BNI – All Gong and No Dinner?

In July 2006 I joined the local Lowman Chapter of Business Network International (BNI). I was attracted by the attitude and enthusiasm of the members of the chapter and the local leadership team. The BNI ethos is that ‘Givers Gain’, whereby members that you’ve given business to will naturally want to reciprocate and find or give you business in return.

The idea is that members of each chapter act as a virtual sales force trying to find business for each other. I was warned at the beginning that it was not a quick fix, and that I would have to gradually build up the trust and respect of my fellow members and ‘train’ them to know what to look for in terms of potential clients over a period of perhaps two years before my investment (i.e. the money I spent on membership and meeting fees) would bring the desired returns. To quote from the BNI Training Manual, the process ‘is more about farming than it is about hunting. It is about the cultivation of rewarding relationships within a structured environment, for the mutual benefit of all’. So far so good!

However, what they don’t tell you at the beginning is that the BNI business model predicts that each chapter can expect to lose, on average, one member per month (i.e. 12 members per year). In other words, a chapter that has spent a lot of time and effort growing to 20 members can expect to lose up to 60 per cent of its ’sales force’ over a period of a year. Surely this scenario is unsustainable! How are you expected to cultivate a lasting and beneficial relationship with another BNI member if that person is likely to leave in a few months’ time?

In order to grow, businesses need stability. They need a loyal and reliable workforce who are willing to put all their effort into producing the goods for clients over a sustained and lengthy period of time. No business can afford to lose 60 per cent of its workforce each year – it is inordinately expensive to recruit and train new members of staff. It is far more efficient and effective to encourage existing members of staff to remain with the company for a period of several years. BNI claims to be the most successful business referral organization in the world. So why are people leaving it in such numbers?

Perhaps, when they joined BNI they were attracted by all the promises of extra business they would receive from their fellow members of the chapter, but they needed some concrete results in order to retain their confidence in the organization. Admittedly, some people do very well out of it – each referral on average is estimated to be worth £330, based on the figures produced by BNI in the United Kingdom, but I’m sure that if some people or firms are picking up business worth, for example, £26,000 or even £100,000, there are plenty of others who are picking up naff all! And if those others don’t pick up enough business in the first year to justify paying approximately £1,000 in membership and meeting fees, then they’ll give up BNI as a bad job and move on to something more rewarding, more lucrative or less expensive.

Other people may find it difficult to attend the regular BNI breakfast meetings every week because they have clients or other work commitments that they need to meet in order to earn their living. BNI is very strict when it comes to attending meetings – members are are allowed just three absences in six months. If you miss even just one meeting without sending a substitute in your place you can expect a phone call from a member of the chapter’s membership committee asking why you were absent. Any further absences on your part trigger the sending of a formal letter – and it really is a case of ‘three strikes and you’re out!’ That’s right! A fair number of the members who leave BNI are in fact expelled for ‘poor’ attendance! You can also be expelled for not bringing enough referrals or enough visitors to meetings. In other words, you are expected to grow the BNI business or else you are asked to leave.

Speaking for myself, I don’t mind bringing visitors to a meeting if I think that it will be of benefit to them, or give referrals to people if I think that person can do a good job for someone who needs that service, but I would far rather be spending my time growing my own business than trying to grow the BNI business. ‘Givers Gain’ is all very well if we lived in an ideal world but in practice I’ve found it a bit like ‘pie in the sky’. I think to myself, do I really want to depend on other people to promote my business when they are all probably very busy running their own businesses? Are they simply passing ‘referrals’ to other members of the BNI chapter to ‘play the game’ and avoid being shown the door for not ‘contributing’ to the chapter? Everyone in the chapter is in the same position – they almost certainly know their own business better than they know mine, so I’m probably the best person to find clients for my own business.

Eventually, I left BNI because I was being asked to invite guests to our meetings as part of a recruitment campaign but I felt that I could not, in all honesty, recommend it to some one else as a viable business proposition. At the time, during the middle of October, the Lowman Chapter had fewer than ten members on its books, from a high point of over twenty, and during the past month at least five other members have left.

But no matter! I have now joined the Business League, which is growing rapidly in the South West of England, and which seems determined to do everything possible to retain members rather than drive them away (and seems to be full of ex-BNI members!). But that will be the subject of another post!

Omid Djalili Gets His Own BBC Show

It’s great to see that Omid Djalili has eventually been given his own TV show at prime time on BBC 1. What is even better is that the producers of The X Factor have moved the time of their results show so that I can watch both on Saturday night without missing any part of either show.

I’m particularly pleased to see Omid do so well because, like me, he is a Bahá’í and was born and brought up in Britain. Of course, Omid has been plying his trade as an actor and comedian ever since he graduated from the University of Ulster in 1988 – he was rejected by 16 different drama schools – when he began to win parts in London’s “fringe” theatre circuit because of his ability to portray a wide range of ethnic characters.

I first saw him perform his one-man shows The Short, Fat Kebab Shop Owner’s Son and A Strange Bit of History at the Riverside Studios in West London during the mid-1990s and I thought he was hilarious. In 2001, I finally got to meet and talk to him in person at the Bahá’í Academy for the Arts, where I was taking a graphic design course and he was performing for us, free of charge, several times during the programme. And I must say, he really is a nice person to get to know.

I had already met his wife, Annabel Knight, who writes a lot of his material, at the Bahá’í Summer School held at Ackworth in 1991, when she was living in Gillingham and I was living just up the road (and railway line) in Bexley. I remember inviting her to the Bexley community’s Nineteen Day Feast, but I think she had other plans in mind.

Annabel and Omid got married in 1992 and moved to the Czech Republic where they started working together in a number of experimental productions; became involved with the Brno-based Centre for Experimental Theatre, where some of Vaclac Havel’s first plays were produced; and toured the country, giving performances and holding drama workshops.

The next time I saw Annabel was in 1996 when she introduced Omid to British television viewers on ITV’s The Big, Big Talent Show, hosted by Jonathan Ross. Omid reached the final of this TV show and won its “Best Comic” award.

Of course, since then, Omid has been seen numerous times on television in Britain and the United States, and in several Hollywood movies – and not just in comedy roles! What I find amazing is that it is now more than ten years since he first appeared on our TV screens, but I am so glad that he has finally reached the top of his profession – after all, the BBC doesn’t invite just anybody to host Have I Got News For You! I understand from Omid’s website that he has even been invited to take part in Celebrity Big Brother in 2008 and, you never know, he might even perform at the Comedy Hall here in Tiverton!

For further information about Omid Djalili, visit his entry on Wikipedia or read the article about him and his wife on the Bahá’í World web site.

How do I Find Time to Write Every Day?

One of the first things I was taught while on a blogging course was the importance of keeping my blog up to date by writing something in it at least once every week. I made a resolution at the time to do just that – after all, I want people to be regular visitors to my blog to read what I’ve written.

It started off OK because I had plenty of material in my “back catalogue” that I could post on my blog, and at the time I was having to write a 60-second presentation every week to promote my business at BNI that I could use as the basis, or so I thought, for my weekly post on my blog.

But then things changed in my life. The local chapter of BNI fell apart and I was no longer required to write a witty presentation each week. At the same time my business workload increased, which meant that I was spending all day, every day, in front of my computer editing articles that other people had written. This meant that I had no desire to spend my spare time, if I had any, in front of the computer updating and editing my blog. Although I was spending some spare time in front of the computer, my interest in family history meant that it was being filled by visiting the Ancestry and the Genes Reunited websites, and entering data on to my genealogy software program.

As a result, my blog has barely been touched for about six weeks and the number of visitors has dropped to nearly zero. So what can I do about it? One thing that I have noticed is that I have plenty of ideas first thing in the morning and I lie in my bed composing potential articles in my head before I get up. However, by the time I’ve got up, got washed and changed, and I’ve started to make my breakfast my initial enthusiasm and creativity has waned, and I find myself thinking more about my next editing job I have to do for one of my existing clients.

So, the answer is simple! I get up at least one hour earlier each morning and write something for my blog before breakfast. As I write this, in long hand, it is eight o’clock in the morning and I’ve written virtually an entire post without much effort. The next challenge is to enter it on to the blog – but I can probably do that this evening – and if you’re reading it now it means that I’ve passed that challenge without any problems. It’s amazing how easy it is to type something up once you’ve written the first draft and it’s there in front of you.

Right! I’ve proved that it can work – now I’ve just got to make sure that I can keep it up. That shouldn’t be too much of a problem as long as I treat it like a training schedule in preparation for running a marathon (or any other distance, for that matter). After all, every evening during the week, without fail, I go out jogging. So, early every morning during the week, without fail, I must write something for my blog.

There, that wasn’t too difficult, was it! Same again tomorrow? We’ll see – I’ve got a business breakfast early tomorrow morning but I’ll try and write something, even if it’s only a few lines. So, watch this space!