This topic came up on the Ask Ivan Misner website, where you can type in a question and connect to a live teleconference where Dr. Misner answers it.

Several people asked about Contact Spheres and Power Teams in BNI.

A Contact Sphere is a group of professionals who complement rather than compete with each other.

A Power Team is a subset of your Contact Sphere that actively works together to pass referrals to each other. An example of a Power Team might be a caterer, a florist, a photographer, and a travel agent, the so-called “Wedding Mafia.” Priscilla’s chapter has a health care Power Team.

Every BNI group wants to create strong Power Teams, because they generate more referrals than groups without them. But it’s possible to go too far with Power Teams and leave other members feeling excluded. If your Power Teams meet separately from the rest of the BNI group, suggest that they invite other members of the group to visit their team meetings.

Brought to you by Ask Ivan Misner.

Complete Transcription of BNI Podcast Episode 151 -

Priscilla:
Hello everyone, and welcome back to The Official BNI Podcast brought to you by AskIvanMisner.com, which is a Web site where you can ask Ivan any question you have about networking.

I’m Priscilla Rice, and I’m coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkley, California, and I’m joined on the phone today by the founder and the chairman of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner.

Hello, Ivan. How are you today and what do you have to share with us?

Ivan:
I’m going great, Priscilla, and today I want to talk a little bit about Power Teams and Contact Spheres. As you mentioned, AskIvanMisner is new sponsor for the BNI podcast. It’s a Web site, AskIvanMisner.com is a Web site that’s done by a friend of mine, Alex Mandossian. And Alex is like the world’s leading expert on Ask Web sites, and this is his Web site, and I’m participating in it, obviously.

But one of the things that I wanted to do was give some samples of the kinds of things that we’re talking about. So from time to time, I’m going to do a podcast with a question that came from AskIvanMisner.com. So if you’d like to have some questions that I might use on the podcast and that I’m often using at AskIvanMisner, got to AskIvanMisner.com and type in your question. If you don’t have a question, it’s okay; you can say, “I don’t have a question today,” but then you’ll get the link to do the live telebridge, so you can actually go and listen to my answers on AskIvanMisner. I usually do about 10 or 12 different questions, and you’ll be able to get to hear them all. And if you want, you can go back and pick up some of the old recordings. It’s free, by the way. It doesn’t cost anything. If you want to pick up a previous recording, there’s a small fee to pick up the recorded telebridges, but you can go there live.

So what I want to do is I want to pull out a question or two from time to time and share them on my podcast so that you can get a sense of the kinds of questions that I’m getting. And the one I want to talk about this week is about Contact Spheres and Power Teams. I had several people, John, Robert, Karen, Claudelle, all ask about, “How do you maximize referrals stemming from Power Teams? And how do you use Power Team effectively?”

So I wanted to talk briefly about Contact Sphere and Power Teams, because they’re different, and we use both phrases.

Contact spheres I spoke about for the first time in a book, The World’s Best Known Marketing Secret. And a Contact Sphere is a group of business professionals that have a symbiotic relationship; they complement rather than compete with one another. A Power Team is a subset of that Contact Sphere. These are the people with whom you have a relationship with that are in your Contact Sphere that you’re actively engaging in a referral relationship. I would describe it as two concentric circles. The Contact Sphere is all of the people that you could potentially be in a symbiotic relationship with, and the Power Team is group of people that you actually have that symbiotic relationship with and are passing referrals to. So they are part of the overall Contact Sphere, potential professions that are synergistic with yours.

And I’ve talked about these in podcasts and in other venues. These are professions that just have that ability to refer one another, the financial planner, the banker, the attorney, people that have a similar type of client, and they’re servicing that client from a different perspective. My favorite one is the caterer, the florist, the photographer, the travel agent; I call that the wedding mafia. They’re referring each other like crazy, they’re working with each other a lot and referring one another to each other’s customers and clients. And so that wedding Contact Sphere or Power Team is a very, very important one.

Just so you understand the difference between a Contact Sphere and a Power Team, the Contact Sphere is all of the professions that theoretically can fit within your Power Team. The Power Team are those synergistic professions that you have a relationship with.

So in BNI, you want to try to create some really strong Power Teams, people that are in the symbiotic kind of a profession. One of the things I’ve kind of discovered over time is that BNI chapters that have at least three or four really active Power Teams tend to generate substantially more referrals that the average chapter. So if your chapter can focus on building some really strong Power Teams, you can substantially increase those referrals in the group, because oftentimes, one referral can be two or three referrals. If you have somebody that’s getting married, that can go to the caterer, the florist, the photographer. So one referral ends up going to three people. So the more Power Teams that you build in a chapter, the more successful it will be.

And I have one other suggestion, and then, Priscilla, if you want to chat about this or if you have any questions, I’d be glad to talk further. One thing that I’ve seen is it’s difficult for chapters to build those Power Teams, but when they do, they can really be powerful, very successful. But it’s possible to almost go too far. I’ve recently been seeing some chapters that have created such strong Power Teams that there’s almost a sense of exclusivity, where they’re being excluded.

For example, a lot of chapters may have a Power Team that meets aside from the BNI meeting; many of them I’ve seen have Power Team meetings once a month where the people in that Power Team are meeting and talking. So here’s something that I saw with a chapter that had that problem. They felt that their Power Teams had become so strong and so powerful that the people who weren’t in them felt left out. So here was something that I thought was just brilliant. What they started to do to come across as more inclusive with their fellow BNI members was that at each one of their Power Team meetings they invited someone who was not in the Power Team. They started with people in other Power Teams first, and then they went to people who weren’t in any Power Team. And they always invited at least one person who was not part of their Power Team to sit in on the discussion that the Power Team was having about, where they were, what potential clients they had, what clients they were about to pick up, whatever the topic of discussion. There was somebody that was not in the Power Team who was present.

And the beauty of that is twofold. First, there’s a sole sense of inclusion, and so they didn’t feel clique-ish. It’s possible for them to come across as clique-ish unless they’re cognizant of being inclusive. And the second thing was it gave people from other Power Teams great ideas of how to effectively use a Power Team, because they saw what others were doing.

And so this chapter went from starting to have the sense of Power Teams almost being clique-ish to Power Teams being a great tool for inclusiveness and for learning how to do this thing called networking more effectively.

So there’s a few ideas about Contact Spheres, Power Teams, both what they are, and most importantly, what to do when one gets really big, sharing that concept with other people in your group.

How does that sound, Priscilla?

Priscilla:
Sounds good. I was just thinking, we do, we have a Power Team in our chapter, and it’s the health provider Power Team. And there are quite a few of them, and I have been a little bit jealous that they have such a great connection. They have a physical therapist, an acupuncturist, what else is there, a chiropractor, a massage therapist, and I’m jealous. They have this great way of giving back and forth to each other, and it’s really nice, and I would love to have the same thing. But I haven’t actually felt bad about it, and I’ve just kind of noticed that they do have these extra meetings, and they seem to benefit from it.

Ivan:
Well, one of the ways to get started in having that for yourself is to work that Power Team and see if they’re willing to have some people visit their meetings so that you can replicate that. Because you get into a chapter with two, three, four really strong Power Teams and you’ve got a chapter that’s just passing a ton of business.

Priscilla:
Yeah.

Ivan:
So I hope this podcast has done a few things. First, I invite people to AskIvanMisner.com. If you have a question, and for John, Robert, Karen, Claudelle, thank you so much for asking this question. I did cover it in an AskIvanMisner telebridge, but we do about 12, 10 or 12 different questions, and it takes about an hour.

So these podcasts are a little shorter. I’m only going to be able to cover one. But I will cover from time to time some of the things that are AskIvanMisner.com.

Hope I gave you some ideas on Contact Spheres and Power Teams and how to build them and what to do once you build them with that sense of inclusiveness.

So that’s it for today, Priscilla. Thank you so much.

Priscilla:
Okay, great. Well, thank you, Dr. Misner.

I’d just like to remind the listeners that this podcast has been brought to you by AskIvanMisner.com. Thanks so much for listening. This is Priscilla Rice, and we hope you’ll join us next week for another exciting episode of The Official BNI Podcast.

Dr. Misner wants to thank the BNI members in Hong Kong and Malaysia where he gave a number of presentations this past week.

At the global networking conference in Kuala Lumpur, Dr. Misner attended a presentation by Penny Power, the founder of Ecademy.com. Penny’s topic was the need for entrepreneurs to stay in their flame: doing what they truly enjoy doing. Then the work doesn’t really seem like work.

Business owners who get caught up in the aspects of the business that don’t come naturally to them are working in their wax and not nurturing their full potential.

The solution is to remember that your wax is someone else’s flame. There is another entrepreneur out there who loves to do the things you hate doing. Delegate the things you don’t like or aren’t good at to employees or outside contractors.

The more time you stay in your flame, the more successful you will be. Flame work is infectious. So find the people in your BNI group whose flame is your wax. It may take time, but stick to it. The key is to see progress.

Brought to you by Networking Now.

Complete Transcription of BNI Podcast Episode 061 -

Priscilla Rice:
Hello everybody and welcome back to the Official BNI Podcast, brought to you by networkingnow.com, the leading site on the net for networking downloadables. I am Priscilla Rice coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkeley, California.. I am joined on the phone today by the Founder and Chairman of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner. Hello Ivan. How are you?

Ivan Misner:
I am doing great, Priscilla. Thank you very much. Last week I talked about my visit to Kuala Lumpur and I have a follow-up to my last week’s podcast. First, I want to thank all the members in Hong Kong where I did several presentations and Malaysia where I did a number of presentations. It was really wonderful meeting so many members and doing those talks to people who were so receptive to the ideas that I had.

One of the things that I want to talk about is a presentation done by somebody else that resonated with me. It was at the Kuala Lumpur Malaysian conference for BNI. While I was attending the global networking conference in Malaysia, I heard a presentation but like I say, it really resonated with me. It was a presentation given by Penny Power, who is the founder of each ecademy, ecademy.com. That’s the ecademy with an e instead of academy with an a.

Penny was not only extremely knowledgeable and successful entrepreneur, she’s also a good friend of mine. I’ve known her and her husband, Thomas, very well over the last few years. Penny’s presentation focused on the concept of entrepreneurs staying in their flame. I thought that was an interesting thing that she was talking about. What are you talking about, I wondered.

She explained in her presentation that an entrepreneur’s flame is where he or she is the most passionate and excited about what their businesses. It’s where they are and what they truly enjoy doing. When an entrepreneur, she said in her presentation, is in his or her flame, the work doesn’t really seem like work. The entrepreneur perceives his or her tasks as effortless. If the business person is able to focus on aspects of business which keep them in their flame, it allows them to achieve their best.

She said on the flip side of that, when business people get caught up in aspects of the business that don’t come naturally to them, that they’re not good at or that they don’t like, working through these tasks takes away their energy and at least I’m exhausted and devoid of passion.

Business people stuck in a situation are working in their wax. I think that’s a great metaphor with a candle in the flame of the wax. Those people aren’t nurturing their full potential or two is what allowed them to thrive in business. She said the solution to the problem – and I love this – your wax is someone else’s flame. Your wax is someone else’s flame. In other words, in your weakness is someone else’s strength. It’s someone else’s passion.

As your business grows, the key to staying in your flame is to delegate the things that you don’t like or aren’t good at to employees or outside contractors, other people who actually enjoy doing these tasks and a really great at them.

The more skillful you are at recognizing the kinds of work that keeps you in your flame and the kind of work that keeps the people working with you in their flame, the more successful you are going to be and the less you are working in your wax, the more successful you are going to be.

She ended her presentation by saying that flame work is infectious. If you are doing what you love its infectious. What resonated with me is that I constantly hear people say that. “Your presentations are infectious. You seemed to love what you’re doing.” The reason for that is that I try to spend much of my time working in my flame.

Mind you, it took me years to get there to be able to do most of what I do being completely in my flame. I set a goal 10 years ago to be able to spend more time doing what I’m doing right now. Things like this podcast, speaking to members, doing presentations, writing and being a spokesperson for an organization. Without understanding this metaphor, I understood the concept of working on my business because I was excited about that aspect of it and working on it. Although I was good and have a doctorate degree in organizational behavior and management, that was my wax on my flame.

So I have worked hard at getting into my flame and do the things I love. The more we can do this in business, the more successful we are going to be. What a message, especially those of you who are education coordinators are wanting to bring this back to your chapter, you are in a room with a lot of BNI members and there are things that are your flame and things that are your wax. In that room, there are people whose flame is your wax.

If you can use some of the BNI members in that room at that meeting every week, and what’s their flame is your wax, you are using what they are excited about to do what you are not excited about. It’s a great way to start to use other BNI members to give you more time to be in your flame. That’s why I thought this fit into BNI so well. I want to thank Penny for that presentation. It was really great and I think it’s something that might resonate with many BNI members.

Priscilla:
It’s a great suggestion. Sometimes I think the hardest part, though, is being able to afford to outsource some of those tasks that are your wax. You know, it’s a lofty goal but it’s really important.

Ivan:
You bring up a good point and I’m glad she did, but I’m not sure. I’ve might take issue with you on it being a lofty goal. I think it may not be an immediate goal. And it may take time. I said to you it took me 10 years. I knew it would take a long time to do, but I never looked at it as being impossible.

It was gradual and so there was always progress. That is the key. I knew I was working with a very large organization even 10 years ago, that it would take time to get to where I needed to go. It could take 10 years or could take two or three years. The key is seeing progress. The more you can gradually be working in your flame and not in your wax and on your business and not in your business, the more you are doing the things that you love rather than the things you have to do, the more successful you are going to be.

I think in a previous podcast I talked about how years ago I created an organization chart. In the organization chart that I had, I had 15 different positions and I was doing 12 or 11 of the jobs. My goal over the next eight or 10 years was get myself into just one job. Every year there was progress. Every year I was doing one last job, one less huge job.

Over a period of time, over that ten year stretch, I got down to one position. I was doing one thing and that one thing was my passion. I think we can all do that. But if we do it gradually – I’m not suggesting that all of a sudden you job out everything. You can do it gradually, and look at this. You’re spending more time doing the things you love. Do you think if you’re spending more time doing the things you love that you could make more money?

Priscilla:
Definitely. I think it’s way more efficient.

Ivan:
Yeah. So if you’re making more money, paying somebody else for doing the stuff you hate is great. Life is perfect when that happens. Then in BNI, you have all of these other people do the things they’re doing is your wax but their flame. If you can bring them in to help you succeed, they will do that. You will be much more successful in business in the long run.

Priscilla:
Okay. Well that sounds like such a plan. I’m glad it took you a while. It gives me some encouragement to make my chart and see how many jobs I’m doing.

Ivan:
I may save us all the time Priscilla, but I’m a 20 year overnight success. It took me a long time to get there, and that the key is not are you where you want to go but the key is are you making progress? As long as you’re constantly making incremental progress, then you’re headed in the right direction.

Priscilla:
Thank you, Dr. Misner, and we’re out of time. That’s it for this week. This podcast has been brought to you by networking now.com, the leading site on the net for networking downloadables. Thanks for listening. This is Priscilla Rice and we hope you’ll join us next week for another exciting episode of the Official BNI Podcast.

Synopsis -
In this episode Dr. Ivan Misner, Founder and Chairman of BNI, the world’s largest business networking organization, explains why he has chosen to start a podcast and discusses:

Topics He’ll Be Covering

His New Role As Chairman

Podcast Feedback

Guest Appearances

How Long Each Podcast Will Be

Members Spreading The Word

How to Subscribe To The Podcast

Complete Transcription of BNI Podcast Episode 001 -

Frank Felker:
Well, here we are with the first edition of the official BNI podcast. What exactly were you thinking of? What is the idea behind the official BNI podcast?

Dr. Ivan Misner:
I think a podcast like this gives me an opportunity to flatten the communication hierarchy, to bypass various layers in the organization and allow me to talk directly to BNI members and directors all over the world about how to make this program work most effectively for them.

Some of the things that I hope to do is first of all, create some materials that members will be able to respond to at the BNIpodcast.com web site and give some comments on. But more importantly, to do some podcasts that members can talk about at chapters – talk about the subject and share the information to help enhance the quality of the results that they’re getting on a chapter by chapter basis.

I think that some of the kinds of things that I would like to cover are new activities and projects – something new to the organization that members might want to know about. I hope to, over time, be sharing new meeting stimulants that we have. Now if you are a member and you don’t know what a meeting stimulant is, you need to write that down and next time you see your director, ask them what is a chapter meeting stimulant? I am not talking about good drugs. Some chapters may want them, I don’t know. But I am talking about exercises that help to make the chapter livelier, more interesting and a lot of fun, which is something very important.

I think years ago I really didn’t talk much about chapters having fun. It was all about the system and the structure. The longer-running BNI, the more important it is I have found that you have to have fun while you are learning and teaching and informing people about what you do. So meeting stimulants help do that.

Frank:
I couldn’t agree with you more. And I think it helps build the bond between the members when everybody is enjoying themselves.

Ivan:
Absolutely. So those things – a calendar of upcoming events, things that are going on throughout the world. I’ll tell you, lastly, and probably one of the most important is that I would like to cover topics that are really aimed at education coordinators, topics that education coordinators of a chapter can share with their members to help members to increase the amount of referrals that they are generating from chapter to chapter. Those are the kind of things that I hope to be covering in this podcast.

Frank:
I think it is a great idea, certainly podcasting is the perfect medium for you to connect directly with all of your tens of thousands of members around the world. Also, the two-way conversation potential of people being able to direct questions to you by e-mail, posting comments on the podcast website and to have them ask you exactly what is on their mind, relative to either getting the most out of their BNI membership or perhaps some question about different resources that you have available in your books and so forth. I really congratulate you for taking this step because you are a very busy guy. I mean, your travel schedule this month alone is taking you across the United States into Europe and back again. I know that it is pretty tough to get on your schedule and get you on the phone for these recordings.

Ivan:
It is, but I think this role is very important. Many members may or may not know that last year I promoted Norm Dominguez to CEO of the organization to give me the opportunity to act as a spokesperson for the company. So my role as Founder and Chairman is primarily to be the spokesperson, to have the opportunity to talk to members directly through as many vehicles as possible. That’s why I love this concept of the podcast so that I can talk directly to members and get feedback.

You are right – the two-way communication is important and the blogs that we will have and the bulletin board at the BNIpodcast.com are a way to get some feedback. We are going to be looking for there are what I call solution-focused feedback. It’s easy to sometimes take a look at what is not working. What I want to talk about in these podcasts and what I want to talk about on the blogs are the solutions to challenges that chapters may have because it is the solutions and the solutions focus that will carry the organization forward in a positive manner.

Frank:
So rather than just being upset or complaining about something, you are looking for people to come forward with solutions to whatever those problems are that are upsetting them.

Ivan:
Well possibly. Yes indefinitely. But I am also open to somebody saying, “Hey, I heard you talking about this on a podcast. We had a challenge with something similar. What is the solution to this challenge?” That is the kind of thing that I would really like to see discussed. You know, everyone can be a critic about issues but the truth is nobody has ever built a statue for a critic. The only people who get statues are people who are leaders and people who say they have a problem and they take a look at the solutions to those problems. They do their best to try to solve issues in a positive way. That is what I want these podcasts to be. I want them to be a vehicle for me to share with the membership world wide the things that members have done all around the world to make this program successful.

Frank:
That is great. That is another wonderful benefit for the members – being able to hear about best practices from other groups and other chapters around the world. That is one of the things that comes from membership in BNI, as I can speak to myself as a member – is learning how to do things better from people who have gone there before you.

Ivan:
You bring up a good point. Because I may from time to time bring in a guest, either a BNI director or maybe even a member to talk about some issue or something that they did in their chapter that was very successful. I will also be bringing in some guests, some friends of mine who I think have material or content that I think will help the BNI members in one way or another. So I may do interviews with guests, some of which may be well known to members of BNI and others may not be well known, but they will all be people who I think have something to add and help a BNI member in their membership and organization.

Frank:
Ivan, I wanted to ask you one thing. One of the benefits of podcast format is that it can be flexible in terms of the length. You are not locked into like a radio show clock format. Do you have any feel for how long these podcast are going to be each week?

Ivan:
I believe each one will be between five and ten minutes, probably closer to ten minutes than five. They will be short, bite sized podcasts, and one of the reasons why I think that is valuable is it is content that we can communicate to members and to education coordinators and directors so that they can take it in short bite size pieces and communicate it to the chapters.

At the chapter meetings, you don’t have 30 minutes every week for someone to share ideas on how to make the chapter work. We have a few minutes. I want to try to do these podcast in ways that can be integrated into chapter meetings and that the chapters can – it’s almost like everyone standing around the water cooler talking about something that they just saw on TV or heard on the radio. I would love for them to sit around the BNI meetings and talk about the latest podcast on a specific subject and be able to integrate it right into the meeting.

Frank:
That’s great. With that in mind, we’re probably just about out of time for this first podcast, the first official BNI podcast. Any last thoughts that you would like to leave the listeners with before we sign off?

Ivan:
Yes. I would love for all of the members who are listening to this podcast to go back to their chapters and encourage other BNI members to subscribe to the podcasts. They will be free. Come to the website, take a look at the content, and make sure to share this information. I have heard that word of mouth is pretty powerful so I would like to see our BNI members use a little word of mouth. A good referral for me would be for you to take this back, this information back, if you are listening to this podcast and share it with chapter members in your group or groups around you so that they can benefit from this as well.

Frank:
That is awesome. I love that. “A good referral from me.” And to that end, I want to make sure everybody understands how they scanned subscribe to the podcast. You can subscribe at the iTunes music store or right on the homepage at BNIpodcast.com. There is also a page there that explains to you how to subscribe and how to download the mp3 files, so don’t be put off by the technology if this is something new to you. It is really worth the effort to learn how to engage with this medium and to be able to hear from Dr. Misner every week.

Ivan:
You know what I would like to say – one last thing before we sign off – and that is remembers all around the world –remember in is netsit or neteat- it is network, and if you want to build your business through word of mouth, you have to learn the techniques to work the organization and get the most out of it.

Frank:
There you have it. Right from the man himself, Dr. Ivan Misner, the Founder and Chairman of BNI. This is Frank Felker saying we will see you next week on the official BNI podcast.