Joining groups or networks is a good method for helping your business flourish and become more relevant in your industry. In this episode, Scott Carson talks about how he was invited to the BNI networking event and how he was influenced to join the group. BNI or Business Network International is a global organization where members regularly meet to support each other. Listen to Scott as he shares the benefits of joining BNI and why you too can benefit from being in it.
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Building Your Network With BNI
I’m excited to be here with you and I’ve got some great content. The thing is going to save you all a lot of toils, stress, things like that with some things that we came to an understanding of some things. It came from me being invited out to a networking event. I’ve got a friend here locally in town who’s a mortgage broker. He asked me if I wanted to go to lunch with him to his networking event and I’m like, “Sure, I’d be glad to go.” I went with him. He brings me as a guest to his BNI networking event, which is Business Network International. We were talking about real estate and talking about some of the podcasts and stuff that we do. I go and I was surprised for a couple of reasons. I get there and it’s a great group. It’s over lunch, it has roughly 40 to 45 people there. Everyone’s going around and introducing themselves.
As a guest, I got up, introduced myself and talked about what I do. What was amazing was my friend handed me this placemat and I flipped the placement over and it had everybody’s contact information: their name, company, their focus or their niche inside the club, their email address and their phone number. I’m sitting there cracking up and it’s been years since I’ve been to a BNI event. I used to go to one over a decade ago here in Austin but with the travel and doing things more so outside of Texas, it didn’t make sense for me to join a local group that I’ll miss more than six times in six months.
They allow you to miss once a month. In a six-month period, it’s three misses and people will sit in your place, but they want you to go too. I’m sitting there and I’m like, “What’s the cost?” It’s about $700 to join. It was about $800. It’s $599 for the first year. You’re paying for lunches. I was talking to the person that runs it who’s saying that it’s somewhere between $15 and $25 for lunch or breakfast if we go on. We only meet on Tuesday through Fridays. One of the great things is inside this group, they had the rehab guy, the professional contractor and the HVAC. They had the inspector and realtor, which is easy to come by for a lot of us. A lot of the professionals that we’re using not only in the traditional sense but we’re also using in note investing, “I need to pull some comps.” They’re meeting every week, either in the mornings or the afternoons. That means four times a week and they’re sharing references.
I had the big light go off in my head because the lady asked me, “You’re invited. Who invited you?” I said, “My buddy.” They’re like, “We didn’t know if you’d saw the website.” I was like, “What do you mean the website?” She says, “If you wanted to go to other BNI events, you can go to the website and find where all the chapters are and see all the members that they have.” I was like, “Ding, ding.” One of the guys said, “They’ve got 5,000 chapters.” I was like, “That makes so much sense in joining a group like this. If I was doing more stuff here locally, I would be joining a group here to find people to help me with my local real estate stuff, my handyman, my contractors, plumbing and HVAC. All those vendors in roughly one spot.” Why is that different than talking to some local person out there? Some people are like, “I don’t want to hire a contractor who has time to lunch one day a week. I want to be working.”
That makes sense but also there’s a little bit of professionalism because they are paying for referrals. They’re part of a group. They’re referring business back and forth, their inviting people. That’s a better group than reaching to any Tom, Dick or Harry out there or Susan, either guys or girls for any vendors that you’re using in your note or real estate investing business. We’ve always talked about using Meetup groups as a great place or going to local real estate investing clubs. I still think that’s a very valuable aspect of things.
Business Network International: BNI or Business Network International is very useful when looking for referrals in specific areas.
One thing I would do is if you’re in an area or you’re buying in an area or if you had a note in an area because I’ve already reached out and done this in the last two days is an areas where I needed help with, I went on BNI and looked for a BNI networking club in that market. I reached out to the president or the person in charge of the event. It’s where I look to see because all the BNI groups will give you the full contact or the member list of those paid members in a specific area. They allow you to reach out with a phone number or email address directly to that member to reach out for new business. These are people looking for business and looking for referral stuff.
I’ll give an example. A local realtor referred the rehab crew out, they referred out the HVAC and they referred out to the general contractor or the person that would do small tile work versus the big contract in size. People were working together to share business and I was like, “That makes so much more sense of them trying to hunt and peck and try to find individual people.” If you were on Note Night in America, you could listen to some of the newer episodes that we’ve released. We had Dickie Baldwin on from Baldwin Advisory Group about how to find realtors and some other things. I still believe that’s a very valuable asset for finding realtors, especially investor-friendly realtors, because not all realtors are created equal. That’s the one thing I would maybe say.
Most of your BNI realtors are your normal transactions. Single-family homes, buying and selling, you can go on that route. They may have a referral to somebody, but still though it might be an opportunity for you to find somebody locally. At least have contact and/or have somebody they could refer it out to so that it’s allowing them to refer business out and be a win-win across the board for everybody involved. That’s one thing that is a valuable tool to use in your market.
I’ll give an example. I jumped on and I’ve been here in Austin, Texas. I wanted to see how many groups were available when I looked at that stuff. I jumped on, there are over 28 groups in Austin alone. Austin is a pretty big market. I don’t think that it’ll be 28 groups in every city. There’s anywhere from 12 members to over 60 because they only allow one person of one niche inside each group, if you don’t know how BNI works. They meet weekly, they’re tracking referrals, tracking business closed across the place. They encourage you to visit once or twice. You’re going to pay a fee at the door for breakfast or lunch or for the meeting space. I actually found out that there’s a BNI group that meets in my office complex here. I didn’t know about it, but they’ve been meeting for six months here, which is a surprise.
What I want to get at is if you’re in a bigger city or you’re investing in a bigger city, it might make something that you might want a VA to do. You might want to have an assistant jump online and pull that information for you in those markets because now you’ve got people that you could reach out to you. I’ll give an example roughly here in the Austin Texas market. There are roughly about 800 people that are a part of the BNI clubs. There are 28 or 29 clubs here. That’s a substantial good list of people to network with. That’s a substantial list of people here locally to build a network or wherever your network is going to be if you’re investing in an area that you’re not at. It might be an easy way for you to reach out to and go from there. I thought it was a valuable tool.
Business Network International: The BNI website is a quality tool for finding professionals.
I thought it was a valuable lead, a valuable asset for you that are reading out there in note nation. You can attend. It doesn’t mean you have to sign up for things, but I won’t be joining any because the fact is I travel too much with what we got going on, especially with the different things we want to buy and market and things like that. It will probably not make sense, although you’ve got to think about it. Maybe I’ll find a group, I’ll join a group or I’ll go to some of these other bigger groups to see how they are. It might make it worth it for a referral business in some fashion. There were investors there, there were bankers there, there were mortgage officers, loan originators and title people were also there. You name it, they were there.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been to the BNI club and I have not been to a BNI group since I started doing the podcast or the videos or even before that. It was over many years, but it was a valuable tool for you all. For what some of us are paying for different things, it might be a more effective marketing piece if you’re going to drop $700 to $800 or $1,000. Now you’ve got a Rolodex of business cards or lists of those that do what you do or do what you need to be done and who knows whether they can refer other things for you out there as well. There are other people in the groups. There’s a Mary Kay lady there. There was an essential oil person. There were The Wine Boys as they called themselves. There was an executive business coach there. There’s a variety of different people that you may not be referring business back and forth, but you never know when you might need somebody.
I thought it was valuable. I thought it’s worthy enough to bring it up. The first thing I would do is I would go to BNI.com and type in an area. If I type in Austin, Texas, it pulls up the full list of clubs that are available for you. When you type in and you hit on a specific club, you can click on that club and then it pulls up the website for all the contacts that are there. Let’s say I am buying something in Chicago, Illinois. I’m going to find this chapter. Go to BNI.com, find a chapter, enter your location and postal code. I’m going to type in Chicago and hit search. There are 25 groups of BNI that are networked in there.
If I click on one chapter detail here, it’s got fifteen members. If I hit the visit the chapter, I can see the leaders. I can see all the members here so I can see the real estate. There’s a real estate attorney here in Chicago, damage restoration. There’s a sales coach, mortgage broker, chiropractor, event planner, handyman, property casualty insurance, banker, web design, attorney for litigation, accounting, personal injury, litigation and residential real estate as a member of this group. If I click on real estate attorney, it gives me the name and contact that I can type in. That’s a good thing. You can google and find them and go from there.
It’s a pretty relatively easy website to work through. It does give you the leaders. That might be something to work at. If I clicked on the chapter website, here’s their name, phone number. If I click on send an email, it allows me to send an email message through the actual portal. It won’t let you scrub information but it allows you to send it through the website. That’s another resource for you to use to leverage besides Meetup groups and real estate investment clubs. This might be a better quality tool for finding professionals. If they’re paying marketing, they’re paying and understand the value of networking, they are paying for the value, especially on the contractor side, we know that people can be sometimes shady. They try to cut corners and stuff. They’re going to be a little bit more expensive, but they’re also would be a higher value for what they do because they are constantly getting business. Cheap does not always equal the best as we all know, after you’ve ever contracted with somebody for different things.
I would check this out. This would be a very valuable tool for you to use or add to your due diligence, to your repertoire for assets that you back. In the past, we’ve talked about using ActiveRain as a great place. That’s not as easy to use as this as I found out to be. I’m liking this aspect of things. It’s a great way for you to use this tool, this website to help you out. They can help save you some time, money or we help you make some time and money back by being able to use stuff in a one-stop-shop like that for the most part. Go out, check it out, make sure to use it and we’ll see you at the top.
Important Links:
- Business Network International
- Dickie Baldwin – Previous episode
- ActiveRain
- http://BNI.com