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Welcome back to BNI and the Power of One. Back with another episode of Multiple Questions. Got some good feedback on the last one. People liked answering more questions than just one if we can. So we're gonna try that again today. Appreciate everybody who continues to submit questions@bnipowerofone.com as always, you can leave it anonymous. Do however you want to do it. So let's dive right in. So today, first one from Adrian in California. Sometimes members use their 32nd presentation to ask for something on behalf of a non profit. They're involved with raffle tickets, participation in a golf tournament, gift baskets, etc. If I then purchase a raffle ticket, is that considered a referral? Would that then be considered thank you for closed business on their part since it does not have to do with their business. So great question. I'm answering on two parts. Let's start with your direct question. No, it's not a referral and no it is definitely not thank you for closed business. Referrals are opportunities to do business that you're passing to your fellow member. So it's an opportunity. They can do business for their own business, for the referrals they are seeking in bni, when we do other things and count them as referrals, this would be another thing. All it does is pad some stats and can have some unintended consequences. We talked about this in many other podcasts, right? The data in the POMS report is more important than most members and chapters really think. And because we just look at AS in totality and look at all that we're doing and we see the importance of representing. But if you are really trying to improve yourself and improve your results and make BNI more valuable for you, you have to understand the data points really clearly. Like what is your average one to one really producing for you? How many referrals did you really get? What was your closing ratio on those referrals? How much money did you make? What's your average referral worth? Because then you can say, okay, I need to close more. So I need higher quality or I need a better, higher quantity or I need a better, higher quality referral so that my average referral goes up and I need to do more one to ones. Because when I do one to ones, it's producing this. Or I need to do better one to ones. Because when I'm doing one to ones, it's not producing this. It's all there for you to study on your own and figure out for your business. But when you put junk in, it can throw all that off, right? Like if all of a sudden you're passing referral for every raffle ticket you buy in this example, and they go back and be like, well, it says, I got, you know, 30 referrals, 50 referrals, 100 referrals. But did they really? No. So that's part one. A referral is only to a fellow member for their business and the product and service they represent in the chapter. And thank you for closed business is just the results of those referrals. So two and two. The second part that you're not asking, but I want to address is this should never happen. You should not be allowing members in your chapter to use their time to talk about something that is not what they represent. Even if it's a nonprofit, which again, we all have nonprofits we're involved in. There's a lot of great opportunities and great causes and everything else. But it causes two issues. Number one is personally, you're wasting your time that you have for your business. If you have 30 second present presentations, you only get 50 of those a year to give them away. While I might think of the giver's gain, I'm trying to help the non profit is really detrimental to your own results. So you don't want to be doing that. But more importantly is, it's Pandora's box once you let one member do it. Now you've just opened the gates and a lot of members are going to start doing it. And now the meeting's kind of lost its purpose and you've naturally introduce competition because everybody does have a nonprofit they're excited about or passionate about and tied to. And you know, so this week it's the boys and girls club and the next week it's this and the next week it's that and then it's this and then it's that and. And now what am I, if I, if I buy a raffle ticket from Adrian, am I obligated to buy a raffle ticket from Susan Am I obligated to, you know, donate something? Because I did it for this one, now I got to do it for everybody else, because that's only fair. And it becomes a nightmare and really uncomfortable. So what your chapter should be doing is you should have an announcement coordinator. Announcement coordinators, not an official title. There is no training, what have you. But somebody who collects all the announcements for the week that members want to share. Could be events, other networking opportunities, nonprofit events, those kind of things. And they put it on a one piece of paper and they can do two, one of two things, or both, depending on the size of the chapter and the time. One is you can have that piece of paper out on the table, you know, and it could be referenced. Hey, for all the upcoming announcements for the next week, et cetera, please go to this page and you can see what everybody has to announce. If not, or if on top of that, what they can also do is they can read them off if you have time. Here are all the announcements for this week, and they should include BNI announcements like upcoming trainings, events, roundtables, those kind of things into that. And that way you have one person controlling it all, and they're not going to sell anyone over the other, which can become a problem when you get into the other, you know, people competing for their nonprofit. So it's a really good question, and it's something a lot of members do and a lot of chapters do, and I completely get it. But you do want to try to stay away from the nonprofit thing during your weekly presentations in particular. All right, let's go through some more questions here. And I'm clicking through. So I apologize about the time because I actually had done this. And what you don't know is it didn't record well. So now I'm rerecording, but I deleted all the questions, so I'm going back through. So let's just click through, make sure we get all the questions. All right. From Preston, Texas. Selecting classifications for new members and renewals. We're owned by an ed. I'm the VP of our chapter. And the most difficult part of the membership committee right now is understanding how to choose correct specific classification. Some of the membership committee and members feel like the chapter is getting too specific when creating classifications. And this is watering down our chapters. Any recommendations would be a great fit. All right, so it doesn't matter whether you're Ed owned, globally owned, doesn't make a difference. The classification listing Connect is set by bni. They are working on editing that at all times and in fact there's a new committee that's really focused in working on it because it is a touchy and important subject. I will tell you. It's one that it just is so complicated and never ending. It is quite literally a project that I have said to others is that's super important but I have zero passion around it. So I don't really get involved in. But let's just talk about the watering down quote unquote. That's not a real thing. Okay. Usually when that comes in it comes from a scarcity mentality a little bit that I, you know, my company does a bunch of different things and I will need to represent all of them because if I don't I'm going to lose something. When the reality is you should be using your BNI membership in your chapter to niche yourself down to to the part of your business you really love doing or is most profitable for you or that you really want to grow and be okay with not talking about everything you possibly can do. Okay. This is why and how chapters can become more productive for members. If you force yourself to niche you will actually get more. And this is how the chapter grows. And then when the chapter grows you have more opportunity. Give you a perfect example. When I was a member I did life disability long term care. What I call the financial insurances. We had a financial planner in the chapter who did the investment side. Even though I was licensed to do it. My chapter is about 27 members. I will tell you right now I. I would have rather been in a hundred person chapter and only been able to talk about one of those financial insurance products. Right. Like if you said Tim, you could be in a 27 person chapter and talk about life disability and long term care or you could be in 100 person chapter and only talk about life insur. I would do the only talk about life insurance in front of a hundred people because I will get way more business even that niched from that 100 person chapter than I will from the 27 person chapter. Way more. And you know that would be really difficult to split up. This is kind of an extreme example because those products might work integrate but you get it right. The idea is really niche to your specialty and be okay with letting go of the other stuff. And it's just a mindset shift of there's plenty of opportunity and oftentimes we're only getting a certain percentage of our opportunity because we're trying to talk about too many things that it causes challenges for our members to really Find referral opportunities. Think of it this way. Your job is to train people how to find you referrals. Okay. That means you really need to train them on who you specifically looking for. How do I identify these, these opportunities for you and most importantly, how do I even bring you up? Well, if I'm trying to do that across multiple product lines, then it's going to be less effective than if I'm only in one product line. Right. If I only talk about life insurance every single week and only talk about life insurance in my one to ones, I'm going to train you on life insurance way more effectively and way more efficiently than if I try to do life insurance. But then some weeks try to do disability insurance and then some weeks try to do long term care and then weeks try to do this. It will take longer because we only have a certain amount of time with our members between weekly presentations at our meetings and one to ones that we're doing. I'm not spending every single day with you. And so if I'm trying to train you on four or five different referral things, that's just going to be less efficient and it's going to be less effective. So niching yourself down makes you more profitable when done. Right. But most of us will think of it as like, well, but I do these three things and if I don't talk about these three things, I'm not going to get business from these three things. Whereas again, if I did way more life insurance, again, this is extreme. But get the point. If I was solely focused on life insurance, I would probably be generating more referrals for myself and the other two based on all the appointments I'm having in the life insurance area. Okay. This is how chapters really grow. This is how you get a hundred, two hundred person chapters is by letting people and challenging them to niche themselves down. There's multiple types of real estate, multiple types of law, multiple types of insurance, products, multiple, multiple, multiple. Right. Commercial versus real estate trades, all of these things. And part of givers gain is to, yes, I could do those things, but I, I'm giving up the opportunity to talk about them because I, I really want to get more of this and that's okay. So I would be, I would not look at it as watering down, but to present more opportunities not only for yourself, but by giving up those things, I'm also producing more opportunities for everybody else in the chapter by allowing more people in to the group. Okay. Hi Tim, this is from Sam in San Francisco, San Francisco area. I have a Question regarding member to member complaints, but regarding members from other chapters. For context, I'm a printer, so I have customers from a number of different chapters. I have a mover from a different chapter who's not paid their invoice in over a year and has become very dodgy. He's not a new BNI member and we've worked together on and off for over four years. I tried to extend a certain amount of grace to B and I members since we're all in the same boat, being in small business and in bni. But even that needs to come to an end at a certain point. My question can I submit a complaint to the membership committee of another chapter? My thinking is that when I meet someone in bni, they are already. There is already some pre vetting involved and members would be keen to protect their VCP by not burning bridges with other members. Well, to the last part, you would think that would be natural and true. We should all be keen on trying to protect our visibility and credibility with other members, whether it be an I or not. But so to your question, not only can you, you should be submit a complaint to the membership committee of the other chapter, you should not submit a complaint to your membership committee because they won't be able to do anything with it, but you should submit it to the other chapter because that membership committee is charged with ensuring that the members in their chapter are referable and if there are things going on that might speak to that in a negative way, they should be made aware. Now, what they do with that information is on that membership committee. But your job is, if you're finding this to be the case is yes, absolutely put that in. Because if you don't, they're just more inclined to do the same thing to somebody else. Right? And the idea of BNI in multiple chapters should be that there's already a level of due diligence done to say this person is referable. That's the beauty of bni. But sometimes people aren't and things happen and we need to make sure that those who are charged with the responsibility of ensuring that are made aware. And again, what they do with it is going to be up to them in that chapter. But yes, you should. You not only can you, you should submit it to the membership committee of the other chapter. And by the way, like all being in the same boat and everything else, there's no grace needed for paying your bills. If they're not paying, they should be paying. It doesn't matter. I mean, we're all in Small businesses, if you take on a service, I'm hoping you have the resources to pay for said services. I. I just don't have grace for that myself. All right, one more as we're hitting 15 minutes here. So from James in Canada, we recently have a new regional director. He's initiated a monthly leadership roundtable expecting the leadership team to attend an additional one hour per month, then another one day of five hours quarterly, in person. Is this what the BNI Global expect from all leadership teams? It's different across the board, to be honest with you. So it's hard to say. BNI Global roundtables? Absolutely. We do roundtables monthly and for three reasons. And you should be attending them for those three reasons. We do not make it. There's not like an attendance tracker that if you don't, certain things will happen. But we do highly encourage it and kind of set it as an expectation of being in leadership. We don't. I don't know about the one day, five hour quarterly thing. Again, each region's completely different. So I can't say that, you know, what they're doing in Canada is right, wrong or indifferent. That is their plan. You should hopefully be made aware of these things before accepting a leadership role so that you can then make the decision if the leadership role is appropriate for you. But let's talk about roundtables. Roundtables are really important for you and for the region. Three main reasons. Number one, make sure you're most up to date on what is going on in the region. Okay. There always are some updates coming out, whether it's tech related, goal related, what have you going on in the region. And the roundtable is a really important time for us to share those updates. Not via email. Right. So just, you know, you get one email, but you can actually answer questions and, and display, you know, if it's a tech update, you can show those kind of things and walk through it and get more granular with it in that involvement of rolling it out and explaining it. Or sometimes we'll use it to say, hey, we're thinking of this and get the feedback from the leaders before anything goes out into the region. Number two is training. It's a great opportunity to continue to educate yourself and for us to educate leaders on important things going on, skill sets, that kind of stuff that are gonna keep you and make you as effective as possible as leaders. Because we trust you in your role, whatever role that is with kind of the brand for the rest of the members in that chapter. Right. When you're on a leadership team, you control the environment for success every week at that BNI meeting. And we're entrusting you to do it right. And we want to train you on how to do it right. Because only when you do it right do you get the benefit of the additional exposure that a leadership team brings to you. When you do it wrong, you get that negative of additional exposure that leadership team brings you. So we, and you should want to make sure you're as up to date on everything and as effective with everything as possible. These are great opportunities at roundtables. And then the third one is networking. It's an amazing opportunity for you to connect, learn from, share, collaborate with the other leaders in the region. And that's not, you know, necessarily an opportunity every member gets. It's a benefit of being in leadership sometimes. So take advantage of that. And we want to connect those leaders because this again is the additional exposure, the additional visibility, hopefully the additional credibility through that that leads to more profitability by being in your role. And so round tables are highly important for that reason, and that is a very common thing. I would suspect that the quarterly thing has the same purpose, just in more in depth, to go into more updates and more training and more networking. But we, I don't do that, so I can't speak to it specifically, but I'm not going to tell you it's a bad thing either, because I don't do that and I don't know exactly what it is. But every region has, you know, their, their own kind of program, if you will, in their region to. With the guise of making it as effective as possible for everyone, not just to give you more things to do, I can promise you that. And so I would take advantage of them if I were you specifically, at least at minimum, that monthly roundtable. So once again, thank you to everybody who has submitted questions and topics. Continue to do so. Go to bnipowerofone.com Leave them there if you're finding this valuable. Answering multiple in a little bit longer time. You know, each one of these might have taken five minutes instead of 20 minutes. Let me know. If not, we can go back to the five. I think this is episode 890, so we're quickly approaching 900 episodes here in the next few weeks. And I appreciate each and every one of you for making that possible. Have a great day.