Positive Power of Principled Profit
Volume 4, Number 5—January, 2007

Positive Power Spotlight: Business Networking International

Imagine a vast international business whose sole purpose is to bring you work through referrals.

Business Networking International, or BNI http://www.bni.com, is such an organization. Using a highly structured format, each BNI chapter actively develops referrals for its members. Each member carries business cards for all the other members in the chapter, and at every appropriate opportunity is able to produce a card for someone seeking services and make the referral.

This, of course, is far more powerful than pressing your own card onto the poor innocent who wondered about the sorts of services you provide--because it has the wonderful credibility of an endorsement from a (presumably trusted) outside source.

Third-party referral is a key piece of the Principled Profit philosophy, and I am not aware of any organization that generates referrals more scientifically than BNI. And while I can't speak for the quality of members nationally, the impression I get from own local chapter is that the quality of work tends to be very high; these are people who will not shame the referring member. Chapters are supported by member dues.

Joining a BNI chapter is a serious commitment; dilettantes need not apply. Each member is expected to attend every week or find a substitute, and to report back on referrals made, deals closed as a result of referrals from other chapter members, etc. Each member also gets to make a brief statement about the kind of work they do and the specific type of referral they are particularly looking for at the moment, and one member gets a more in-depth block. The meetings are tightly structured and last an hour and a half.

Only one member in each field is allowed per chapter, so there's no issue about slighting one person by referring another. The organization claims that in 2006, BNI members made over a million referrals, resulting in over a billion dollars worth of work.

I have been an occasional substitute at my local BNI chapter, and even though I don't participate regularly, I've still done business with at least five members of the group, and had others as radio guests.

Another Recommended Book: Getting to Scale: Growing Your Business Without Selling Out, by Jill Bamburg (Berrett-Koehler, 2006)

Of the three dozen or so books I've read in 2006, I think Getting to Scale may be the most important.

Tackling head-on the issue of whether it's possible to grow a socially responsible company into a large enterprise while maintaining the original mission-and addressing the planning failures of companies like Ben & Jerry's, who saw their mission compromised after they sold out-Getting to Scale documents a number of companies that have managed to stay both profitable and responsible while growing, in some cases, to annual revenues in the nine figures. The book even cites examples of how the founding owners can sell the company while ensuring the continuity of a mission driven by more than a purely financial bottom line.

Several of these enterprises involve manufacturing or other capital-intensive activities, where economies of scale are directly related to the ability to succeed. And from my perspective as the owner of a one-person business who has deliberately chosen to stay small-and who believes strongly that market share is an irrelevant concept to most microbusinesses-this was a real eye-opener.

It was, in fact, quite refreshing to read stories of successful companies that started very modestly-some of them with just a few hundred dollars, ranging up to 6-figure startup costs-companies that had figured out how to build their businesses so that the social mission was so closely entwined with the essential core of business success that it could not be compromised. In keeping with the message of my own book Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, Bamburg not only pays attention to the advantages that socially/environmentally responsible companies have in the marketplace-but also shows how to maintain those advantages while scaling up far beyond the dreams of most socially motivated business owners, but also how to leverage that growth to do greater good in the world.

A couple of my favorite quotes; he second is in the context of growing a nonprofit, but I think it applies equally well to social change-oriented for-profit businesses:

When the company's value proposition is directly tied to the firm's social value proposition, it becomes a lot easier to make day-to-day business decisions, to avoid values conflicts, and to address the "legacy" issues to ensure that the social values of the firm will outlive the founder's direct involvement. The pieces fit together and reinforce each other in a way that is almost magical. (p. 16)

Start something with the low-hanging fruit...Somebody will usually say, "Well, I want to do something and then take it to the hardest place in the world. We're going to go where the need is the biggest. Well, that's great, but...the vast majority of people actually don't live in the very worst places in the world...Find the place where you can actually develop a model and make it work...Then you start saying, "OK, now we can start taking this to slightly harder places." (Martin Fisher, co-founder of KickStart, a nonprofit technology transfer firm working primarily in Africa, p. 130)

I'd describe this one as required reading in any business course I might teach.

If you'd like to buy this book, please follow this link to buy from a BookSense independent bookseller:
http://www.booksense.com/index.jsp?affiliateId=FrugalFun