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Sam foreign, Welcome back to BNI in the Power of One. Thank you for joining me again today. Appreciate everybody back with your show. Submissions, questions, topics, etc. Submitted@bnipower of1.com we're gonna do something a little bit different today. We're gonna answer questions, but we're gonna answer multiple of them. Some of these I can answer pretty quick and we do have a long list and I'm late on a lot of some other ones. And so I just thought, well, I got a chance. I'll be out next week traveling, so it'll be fewer times for me to get to record and stuff too. So, you know, figured maybe we'll just click through some of these and get through them relatively quickly. Maybe we'll get through three, maybe, maybe four. I'm going to keep an eye on the time. Don't want to go too long, but. All right, here we go. First and foremost question, please keep anonymous. Not a problem, but I just need some clarification about the way B and I meeting should run. I personally feel like I'm at a social club instead of a networking meeting. Our presidency occasionally changes how our 32nd presentations go. This week they had us give the 32nd presentation for the person who usually goes before us. It's a little weird, in my opinion. I can see that they want to try and boost one to ones and keep people paying attention during the meeting, but it just seems incorrect to me. Maybe I'm wrong, I'm not sure. And I'd love some clarity. All right, so good question. First and foremost, we're not there to be a social club. So I would share some of those feelings with your leadership team, ultimately, because perception is reality and that's ultimately not the goal. However, what they're doing is not necessarily wrong. It might be the cadence that they're doing it that is wrong. So there is. And they've been around forever, a long. And if some. I know somebody's gonna be like, where can I get that list? I don't even know where you can get the list anymore. I'm assuming you might be able to find an academy. Some people haven't used them for a long time, but list of what they call meeting stimulants and the idea of a meeting stimulants to bring some energy, a little bit of change to the meeting, to, you know, change it up, break up the boredom. If there, if a chapter was kind of stuck in its ways, maybe those kind of things. Great intent it could be to highlight the need to do one to ones. It could be used as an educational moment, those kind of things. But and so they're fine. One of them is the example that you're giving here. One of them is to do another person's weekly presentation. I would say if you're doing it on the person who usually goes before us, you must be maybe doing it alphabetically, that's fine. But one you want to do some prep. If it's meant to force a one to one beforehand, say hey, next week you're going to do so and so's weekly presentation. You might want to meet with them beforehand. Or it could be used as an educational purpose of we don't really know each other as well as we thought we did because we're not really listening in the importance of one to ones. Those are both logical reasons to change it up that week. However, they're only supposed to be done like once in a great while, right? Not even monthly should be like quarterly at most because then it can become a little silly and it becomes a little social and it gets away from what we're doing. And if your chapter really needs to do a meeting stimulant every single month or every other week or two consistently because it needs the energy, there's something else going on. So I don't think you're wrong, but I don't think you're right either because I don't have the full picture. But meeting stimulants like this are fine from time to time to do to because they can accomplish a couple goals. But if it's becoming too consistent where it feels a little silly, then it's lost its purpose. So great question. All right, next question. Please keep anonymous. Our chapter is coming up in its five year anniversary since launch. Our Realtor helped launch the group recently. They suggested that we do not make it part of our weekly presentation to be introduced to other real estate professionals. The thought was this should be a closed group and you can ask during your one to ones if you need to be introduced to other real estate agents to grow your business. What are your thoughts? Should we be able to ask for other realtor intros despite having one in our group? Yes, yes, absolutely. Because you're not asking for a real estate agent to join the chapter. I have no idea who you are or what profession you're in or any of that, but let's assume you're in insurance or you're a mortgage broker, or you're a home inspector or you're in any of the fields where you are home services Real estate agents are going to probably be one of, if not the biggest referral opportunity for you to receive referrals. Thus you probably can't rely on just having one. It sounds to me like the real estate agent even knows that by saying, hey, it's fine if you do it in one to ones. Well, if it's fine if I do it in one to ones, it's probably fine that I do it in the weekly presentation too. Because again, you're not trying to introduce competition in the chapter. These are referral sources for you, right? These are. There are two types of referrals you look for and ask for in bni. Transactional relational. Transactional is next customer, next client. Relational is those who are going to find you more of those transactions. So it's perfectly fine from A, B and I standpoint to ask for referrals to other real estate agents. Again, as long as it's not, hey, can you bring other real estate agents to this chapter? If you can bring them here, that'd be great. Like, that's not the purpose. The purpose is these people will feed you and these are referral opportunities for you. If the real estate agent, I don't care that they started the chapter. Like, even if this was in my, I have no idea what region they literally kept everything in honest, which was great. But I wouldn't even care if that person started the chapter if they were the first member in the chapter that doesn't bend any kind of rules or anything else for anybody. And there's something else happening there that they would be so concerned that if you're asking for referrals to real estate agents, that that means other people will know a fellow member knows a real estate agent and the what they're going to then go and give all the real estate agent referrals to that person if that's what they're really worried about, something bigger, deeper problem going on in their membership. Right. I should, if I was the real estate agent, I should have no concern that I know you as, let's just say mortgage, I have no idea. Mortgage broker. Want more real estate agents to help feed your pipeline? I don't care if you ask for that because again, you're not asking for an intro to somebody who's looking to sell their house to directly compete with me. And even if somebody's like, yeah, I know my sister's a real estate agent, that shouldn't affect me in any way. So I think it's, there's something else there, it's guarded, it's where the, the, the exclusivity of the seat really comes into play, you know, and by the way, on that exclusivity isn't to, you know, what you determine it is, it's decided by the membership committee ultimately on what people apply for. So there's niche, there's gray area and blah blah, blah. We hold people to exactly what they applied for and was approved by the membership committee. So people get take that like I'm the real estate agent, this is my seat. And they go too far with it. And this would be an example of being too far with it because it's, it's not competition for what you're looking to do. And I would work with your leadership team and work with your chapters director, managing director, executive director, wherever you are, to potentially help you move forward with that. Great question though. All right, we had two questions that came in off the last podcast that I wanted to dive into too. And in particular because really interesting, they came from South Africa. So if you're listening in South Africa, super excited about your national conference coming up in mid May. I will be there as one of the presenters with Jeremy Walsh, who's amazing. You're probably going to find that better than me. He'll probably be the bigger draw, I would bet. But if you're in South Africa and you can get over to Johannesburg, I would love to meet you and love to see you there. All right, so the first one is says I'm a part of BNI Visionaries, part of the Cape Town regions of South Africa. My chapters are on 52 members. We have two featured presentations of five minutes each week. My feature presentation is coming up in May. Hopefully it's not while I'm there and you can come to conference and I would love you to give some perspective on how you would structure a five minute presentation. I've heard you speak about your structured ten minute feature presentation around three life stages, but I want to know whether you would advise focusing on less LCDs one or two or just talking shorter on each and sticking to three. For reference, my B and I classification is web development and I'm currently focusing my specific asks around people and construction. So currently my plan is to talk about that and spend the second part speaking about the ideal referral partner relationship referrals as thank you for your amazing show, love the variety and I think I've listened to close 140 episodes in the last month. So. You are a crazy person. No, I appreciate it. You're probably sick of my voice so There's a really good question and you can see that you've listened before because you kind of answered it. You can go either direction really. It depends on what you're hoping to get out of it. What I love about this question is you're highlighting for everybody else what the purpose of a featured presentation is, which is to train on referrals and to what we answered just a few minutes ago. You're talking about both types of referrals, both transactional and relational. That's perfectly fine. If you want to go, you know, you're going to take about a minute total for intro and recap. So whenever you're doing a presentation, you want to kind of do the hey, this is what I'm going to tell you. Tell them and then remind them this is what I told you. So you want 30 seconds of a quick intro, 30 seconds of kind of a wrap up. So with that, you've got about four minutes left. So you could do two minutes on each side of that or you can do a little bit over a minute on three of them. If you wanted to do such a. Now when you go into the two minute, if you're going to do the. I'm going to talk about people in construction and then those, you know, the referral partner relationship referrals, make sure those are pretty specific though, right? Not just construction's vague. A lot of areas in construction is there, is it plumbing, is it electrical, is it general, you know, general contractors, is it flooring, is it whatever. We just built three dry bar businesses in the US in the last two years. So I'm more into the construction side of this now understanding. But so make sure you're just very specific in that and make sure the referral relationship, referral partner part ties to that. What are those refer. What are those professions that will find you more Plumbers, general contractors, whatever that is. Okay. And in and around what you're going to do for their web and you could think outside the box on that. It could be the accountant, it could be the business coach, it could be the payroll company, it could be something like that that is a good relationship with them and is seeing their numbers. Who might be the tie to be like hey, have you thought about increasing your website, whatever it is you're doing on the web development side to help them? If you wanted to do three, you could say you could do two, you could do. Let me talk about plumbers now let me talk about general contractors. Let me talk about referrals. You could do. Hey, let me I really get into construction. Here's one side, electricians. Here's another side, plumbers. Here's why they're different. Here's another one. You could do it either way as long as you start with what is my desired end goal and that this presentation is training people to help me achieve that desired end goal. What these presentations are not is a chance for you to go and showcase all your products and services and how great you are and use it as a sales, you know, a sales moment. They should follow the exact same focus as your weekly presentations. Just based on your question, I can tell you're doing well with that mindset. All right, and then last one, we're at 13 minutes. We're going through four of these pretty quick. Okay. BNI Power of One was a truly great step forward as a way to measure one's level of activity. Simple and effective in our region. And I do believe there are others around the world. We are using a new set of metrics. They've added thank you for close business and change the weighting between attendance, 10 points. Referrals 25 points. One to ones, 20 points. CU's five points. Thank you for closed business. Five points. Visitors 20 points. Sponsored five points. Maybe called Power of Seven. I think it's just called Member Traffic Light. I would love your thoughts. And if you know any successful change over two such metrics, I'm picking up a lot of unattended consequences of the things you cannot control. It would be good to have another perspective on this. Okay, so I'm going to say this being completely biased as the one who invented the Power of One Report. I did see this Member Traffic Light report and I think there are some good intentions around it. And I think part of the Power of One that's always been questioned over the years by some members, by chapters, by regions, by countries, by whatever was things like thank you for closed business. Why was thank you for closed business not on there? Thank you. Closed business should be on there. And my explanation to why I we don't do some of these things and why I continue, we continue to run the Power of One right now as originally designed is because I do not believe in tracking some things that you are not completely responsible for. But the flip side of the question is you could pass a bunch of referrals and get a really good score in the Power of One and they could all be junk and not produce thank you for closed business. Which I understand that too. So which is why I've always said your Power of One Report should not be the end all be all report you look at because it doesn't have end result stuff on it like thank you for closed business. So I'm completely biased and sticking to the regular power of one because of some of the things you mentioned, which is simplicity. Sure. It is simple to understand and it is. It only tracks the activity you're really responsible for completely because you know as many people. The flip side too, you could pass a bunch of referrals and none of them closed business. They could all be junk is I could pass a bunch of good referrals and the member could go screw it up. And I don't get thank you for closed business on it. So you know, both are true. Both can be true. So we've always run it this way. I the sponsor, one versus visitors, same kind of thing. I could bring a really good visitor who doesn't join because the chapter meeting ran poorly or some member said something crazy in the meeting or what have you. But I can also bring a bunch of people that could never join or have no intentions of ever joining and the chapter could be tracking it as visitors even if they're not qualified visitors and vice versa with data in general. So if you're using the traffic light report, I don't know that there are unattended consequences because what they've done well is, is you know, thank you for closed business and sponsors are only 5 points. So even if you weren't, let's just say you were passing a bunch of junk and not passing anything, you've closed business or you brought a bunch of visitors and none of them joined, you could still score 90, which is a really good score. So they're not overly weighted to that end result, but it gives some credit to that end result. I think the challenge I don't remember off the top of my head is how they calculate the 5 points for thank you for closed business and so forth. But so I'm not necessarily saying their reports bad, it's just it is different for me when you start changing scoring it becomes a little bit more complicated just to understand the more complicated you make it to understand it could add in resistance to adoption. I'm not a huge fan of some of the scoring they did. I just think overweight some things towards others. So again, the power of one is very simple. It's 20 points across that you can get. Same for everything. It's the five things that you control. Did you show up? Did you pass a referral? Did you do a one to one? Did you Take a training. Did you bring a visitor? And I am under the belief of if you're doing those things and you're doing them even halfway, well, the results will come. So that's my perspective. You can't take this and say, Tim said we shouldn't be doing it, though, because it is a country decision, regional decision. You're not the only ones using it. I got into debates with the people who were creating it for us. It's. We're so ingrained in the Power of One that it would be very hard for me to change it in my regions because of just, you know, how well it's been established in my region for 15 years or something. So hard to come in and change it up on the fly. Don't love that part of it. I'm not. I'm not in love with it, but again, I'm biased as hell. Right. I'm gonna have a hard time buying into the new thing of anything when it comes to this because, you know, we literally created the Power of. It's why the podcast is called the Power of One. So I think you should. I think you should use it, and I think you should dive into it. And I think that as long as you're doing the same activities you're doing in the Power of One, I think you're going to score just fine. You know, it's. It's still related. It's still pushes most of what was on the power of one. You know, the CEUs are only five points, and they, they up the visitors or they up the referrals. And you know, you're going to come up with. If you're going to add thank you for closed business and sponsors. You got to come up with the points somehow. You got to take it from something. So anyways, remember, traffic lights, perfectly capable, perfectly fine report. Different than the Power of One. Yes. But still completely usable. So. All right, with that, we're hitting about 20 minutes now, so thank you for hanging in there. I don't know, maybe if you like this and you're saying, hey, Tim, give us a little bit more time, more questions, or if it's. I really like it when it's one question, it's only like five to 10 minutes long. Your feedback will help dictate this of whether we do it something like this or not. But there was so many coming in, I wanted to try to get a few of them out while I am traveling to Florida. When you're hearing this, I'll be in Polk County, Florida. One of our new regions doing visitor day. Super excited to see a couple of our chapters that we are helping out in that area. Now after that, for anybody listening in the U.S. we have the U.S. national Conference in Orlando, right in Universal. That's coming up the last few days of April, first day of May. Hopefully you're coming to that. Still time to register if you want to come to that. I'd love to meet anybody out there for that. And a week later, South Africa, Johannesburg for their national conference. So super excited. Never been to Africa before. So I'm very, very excited about that opportunity as well and look forward to meeting anybody and everybody that I can there with that. Have a great rest of your.