Should I Join BNI?
Will BNI help my business? Is BNI worthwhile? Is BNI a waste of time?
Ignore the above. Rest assured BNI is a complete waste of time. I’m just trying to sucker the search engine bots into ranking me higher for the above phrases.
I really don’t have a lot of time to play with this blog I’m mostly busy working. (no thanks to BNI referrals) But recently a reader posted a comment in response “BNI Sucks” article. I think the point that he so ineloquently attempted to make is that the poor showing we had during our 9 month tenure in BNI was my fault rather than what is in my opinion the many failings of the BNI program and organization. It’s an interesting point and straight out of the “How to Manage a Cult for Dummies” handbook. That is if someone is perceptive enough to see though the bullshit and call it at face value immediately charge them with “not getting it” so you can setup an us versus the outsiders pattern. This is standard operating procedure religious / cult nitwits to separate the people that think from the dolts who believe everything they are told. We can’t have logic, reason and fact checking mucking up the works!
Somewhere near the intersection of no impulse control and bad grammar Chris of ALS / Absolute Locksmiths & Security http://www.als24hr.com / info@als24hr.com – posted the following drivel on my blog;
Your a small mined prick who simply did not understand BNI. I have been in BNI for a long time and made a lot money from it,and made a lot of other members money from my own efforts. It just shows you don’t understand it and this is why you failed badly at BNI. The only saga is you. Grow up and wake up to the real world you sad twat…
Chris is from England. I’ve always looked down on the British. This is the country that gave us boiled beef, warm beer, bad teeth and Benny Hill. The once great empire reduced to following the USA into Iraq like a pup on a rope. If you were to write a book about England this would be the title;
England 800 Years of Failure: From owning India and America to following orders like a good doggy.
It’s a deserving end for all of your pompous pageantry and foppy faux royalty. But at least you have Big Fucking Ben right?
Consider this; when the Ford Motor Company (who makes some of the shittiest cars on the road) purchased British automotive standard bearer Jaguar in 1990 Jaguar’s quality actually went up. How bad do you have to be at making cars to get taken to school by Ford? We have Intel, Google, and Cisco Systems and the best of your technology is worse than fucking Ford. (And I don’t want to hear this Bletchley Park we invented the computer Allen Turning bullshit. I haven’t seen dick out of the place since the 1940s)
The one thing that you Brits have always had over Americans is that you sound smarter and more refined than us. You have better delivery and diction. You put the average British plumber next to the average American surgeon 9 out of 10 people are going to want the plumber to remove their appendix. Brits simply sound smarter than Americans. But poor Chris missed out on the one inbred benefit to being British (but not the actual inbreeding) sounding smarter. Because when you read what Chris read it’s pretty clear that it doesn’t sound real smart.
My final comment on England before moving on to BNI; there are exactly two reasons why you British bitches aren’t dressed up in lederhosen serving superior beer to your German masters;
1) The USA
2) The English Channel
Because without the USA and the English Channel your cloudy little island nation would have suffered exactly the same fate as France, but without the good food and hot women. So show some respect and appreciation the next time you are inclined to call an American a twat, you twat. You will eternally owe us.
Now that I’ve used most of our regularly scheduled broadcast to bag on our wooden toothed British brethren I don’t have a lot of time to expose BNI for the fraud that it is. So for the sake of brevity let’s just do a little math. These are all round numbers from the BNI chapter than I belonged to (note the glorious past tense)
Our BNI chapter had approx 30 members and our chapter earnings were approx $60,000. Average chapter member earnings are $2000 each for the year. When you subtract your yearly dues of $600 the average member in my chapter earned $1400. If each BNI chapter member averaged 4 hours of BNI related activities for 48 weeks a year that would mean the average member in my BNI chapter would have invested 190 hours in BNI. So if each member earns on average $1400/yr divided by 190 hours per year that means they have profited approx $7.30 for each hour spent on BNI activities.
So the assertion that Chris made is that I didn’t “get” BNI. It was my fault that we didn’t turn up a lot of business though BNI is false. The math is clearly on my side. Our chapter is one of the better performing local chapters and I brought in near our chapter average of $2000 which works out to somewhere around $9/hr for me. A miserable result.
Here is the why I’m annoyed with BNI. Because they sell false hope and they take advantage of the weak. I regularly see people come though the BNI meetings who’s business is down on it’s luck because of the current economic circumstances. They hard sell BNI membership as a solution to their sales slump. They give the illusion that this is a great sales and marketing tool when the to prospective members while hiding the actual performance of the organization. Of course if they told prospective members the truth that the average member earns between $5 to $10 an hour. Some less, some more. No one would join.
I went to a BNI breakfast today, networking should really help my business, but BNI seems very cultish it seems that the value of a chapter comes from its members, so why am I asked to pay 500 pounds to an multi-level organisation when it’s really the grass root members who are my advocates.
One of the directors gave an acrostic sermon, based on RECESSION, all I can remember is the word recession.
I thank you for your blog, as it helped precipitate the unease I felt from their hard sell tactics.
(on a lighter note, have you actually been to France?)
I’ve never been to France. The entire above article was based on my view of Europe formed from the movie “A Fish Called Wanda”, various Monty Python skits and the BBC show “Top Gear.”
The Germans do make much better cars and beer than the British.
I firmly believe that the statue of limitations has run out on England for the crimes of Benny Hill. So I shouldn’t bag on you for that.
On a more serious note. The average member in our chapter didn’t earn a lot though BNI. A few (2-3) did alright. But for the majority it was a complete waste of time and money. Myself included.
If you sell something very generic on the that everyone could use on the retail level you might do OK; insurance, banking, cable tv/internet. If you are doing business to business type selling it’s most likely going to be a giant waste of time and it will suck away energy from your more profitable sales channels.
Grumpy Nerd
Great comments about BNI and you have decsribed brilliantly, the ficticous leads and the bullshit fed to the suckers( paying members)
I resigned after six months in the chapter because I had enough of the propaganda and had grown weary of the phony leadership and MLM all stars.
When I joined BNI they never informed me that my breakfast dues were $780 ( paid every 2 months in advance) and eventtually increasing to $1320 when the chapter moved 20 miles to a new location without a membership vote.
The real cost of the membership starts out at $430 per year, breakfast dues and another couple of hunderd dollars per year in training fees, which by the way you have to pay in order to be allowed to perform your 10 min presentation.
The only people that seemed making money from chapter referrals in the chapter semed to be the real estate person, the dentist, and maybe the home improvement salesperson.
Out of loyalty to the group I agreed to use the services of the dentist, I went there for an” exam” or teeth cleaning”
he was out of network on insurance and charged me $450 for a teeth cleaning. he also informed
me that Ineeded gum work done and that this would cost $7600 but he would discount me 20%.
No thanks I had a quote already from anotyh dentist
for $1400!
Eventually I had enough and resigned via email .
I posted on another thread. A few other things. They don’t understand that the attendance policy is too strict. They should follow the 80% rule of law school which would be 5 cuts per 6 months. A solo guy, like a computer guy, is not going to be able to make enough meetings. MM, go to BNI or do a closing? What if I have court-appointed apperance? Thanks to your blog to convince me to fire BNI. Misner has a great scam going, no doubt. Kudos to him, he got 3 years out of me, no more.
I agree that Chris has freely demonstrated that he is an illiterate and abusive nitwit.
However, did you know that he is also black?
Will you be as quick to ascribe his apparent lack of intelligence to his ethnicity, as you are to his nationality? Maybe you’ve always looked down on black people, as well as the British. You might also go on to say that black Africans are primitive and uneducated, and therefore better off being enslaved by white Americans.
But I very much doubt it.
Of course, I have no idea what Chris’s ethnicity is. (Or what yours is, for that matter.) But I use this to illustrate that your argument would have immeasurably more integrity if you rose above cheap nationalism and stuck to the simple facts of why he is an idiot. After all, it was he who made himself look foolish with his lack of a logical argument and childish name-calling. It would be far smarter for you to leave him down at that level instead of choosing to join him there.
I’m also disappointed that you used his email address to identify his business, when he entrusted it to you in good faith that his email, while required, would not be published.
By the way, with regard to speaking German, research the etymology of the word “dollar”. You’ll find that, as an American, you speak a little bit of German almost every day.
I’m looking forward to reading more of your writing, Grumpy Nerd. But you’re much funnier when you rally against people’s idiocy and personal misgivings, rather than the things over which they have no control.
hI, EVERYONE…FOUND THIS SITE RESEARCHING BNI…YOU GUYS PROVIDE ME WITH LOTS OF LAUGHS IN ADDITION TO THE FACTS GRUMPY NERD: IF YOUR BUSINESS EVER FAILS YOU MIGHT LOOK INTO TRYING YOUR HAND AS A ‘STAND UP’ COMIC. IT APPEARS YOU HIT A NERVE WITH A TOUCHY BRIT…SOME OF US CAN’T FACE THE TRUTH. OBSERVER IN THE USA
Touchy Brit? Not at all.
In fact, I’d like to thank you, OBSERVER IN THE USA, for (somewhat loudly) demonstrating that idiocy is a wholly human trait, and that no single nation has yet successfully monopolised it.