Chapter goals – reached £1 million, which is great. The goal the current leadership team has set is to work closer with individual members to ensure each of you, each of us, is receiving what you need from BNI. One of the ways we’re doing that is with the new mentor programme. After the 6-week programme, each of us has a mentor and will be having a sit-down meeting with them every two months, and a short catch-up in between.

That was the first step.

Our next step is to get a little closer to our individual goals. In your mentor meetings, you will probably talk in some depth about your goals. And we know goals aren’t always financial. We’ve said they can be personal development and training, peer support and mentoring for our businesses, but typically, when it comes to renewal and we’re asked to put our hands in our pocket for a renewal fee, we tend to revert to looking at finances.

Now we’re all business owners, so we will all at some point have sat down and had to work out some figures or some sort of business plan. What turnover we might need, what costs we might have, and what profit will we be left with to make running our own business worthwhile. And you probably need to make adjustments during the year. See what’s working, try new methods – and there are plenty of methods within BNI you can use to grow your referrals. It’s what works best for you and your business.

How many of us have heard the saying “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”?

So what we want to do today is to start that plan. Identify our collective goal and then how we’ll get there. We want to know what the people in this room did in the last year is so we can see how much we need to grow that by. The £1 million included members who have since left, some of whom will have built up a decent BNI business, so we only want to focus on those in the room.

I have here a sheet that asks you to note down how much business BNI has brought for you in the last 12 months – or you can change the number of months if you joined less than 12 months ago. And at the bottom there’s a big fat cheque you can write yourself for 2017. Now you don’t have to put your name on it, you’ll work with your mentors on individual goals. What we’d like to do with this is add them all together – pro rata if you joined under 12 months ago – and work out what our chapter business goal is for 2017 for all of us – so we’re going to ask you to hand this in at the Contributions section. The reason we want the historic data is so we can understand the difference – do we need 50% more business, double the business, and so on.

Now there’s another saying “A goal without a plan is just a wish” – and we’re not here to wish, so we have a plan.

Our new BNI Director Consultant, Gavin, who you should all have seen or met by now, will be doing a series of ed slots in January. We’ll be looking at the difference – and practical ways in which we can all help each other meet our goals.

This all falls into the Givers’ Gain philosophy. If we can all work out the best way to ask each other to help us in our 60 seconds and our 10 mins, and we all take action, then we can look forward to 2017 being our best year yet.

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