According to Napoleon Hill, a mastermind group is essential to success. Word of mouth advertising is the undisputed champion of the most effective methods of getting good business. Many organizations don’t have the old weekly sales meetings, and many reps are not being held accountable and or encouraged enough every week. Solopreneurs can suffer from isolation that robs them of their motivation.
A Business Networking Group can be the cure for all those ailments. Some benefits to a functional, effective Networking Group can be referrals passed to you, business skills that you can pick up from presentations and discussions held, camaraderie and encouragement on a regular basis, and a chance to build yourself a sales force by having 5 – 25 other people from your group out remembering you in conversations and passing out your business cards. Promoting one another’s services and products, and becoming customers of each other can take your business to the next level.
To date, there really are just 2 main courses of action if you want to be in a business networking group; Find one that exists and join it, or start your own. For many industries, starting your own is the way to go because your industry seat may already be taken. Even if there were an organization that had groups in your area, chances are something would not work for you: the dues they demand might be too expensive, they might have a philosophy that does not jibe with yours. Maybe the group has dilapidated to a social meeting. Maybe the group is too punitive, or militant. Maybe it is just plain corny. Here’s a couple of things that you might consider if you want to get into a structured weekly networking environment.
The first option is to locate all the groups in your area and see if there is a spot you can fill. I recommend that you do this because you will make a lot of contacts and you just might hit it it off with some people that can really inspire and equip you to do great things. Also, you might just find the perfect match for you; a meeting at the right time, the right distance from your home or place of business, that meshes with your business philosophy and a method that you will enjoy being a part of.
The second course of action is to start one of your own. Benefits: You name the time and place, you direct and lead or at least choose the person that you want to lead the group the way you would like to have it go. You will make more contacts by starting it yourself and you will have a higher visibility (read, more referrals). The con: How to go about it? There is a lot to a networking group, especially starting one, and a lot of it is counter-intuitive. That is, things that would seem to make sense end up destroying a group, and some things you think don’t matter do, and the things a group needs to have just aren’t apparent. So what you need is help.
The answer? Over the last 5 years, the folks at BizBuilders Networking Groups (yes, one of my companies) have developed the 1st Do-It-Yourself Networking Group Start-up and Maintenance Curriculum that gives you all the information and tools that you need – all the forms, the methodology and structure, including web-presence – that you need to get a group started, all at about 10% of the cost to the members to join as joining one of the big dues-collecting organizations.
Here’s how it works: You buy the curriculum, which comes in various sets, and you do the work to get the group together. It is all laid out for you. Each member just purchases their own supplies, or the group can share, whatever, and they each sign up to be listed as a member on the local chapter web-page, which is supplied with the Chapter Start Up Kit. If your chapter, or you, want to collect some dues (which is a good idea because there should be a financial commitment on the part of the members), that’s okay. It stays with you or your chapter. You can use it for whatever you or your chapter feels is most important. If you want to have a group that has no dues, then that’s fine, too.
Here’s why it makes sense: In reality the person that starts the group and leads the group does all the work anyway. Why not spend just a couple hundred dollars and have a whole chapter up and running with each member spending a little bit to be listed on the website and buying their own supplies for a few dollars instead of sending THOUSANDS as a group off to the “National HQ” for “support” that they rarely really deliver?
Why this is the time: I just rolled out the website and the opportunity to get the curriculum this morning. Right now, I am offering the Chapter page set up as part of the package price, and the members listing is only 7 bucks a month. More importantly, it takes time to build a real network, so every week that goes by is vitally important. Getting started is sometimes the hardest part, but it is the part that truly successful people do to differentiate themselves from the herd. Your future is determined by how soon you start and how well you do on everything. Getting started on your networking group and meeting like-minded professionals and passing referrals back and forth is best done immediately.