Ivan Misner is the Founder & Chief Visionary Officer of BNI, the world’s largest business networking organization. BNI was founded in 1985. The organization now has over 7,000 chapters throughout every populated continent of the world.
- Ivan learned from his trucking business that when money is tight, don’t fib to people. Don’t tell people, “You’ll get the check this week.” People will work with you if you are just honest with them.
- You can’t talk your way out of something you behave yourself into.
- It took him twenty years to get to the point of success where he is now. He had lots of failures along the way. It is those failures that are the best lessons as what not to do in order to be successful.
- Define yourself by your successes, acknowledge your failures, learn from your failures, move on and don’t live in those failures.
- Make a plan, it is a road map. However, sometimes there are detours along the way and you have to be willing to go with them.
- Set goals and set up a system to measure your performance to achieve your goals easily.
- Ivan’s philosophy is to do six things a thousand times and not a thousand things six times.
- To start a business, ask yourself these questions. What are you passionate about? What do you like doing? Start with that. Then you look for business opportunities in those areas that you like doing.
- He was able to build his BNI brand by writing books, which he is passionate about.
- You may not have the answer, but you have to know where to find the answer.
- You can start to build a following by writing a blog and building a platform. You do that for a year or so and you’ve built content for your book. Once you have the following, you will have a reputation that can enable you to get the interviews, but it also will give you credibility for jobs and it will open up doors.
- Get out and connect with people. Networking is a contact sport. You can’t rely on just your content to replace your contacts.
- Build credibility through your blogging and writing, as well as connect with people face to face. This will help you build your business.
- VCP Process – (Visibility Credibility Profitability). First you have to be visible in the community. People have to know who you are and what you do. Then you have to establish credibility. That is when people know who you are, what you do and that you are good at it. Profitability is when people know who you are, what you do, that you are good at it and they are willing pass you referrals on an ongoing reciprocal basis.
- Networking goes wrong when people try to jump over visibility, jump right over credibility and try to get right to profitability.
- Offer help and people will hand you their business card.
- Last year in BNI, they passed 6.6 million referrals and generated $8.6 billion dollars worth of business for their members all around the world.
- Ignorance on fire is better than knowledge on ice. If you go with what you are passionate about and you are on fire about it, don’t worry if you don’t have all the answers.
- Only you can motivate yourself.
- If you think you can or you think you can’t, you’ll be right.
- The only choice to have to get you where you want to go is to try. Any other choice will get you failure.
- We have a lot less control over winning or losing at something than we do over trying or quitting at something. Always try, you can eventually win. If you always quit, you can never win.
- To be part of BNI, go to www.bni.com. Find a local chapter, go visit a group. They allow one person per profession. They get together every week. They pass each other referrals. The only way to join is to be approved by the local chapter.
Ivan Misner Contact Information
Website
https://www.facebook.com/IvanMisner.BNIFounder
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