Changing the way the world does business
I heard Dr. Ivan Misner, founder of BNI say that “a company’s vision should be audacious.
And BNI’s vision is just that; “changing the way the world does business!†What is interesting about this vision and this statement is the fact that BNI is changing the way the world does business back to the way the world use to do business.
Just a couple of hundred years ago the world did business the way BNI’s vision suggest and that is doing business with people you know and trust or at least with someone that you were referred to by someone that you know and trust to someone they know and trust.
A lot of knowing and trusting is the key to the way people really want to do business. People are forced to do business with someone they do not know and trust because they do not know someone in that field of expertise.
This happened because of how the world began to change. For thousands of years modern man did business with their neighbors and people they knew and trusted. This changed in 1422 when The Gutenberg printing press was invented. Millions of copies of books were delivered into the hands of the common man. People began to learn and think about things that were not in their neighborhoods.
Then came the Industrial revolution 400 years later. People started to live next to and do business with people they didn’t even know. Businesses became more specialized, the family doctor no longer did house calls and the profession of being a doctor was divided into hundreds of specialties. Even carpenters and tradesmen divided their level of expertise into narrow and specific services.
All this being said, consumers were forced to go to the yellow pages and now to Google to find someone that they don’t know and trust to get their needs met and hope for the best. BNI changes that. BNI members want to develop a relationship with their customers and contacts to the extent that they will trust them for a referral. BNI members also want to meet as many business professionals that are experts in their field and develop a trust in them to the point that they can refer their contacts to them and be referred by them.
The word referral means; someone introducing someone to someone that is an expert in their field. This works because people want to do business with people they know and trust or at least be referred to someone by someone they know and trust. BNI is changing the way the world does business by changing the world back to the way the world used to and wants to do business.