what a chapter of 30 is. And if your chapter is 20 members, fill in any number. But let's just say it's 20 members and it wants to be 30 to make the money of the 30 person chapter. You will not make the money of a 30 person chapter until you are a 30 person chapter. So if your goal is hey, this year we want to go from 20 to 30, then your thank you for closed business goal can't be equal to what a 30 person chapter would produce. It will be more than a 20 person chapter because you're adding people along the way. But your goal of hey, we want to make X amount of Money as a 30 person chapter, that'll be your 2027 goal. Unless we go from 20 to 30 right now. And now we have the 30 people working together. And even then that goal, that amount of money you'll get will grow exponentially each year because the relationships are further developed and together and everything else. So let's just say, you know, a 30 person chapter makes twice as much as a 20 person chapter. Okay. And your chapter is making a million dollars. Well, if you go from 20 to 30 throughout the year, you'll make more than a million dollars. But you won't make the $2 million the next year. You'll make the $2 million the year after that. You'll make more because the relationships are deeper and so forth. Is this making sense? So visitor days help us get from that 20 to 30 quickly, which is important for the time investment. It also allows us to be more effective for each other. If I'm inviting visitors that I need and want to join this chapter and I will get more, a better chance of that happening if other people do the same. So now we're helping each other. The growth series that he mentioned in the. In the question, in the comment, I highly recommend you check that out again. It's in the five sixties somewhere. But if you type in growth series, they'll all come up, it's five episodes. And what that will walk you through is how to double your chapter. Because that should be the kind of the image. It's not very difficult. In fact, it's very, very, very simple to double your chapter during the springtime during member extravaganza. Double. It's not necessarily easy to do though, because it requires everybody in the chapter to do their part. And so you gotta, you know, commit to each other. You gotta set a goal, you gotta set some expectations, you gotta plan the visitor day, you gotta do all those things. But it is simple by nature. And so here's the answer. Everybody in the chapter owns the one profession they want in that chapter selfishly. So have everybody in the group identify what is the profession you want in this chapter selfishly, because you know they're going to help you the most based on their profession, so they're going to see more opportunities, et cetera, et cetera. If every member in the chapter were to own the one profession, just one profession, and by own it, I mean truly own it, and commit to getting somebody from that profession to join the chapter, to sponsor somebody from that profession, your chapter will double. Very, very simple. And that Grow series podcast will walk you through, like, identifying what the profession is and more importantly, how to invite, how to find people to invite. What's the language to invite to make it more effective for you? I think it's about two to three hours worth of work per member to make that happen. Doesn't sound like a lot. It isn't a lot. But what's challenging is you got to find the two to three hours, right? And I know everybody is extremely busy and everybody's got a million things going on, but the idea is if you can expand your network and you can expand your referrals, you become more efficient and maybe you, you are able to grow your business where you can actually free up some of your time, whether that's hiring more people to come in, et cetera, et cetera. If you need the bigger business to get there, this is the way to do it does take that effort and a lot of that time, let's say two hours of that three hours, or the hour of the two hours can be done on the couch, 8 o' clock at night, watching a sports game, watching a movie, watching tv. Because it's just research, it's figuring out who in the area exists for the profession that I'm looking to invite. The part that can happen during that time is the actual inviting. Because my recommendation for you is don't send an email, pick up the phone and call them. Don't pick up the phone and call one person, pick up the phone and call 20 of them. You call 20, you're going to get seven or eight of them to say they want to come to your meeting. I don't know if this ever happened to you. Happens all the time, it seems like. But somebody says they're coming and then doesn't for a variety of reasons. So maybe three or four of them show up. You got three or four people from one profession at your visitor day, you're going to get two of them to apply. If you got three visitors from your profession and every other member in your 20 person chapter also has three visitors for their profession, you've got 60 visitors in the room. You've got 80 people in that room. I'm telling you, your chapter is going to be 40 unless you really mess up the meeting and all the other little parts. But you should be 40 at the end of that. And now you've got strategically the profession you needed and wanted. That's going to help you more often. I think conservatively, referral month. And all the benefit of having 19 other professions you didn't have meeting with you every single week, learning about you, learning what you're looking for, which just exponentially increases your opportunities for referrals to come to you. So now you're getting multiple referrals a month more. That is all entirely possible. Everything I've just said is entirely in your control. It's entirely realistic. It's, it's entirely possible. Why your chapter has never gone from 20 to 40 in a short period of time is because statistically we know about 10% of your chapter right now is actively inviting 10%. That means two people out of your 20 person chapter are actually doing any inviting at all. It will never go from 20 to 40 with that. Never ever won't happen. Okay, member extravaganza. Why do you want to take advantage of it? Yes, there's some in different, some included incentives. Right. In our regions we got multiple contests going on. Everything from the national contest where people can win a cruise for two with Dr. Meisner to some cash prizes to all kinds of different things. That makes it fun. But the, the purpose of member extravaganza is to capture the opportunity in the market. The springtime is the best time of year, only matched by the fall for you to really expand your network in the inviting side. Right. You should be looking at your calendar and there's different focuses throughout the year. Your chapter is going to be in. Spring is about growth. It's about, hey, let's look at what's going on in the market. One, the weather's nicer, people are out, they're re engaged, they're active. I know as I'm recording this, we're expecting a ton of snow and that seems, you know, counterintuitive, but it just doesn't fit. But it's true. Come March, the weather's gonna start turning April, May, definitely. People are gonna be out there actively in the south and in the west, like it's not as hot as the summer is gonna be. So it's nicer. People are active, Kids are still in school. Beauty for the Northeast. Our kids are in school until June, mid June. So you get the entire member. I know there's a bunch of people in late May, there'll be some high school graduations and in some parts, your kids get out of school in May because they go back early. But whatever. Most of this time the kids are in school. You haven't hit the summer distractions of them being around. You haven't hit the summer distractions of family vacations and the holidays and everything else that's going to go along with that. The summertime for us is a training focus. So if you look at any networking activity, look at your chamber of commerces, look at these things, you'll see attendance pick up in the spring, naturally. And so that highlights that people are engaged. That's the opportunity to grow. They're looking, they're engaged, they have the up their the time, like all of that stuff. You can get them engaged way easier in the spring than you can this summer, way easier in the fall than you can the summer or the, or the winter. So take advantage of that strategically take advantage of that for you. Growth is the ultimate tool to success. Growth is the tool that helps you get more referrals and more money. There are only three ways to make more money from networking. Do more of it, get better at it, do it with more people. The doing it with more people is the easiest lever to pull and the most powerful level to pull. It's got the quickest result for you. It's easier to invite for three hours than it is to learn skill sets, implement them, blah, blah, blah, blah. And frankly, for a lot of you probably can't do more networking because that's a time requirement, right? And time is finite. So pull that lever if you're looking to get more business. Growth is the ultimate tool for the chapter success. And when I say chapter success, I mean member retention. You only really grow if you keep the people you got. And you're only going to keep the people you got if they're getting results out of it. If you add more people to the chapter, there's more opportunities for everybody to grow. Thus it is a tool for retention. We'll go into a whole nother. I can get into a whole nother series on that. But it is the number One tool for success. It is not the goal. It's a metric we, we, every chapter tracks. It's a metric that gets recognized, of course, but it's not the goal. The goal is, is every member in the room right now, here, a year from now. And in order to achieve that, everybody in that room better be making a good amount of money and getting their investment back. That requires a lot of different things. Mentoring, training, accountability, all that. But growth and adding more people to the room is the greatest tool to help that happen. So work together. The visitor day is just saying, hey, let's all do this. Let's all commit to owning our one profession. We're all going to sponsor the profession we want and to increase our odds significantly of making that happen. Let's all invite for this day and have a special meeting for that day and have a director there who is trained on how to do a powerful presentation that will increase the opportunities for conversion. The. Oh, they need to see a regular meeting. They. They need to see a member do it. No, they don't. They don't. A proper visitor day is not a hard sell. In fact, most of the visitor days, I do almost try to talk people out of it because then, you know, you got committed people. Use the resources available to you. Use your director team, use your. The tools that exist. Use that podcast series. Start planning now. A visitor day is not something like, hey, two weeks from now, we're going to do a visit. No, no, no, no, no. That needs to be planned, like six to eight weeks out. So do that. And for my regions, that means you've got enough time in member extravaganza to do two of them if you wanted to, and maybe you should be doing two of them. But this became a longer episode because I am passionate about it. And I know you're going to say, well, Timmy, you're passionate about because you want more. Of course, course B and I wants more members. That's the business we are in. But we know we don't get more members unless we keep the members we have. It is the ultimate win win organization. We will only successfully grow if our members are having success, period. And adding more people is a tool for you to have more success. That just is what it is. So let's work together. I know in our regions, we're. We're super excited for member extravaganza. I hope in the other regions, listening to this, you are. I'm not sure if other countries do something like this, but even if they don't, it. It doesn't matter. Take advantage of the time. The true incentive is not the cruise or the the bragging rights or the cash prize for the chapter. The true incentive for doing it is increase business for the rest of this year and every year moving forward you add 20 more people to your network that is going to pay dividends. Every year moving forward. Not just this year, every year moving forward. It is an annuity investment that keeps paying and paying and paying and paying again if you do the things right to keep those relationships alive. So with that great question. Timely question. Don't use the socials as a way to grow. They won't work for you. Plan the appropriate visitor days with appropriate focus that you're showing them what they really are committed to. As always, if this is helpful, share with another member. That's the best thing you can do for me and try to impact as many people as we can can Leave a Review Leave a Comment I hope you enjoyed it and I really appreciate. If you got questions or comments, go to bnipower of1.com have a great day. Sam.