Growing Your Business Relationships

As a member of BNI, Business Network International, I am on the lifelong plan of growing my business relationships. Each week I get another opportunity to make direct contact with people active in my business community. These people have made the commitment to help me in my business. I, likewise, have committed myself, my time, and my talent to them.

So how does it work? Well, we meet weekly at our meeting. That's a nice, tip of the iceberg experience. The real networking is the rest of the week. I say growing relationships because this takes time and effort. I must be willing to set aside time in my hectic life for others. I must put aside my own goals to learn about and help others to achieve theirs.

So am I really such a self-sacrificing person? Yes and no. I get such gratification from knowing that I have helped out another business person. Not just another business person, but someone who has invested their time and energy in the relationship as well. I am giving of myself to someone I trust to deliver quality products and services to those in need or want. That in turn builds my reputation with my friends, family and customers.

And as I look around the room each week, I get the supreme satisfaction of knowing that each face looking back at me has made the same selfless commitment to me and to my business. IF I invest myself in them and their businesses; IF I deserve their trust and respect. THEY will each give back to me.

At the end of the day, my business is benefitted and my personal life is enriched. Thank you, each of my BNI partners. If you are interested in participating, please call me (209) 367-5555

LOYALTY & CONSTANCY

In our lifetimes, computers have gone from requiring their own buildings/rooms to desktop and laptop. Where once a computer was unique and formidable, now they are so commonplace that many of us have several in our homes. Technology keeps changing and those changes seem to come faster. Most of those changes are for the better: faster computers; more memory; less expensive, higher quality digital cameras; medical breakthroughs; communications breakthroughs; etc. Generation X has grown up trying to keep up. So, what has happened to loyalty and constancy?

As our socio-economic environment seems to have joined the high-speed world of change, loyalty and constancy in character become ever more powerful. For nearly five years now I have been a member of BNI, Business Network International. I have seen some truly incredible people come and go. I have seen some truly incredible people come and stay. The ones who have come and gone have been like meteors. Often, they have lit up the sky with brilliance; but their lack of loyalty and constancy made them a temporary fixture in our network.

In contrast, I have seen business people come and stay. They didn't necessarily announce themselves with fanfare. They came in often quietly and looked for ways to prove their loyalty to others. They took time to get to know the needs of the other businesses to see what they could do to promote other businesses. They took time to learn who the business person truly is. The loyal members respect the other members of integrity. The loyal person returns loyalty with more loyalty. They have remained constant in our chapters. In season and out, they are there, loyal and constant in both their attitude of "Givers Gain" and in their personal and business ethics.

Though quite often there are no parades in their honor, I believe that loyal and constant people always reap the rewards of their diligence. Eavesdrop when their names are mentioned -- all you will hear are kudos. Mention their names to perfect strangers and see the stranger open themselves to you because of your acquaintance with someone of such quality.

Be Bright. Be Brilliant. Light up the Sky. Just do it with an attitude of loyalty and constancy. The more things change, the more they stay the same. A reputation is easy to acquire and hard to change. So in all things -- personal and business -- be sure your ethics are in play at all times and stay loyal to the good people that come into your life.

PEOPLE PROFITS

Was that profits or prophets? No, not the ones who can see the future -- but wait, yes, the ones that can see the future. The future that is full of profits.

Business networking is primarily about relationships and secondarily about transactions. Relationships are ongoing, growing, vital and easily damaged. Transactions occur and then cease to be anything more. In today's economic climate, it becomes more important than it has for years that we business people understand the difference between transactions and relationships. The quick and easy spending that has marked the last two decades of business lent itself to transactions. Now, we are in a more conservative economic climate. There is still plenty of money being spent, but it is being spent more carefully and with more thought. That means we businesspeople need to cultivate long-lasting, ongoing and mutually beneficial relationships that support the spending that is going to happen.

How do we find and create these relationships? Networking. BNI, Business Network International, is an organization that exists to connect business people with other business people for mutually beneficial relationships. In the Lodi Founders Chapter of BNI in the Central Valley of California, we have forty members. Our core group was fourteen people who started this chapter four years ago. We still have the majority of those members and they are still active members. Why? Because for four years we have spent the time and energy to get to know one another and to learn how we can help each other in business. Sometimes that means we are engaging in business directly with one another; always it means being on the lookout for potential business for one another; for the luckiest it also includes business mentoring to foster our relationships and enhance our reputations. All of our activities can be summed up in the motto of BNI, "Givers Gain!"

Being in business alone can be frightening and financially deadly. Look to other people. Help to creat profits for them and this prophet can honestly, and from personal experience, reassure you that those people will help to create profits for you as well. People Profits from a people phrophet.