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Synopsis

This week Dr. Misner is in Orlando at the BNI National Conference and calls in to praise BNI’s long-term employees, some of whom have been with BNI for all its 23 years. These are the people who’ve taken BNI from a home-based business in Dr. Misner’s tiny Claremont house to the international organization it is today.

Employee loyalty shows that a company has stability, commitment, and a good working environment. It’s important for members to know that BNI’s success is based on having good people.

The other thing Dr. Misner talks about in this chapter of Givers Gain is the communication revolution. This podcast is just one example of the things technology lets us do that we couldn’t do before. Thousands of members listen every week, thanks to the e-mail announcement list and the fact that education coordinators are sharing this information with their chapters.

One reason for writing the book was to keep BNI chapters from repeating mistakes that have already been made. BNI keeps experimenting with new possibilities, testing them out before disseminating them to the BNI chapters. The Referral Institute was born from some of these experiments.

Brought to you by Networking Now.

Complete Transcription of BNI Podcast Episode 055 -

Priscilla Rice:
Hello everyone and welcome back to the Official BNI Podcast, brought to you by networkingnow.com, which is the leading site on the net for networking downloadables. I am Priscilla Rice and I’m coming to your from Live Oak recording studio which is in Berkeley, California. I am joined on the phone today by the Founder and Chairman of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner. Hello Ivan. It is so nice to have you on the phone. Where are you?

Ivan Misner:
Thanks Priscilla. This week I am in Orlando for the BNI national conference in the USA. I’ve been traveling a lot over the last few weeks.

Priscilla:
Yeah. It sounds that way. What do you have to share with us?

Ivan:
This week I’m talking about Givers Gain chapter 9. I want to just remind all the listeners while going through the book, Givers Gain, that every new member when they join the organization goes to remember success program training or new member orientation. It’s called different things to different countries. They get a free copy of this book, Givers Gain.

I really thought that it would be great for BNI members to not only have the book but also hear in my own words, a discussion about the books chapter by chapter. We are to Chapter 9 now. I think this is a great way of flattening that communication hierarchy and hearing directly from me what I put in writing. I would like BNI members to pick up a copy of the book and as I am talking about the various chapters, go back to earlier in the year and you will find every chapter. We are up to Chapter 9 and sometime this year, we will complete the book. Have the book with you as I go through and talk about these chapters.

This particular chapter is The New Millenium. I talk about the opening years of the 21st century and how it has been a time of incredible growth for BNI indefinitely transition. We’ve created new systems to support our growth. At the time that I wrote the book, we had about 600 directors. Now we are over 1000 directors. We are on every populated continent now. I talk about this in the book.

In 2004, we opened a new headquarters in a really beautiful modern two-story complex in Auckland that ironically, is not far from our little itty-bitty Clairmont Palace that we had 15 years ago as BNI headquarters, when we bought a house that was on commercial land. It was very small. You could probably fit 10 of those houses in a commercial building. It’s just amazing how we have grown.

We certainly have the facility, but I think the most important thing is that we have really brought in smart personable and motivated people. We have great people who work for this company. I think the fact that we have people who’ve been with BNI at headquarters for 10, 15, 20 — we have an employee other than myself who has been with the company since the very beginning. This is our 23rd year and she’s been with us for 23 years. You know, you know employees like Amy Turly-Brown, our Director of Operations. I talk about her in our book. Amy started as a BNI member. She represented a hair salon. She came to work at BNI as a receptionist which is amazing.

Amy is one of those classic examples of the kind of employee that everybody wants because she constantly took on responsibilities while above her pay great just because she wanted to learn and expand. Of course, every time there was a promotion opportunity, guess what. Amy got it. She is now third in command reporting directly to the CEO of the company. She started as a BNI member and then a receptionist for us. She is in our director of operations and has been with us since 1991. It’s been a long time.

Priscilla:
That’s an incredible story.

Ivan:
It really is. And Lonnie Figerly, BNI’s first employee. She started BNI making member packets. She made 10 or 20 a week. That’s all she did. I was working out of my house, so she came into my garage and put together about 20 new member packets every week and that was it. Now she works full time for us in our accounting department and also as a Senior Supervising Regional Director for BNI in Southern California. She has been with us since day one.

Of course, why wife, Elizabeth, started as a member in 1986 and is now the director and administrator of the BNI foundation. Norm Dominguez started in 1987, so has been with us for more than two decades. He started as a member then director. He started up the ladder and is now the CEO of the organization.

Why are these things important? To the listeners, I think it shows something about the company when you have a group of employees have been with the company a long, long time. It shows stability. It shows commitment. It shows hopefully that there is a good working environment. I think that’s important to know is a member that there is a stability to this organization that plays itself out throughout the organization. That’s why I talk about it in here because I talk so much about growth, but it’s also important to understand that the foundation is all based on having good people working for the organization.

The other thing I talk about in this chapter is the communication revolution. Communication has really changed right after this podcast. When I wrote this book and I was talking about the turn-of-the-century, podcasting was — I’m not even sure it was around in 2000. If so, it was in its infancy. We have come so far with technology. It enables us to do things that we just couldn’t do before. Our online database system, BNI net, I predict a year ago to see some real changes over the next few years with BNI in our database system and helping to allow members to network worldwide. That’s one of our goals for the system.

Priscilla:
Do you have any idea how many people are listening to this podcast?

Ivan:
There are thousands. I don’t know the exact number but we have thousands of members listening to the podcasts every week. One of the things I recommend is go around your chapter and have everyone to a sign-up sheet together e-mail address. Then get on the e-mail announcement list. So that each week you get an announcement saying here is that topic. Have one of your members collect e-mails and put it into the e-mail list that you can find on this podcast. You’ll never. We don’t sell the list we don’t give it away. You’ll get one e-mail a week that says here is the topic. When we started doing that, we started getting more and more hits. We’re getting thousands of hits but what I really like is that the education coordinators in particular are sharing this information at their chapters and I think that’s really powerful.

There is so much more to cover in the book. We are almost out of time. In Chapter 9, we talk about experimental programs. You know, when you run a franchise, you perform a balancing act between the stability of following a proven system and the importance of trying out new ideas. The day we say this is BNI and we will never make another change to it is the day we’re going to be in trouble.

So we are constantly improving the system and you have to have what I call controlled experimentation. You just can’t let people go willy-nilly because you end up making the same mistakes over and over and over again because people don’t know what mistakes are being made. That’s why we wrote this book to teach people some of the things we did wrong. We talk very candidly about some of the things we did wrong so that people don’t make this mistake.

If you have a chance, take a look at the experimental programs because to this day, we still use it. Things like the member success program came out in the experimental program. It’s probably the biggest of all — the education coordinator. We didn’t have that at one time. That was an experimental program that came out of our system. The last thing I want to talk about in this chapter is the Referral Institute which is a sister company of BNI. We started doing more training.

One of the things that we really are proud of is that we do a lot of training education in BNI. But sometimes you really have to 50 in programs like the certified networker training, which is like 26 hours or so of training. It’s so comprehensive that we found it was just too much to try to do within the BNI context. So we spun off a sister company, the Referral Institute. Listeners have heard of the Referral Institute. We have a strong strategic alliance with them. They use our material.

I am associated with the company and what we’ve tried to do at the Referral Institute is provide really in depth going deep kind of training for people to build their business through referrals. We talk about the Referral Institute in this chapter to have a chance to take a look at that. The website is Referral Institute.com. We’ll find any training that you might do with referrals would be very synergistic with BNI it’s a situation where the Referral Institute refers many, many, many people to the organization. Chapters to come through Referral Institute training tend to have much, much better members. That’s most of Chapter 9. I’m really looking forward to the next chapter that were to talk about which is Chapter 10, BNI Traditions. It’s one of my favorite topics. That’ll be our next topic for Givers Gain.

Priscilla:
Great. I thank you Ivan. I just wanted to say that it’s very impressive – was it 23 years ago you started the company?

Ivan:
23 years.

Priscilla:
How far ahead were you! Now referral marketing is kind of a big deal. But then, probably nobody had ever heard of it.

Ivan:
You’re absolutely right. When I first started BNI, we got a lot of what is that? They had never heard of anything like that. We would get people who would ask if this Amway or multi-level. I would say no Amway is a member number of our chapters and we have multi-level members and their chapters. But they just didn’t understand. They thought it was just like Rotary. I said that rotary is a great organization but it’s a service club not a referral group. In the early days, there was a lot of confusion about what BNI is. I think in a lot of ways, we’ve created an industry worldwide and certainly and methodologies for people to help build their businesses. Last year we passed 5.5 million referrals and generated $2.2 billion worth of business for our members all around the world.

Priscilla:
That’s great. I think were almost out of time.

Ivan:
It goes by fast.

Priscilla:
It does. So I want to thank you very much Dr. Misner and just remind the listeners that this podcast has been brought to you by networkingnow.com, which is the leading site on the net for networking downloadables. Thanks so much for listening. This is Priscilla Rice and we will see you next week on the Official BNI Podcast.