How it all started…
It was early 1984 when our founder, Dr Ivan Misner, PhD [read bio here], found himself in a quandary. Just like everybody else with a thriving business, he invested in a nice big house. But no sooner had he moved in than he learned he was about to lose his biggest client who was in the process of folding up! Being a Management Consultant, he naturally weighed several options. Advertising? It’s a necessity for many businesses, especially retail, and it can be very effective - but his market was limited and hard to target. A barely adequate ad campaign would cost a lot more than he could afford.
He tried direct mail. The experts say a 2 percent response is considered good through this method. As a business consultant, he got zero!
He could put together a massive public relations program but again, his cost and limitations were a lot like those of advertising.
He could of course, lock himself in his office with a coffee pot and a telephone and start cold-calling to ask for business. He knew how to cold-call. He had trained whole marketing departments on how to do it. In fact, he worked with them so long that he knew he’d never wanted to do another cold-call ever again! There had to be a better way…
Actually, the answer was fairly obvious. He was already getting most of his new business from referrals and his speaking engagements. He knew that his highest-quality, longest-lasting, best-paying clients were those who had been referred - yet there were no reliable way of increasing those referals.
What he needed was a focused and structured networking system designed from ground up to do a single thing well: generate the largest possible number of quality referrals in a positive way. With that in mind, he approached several business people he knew and trusted and told them what he had been thinking about. As expected, they jumped on the idea and eventually held BNI’s first formal meeting on January 1985 and as they say, the rest is history…
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