Networking, Legacy, & Scaling your Business, with Ivan Misner

Welcome to Building your Leader Brand. Today on the show, Bob is speaking with Ivan Meisner. If you take a look at United Nations' estimates of GDP, Gross Domestic Product, there are actually 100 countries in the world with a lower GDP than what BNI generated for our members as just last year. That blows my mind. I am humbled and honoured to be part of an organisation that makes such a huge difference in local communities and A global impact as well. Hi there, and welcome back to Building Your Leader Brand. My name is Bob Gentle, and every week I speak to incredible people who share their secrets to building, marketing, and monetizing your expertise and the mindset you need for your business to grow and thrive. If you're new to the show, then while you still have whatever device it is in your hand, take a second to subscribe. Now, I say this every single week. I say I'm a bit excited, and I've been really looking forward to this conversation organisation. And I always mean it, but today I mean it even more than the normal. I am thrilled to welcome Ivan Meisner from BNI to the show. If you don't know Ivan, if you don't know BNI. A, you've probably been living under a rock as a business owner, but BNI is almost certainly the world's number one referral networking organisation. I probably have been a member for what feels like most of my adult life. I have a lot to thank you for, Ivan. Joining me here today, probably one of the biggest ones. So thank you very much for joining us. Truly my pleasure. Happy to be here. I think an entrepreneur is either working in their flame or working in their wax. When they're working in their flame, they're on fire, they're excited, they love what they do. You can hear it in their voice, you can see it in the way they behave. When they're working in their wax, it just takes all their energy away. You can see that in the way they behave, and you can hear that in their voice. This is my flame. I love doing interviews, I love speaking. I love pouring into entrepreneurs and talking to them about what I did right and what I did wrong. Let people take bits and pieces, and hopefully it inspires people to be their best self. So I have a few key areas that I'd like to speak about today. I think everybody listening knows what a referral is. There's probably a lot of misconceptions and a lot of assumptions around that. But one of the things One of the things that I know from speaking to hundreds of business owners is it doesn't seem to matter the scale of the business, how much automation is built in, how much people might declare themselves as an online business owner. The opportunities that tend to move the dial always seem to come through relationships in one way or another. Something I'm very aware of is whatever seems to be working, trying to put systems around that. For me, BNI is one of these systems that just works. I'm really interested to hear from you because I think a lot of people, if they're used to BNI, will be accustomed to BNI operating at a local It's a wonderful thing for local businesses. But I'm aware that there is a bigger potential in BNI for people, particularly when they want to build a national or an international consulting practise, which is my main area. And there's very little actually spoken about that. And I'd be interested to hear your perspective on how my audience might exploit or participate or thrive in a network like BNI. Well, I think when I started BNI, it was all about local. I'd like to tell you I had this vision of an international organisation, but I just needed some referrals. I was a management consultant. I needed some referrals. I put together a group, and That group turned into two, three, four, five because people kept asking me to help them generate referrals. Bob, today we have 11,300 chapters in more than 75 countries around the world. It is about working locally but thinking globally because you can connect with people worldwide through our online platform. Last year, the organisation, and this blows my mind today. We're celebrating our 40th anniversary. Forty. 40th anniversary. I started being I when I was 28 years old. You can do the math. We're 40 years old as of a month or two ago. Last year, we passed 16 million referrals, 16 million referrals worldwide, and generated over 25 billion. That's billion with a B, 25 billion in what we call, and you know, Thank you for closed business, which is the amount of business our members generated for each other. Now, here's the incredible part I'm talking about, global. If you take a look at United Nations' estimates of GDP, Gross Domestic Product, there are actually 100 countries in the world with a lower GDP than what BNI generated for our members just last year. That blows my mind. I am humbled and honoured to be part of an organisation that makes such a huge difference in local communities and a global impact as well. So one of the things you were mentioning just before we started recording was a book, and you have written a lot of books. I think for many people, you are probably the number one authority on, if not networking, most certainly, referral networking. Why another book? Well, there's a few reasons. I love opportunities to do podcasts and interviews and whatnot. I learned years ago that when I go, particularly in the early days when there weren't so many podcasts. It was all radio or maybe television. If I went to the radio stations or TV stations and I said, Hey, talk about BNI, they'd say, Take an ad out. We're not going to talk about BNI. But I learned a long time ago that the media will interview any idiot with a book, and I have 30. I started getting lots and lots of interviews. There's really two reasons. One that I continue to do. One is that I I want to create content to help business people be more successful. The second is that I want to be able to get exposure for what I do, for what I write about, and of course, for BNI. That's why I keep doing books. The latest book I did was done with two people from the United Kingdom, Greg Davies and Julian Lewis. That's the second book I've done with them. They were great to work with. I love working with them. What is the theme this time? The first book we did together was Infinite Giving, and it was about the seven principles of givers gain, which is BNI's principle core value. This book is called Infinite Legacy, and it's about the legacy that we leave in life. When they came to me, they came to me with the idea, I jumped at it because the more grey hair that I have gotten, the more people have started asking me, what's the legacy that you hope to leave? My answer was always It's probably the shortest answer I ever gave in any of my live talks. My answer was, your life is your legacy. However you lived your life is the legacy that you leave behind. In doing this book, I found that's partly true, but not completely true, because you can leave an accidental legacy or an intentional legacy. The opening to this book, Infinite Legacy, is probably the best opening of any of the books that I've ever been involved with. It tells a story about a man more than 100 years ago, a true story, about a man more than 100 years ago sitting in a coffee shop, having a cup of coffee, reading a newspaper. He was in Europe. He's reading a newspaper. He goes to the obituary section, and in the obituary section, it says, The merchant of death has died. He was like, Wow, who's this? It was him. It was his He thought, Well, this is going to be a mistake. He read the bio, and it was him. He was like, Oh, my goodness. How? Of course, there's this question of why did they think he was dead? But the bigger question was the bio that was left because this particular gentleman was the inventor of dynamite. He invented it for mining and for building deconstruction so that new buildings could be built, but it ended up being used for war. He was leaving an accidental legacy. Soon after, he literally, on one sheet of paper, hand I wrote the outline for a foundation that would recognise people in science, in mathematics, in literature, in global impact. We know of this person today because that's the Nobel Prize. It was Alfred Nobel. What most people don't know is he invented dynamite. But very few people know that, but they almost Everybody knows the Nobel Prizes, particularly the Nobel Peace Prize. So he decided he was not going to leave an accidental legacy. He wanted to leave an intentional legacy. And he left an amazing intentional legacy in the It's a really interesting idea. As you were speaking, I'm thinking legacy, that's a long way down the road. You could almost look at legacy as a little bit of a luxury. However, what it absolutely is, is the direct consequence of building that personal brand intentionally. It's the afterimage. It's what's left when the personal brand winks out. If you're going to build an intentional legacy, I guess it goes hand in hand with building that intentional personal brand today. Our personal brand, to a large extent, is about what happens between us and other people. It's the connexion. It is about relationships. There's a great quote that we have in the book that I read in college. I think I was a freshman in college. I'll paraphrase it here. It's by Jean Paul Sartre. It said, We all die too soon or too late, and yet our life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. We are our deeds in life and little more. In the beginning of your comment there, the question, you talked about not thinking about legacy. The truth is, our legacy happens as soon as that line is drawn neatly under our life. And that can happen tomorrow. It can happen 20 years, 30 years, 40 years from now. We don't know. It's about how we interact, and that's what we say a lot in the book, how we interact with other people. Because legacy is not just about money. The What I see we leave is about the relationships that we have with people. I look at my parents and we talk about it in the book. My parents had no money. They were lower working class. My dad worked, my mum had health issues, she didn't work, but they were amazing people. Any people skills I got, I got from my mother because she was great with people. My dad, not so much. But I got my work ethic from my dad. He was a hard working man and a family man. Those two things impacted the person who I became. Now, you may think, so what? Well, so what is, it's how I showed up in the world was on what I learned from them. And the ripple effect of the person that they taught me to be, the ripple effect has, I'd like to think, affected hundreds of thousands of other people in the work that I've done because of what I was taught as a young man. It doesn't have to be about money. It's about the relationships and the impact that you make on other people. On that note, I'd be really interested to jump into a time machine and go back to your a few months into BNI in your own home, as I recall from the legends. What happened to trigger you to scale that? I'm interested to know at what point did you realise, I need help? How did you actually execute on that? That's a great question. It's a two-part question, and it's a two-part answer to the question because I still rassembled into it. Like I said earlier, I'd like to tell you I had this vision of an international organisation. I just wanted one group because I needed referrals. I lost a big client as a management consultant, and so I needed more referrals, and I got almost all my business through referrals and speaking engagements I put together this group. Someone came to me and said, I can't join because in BNI, for those of you who don't know, we take one person per professional classification. Her classification was represented, so she couldn't join. She said, Hey, would you help me open up a second group? I actually said, No, this isn't what I do. I'm a business consultant. I don't run networks. She said, Hi, this is consulting, and you're helping me build my business. That's a stretch, but okay. I opened up the second chapter just a few months after the first one. At the first meeting in the second chapter, two people came who couldn't join because of a classification conflict, and both of them said, This is amazing. I could get a tonne of business. Would you help me open up our own groups? I said, No, this isn't what I do. But they talked me into At the end, so I fell into it and just I was being pulled. In marketing, there's push marketing and pull marketing. Push marketing, you're pushing a rock up a hill. I was being pulled through the marketplace. I didn't I really understand that. I opened in January eighth, 1985. By December, the last week of December, I always take a week off right around New Year's to contemplate, to think how... Because as a consultant, there's not a lot of work usually between Christmas and New Year's. I take time to think about, Where do I want to go in the next few years? How did last year go? That year, I was like, What the heck happened? Because by December, I had 20 chapters, and I wasn't trying. It hit me. That was what I call my Brody moment. Remember the movie Jaws? Yes. Okay, so at the end of the movie, Sheriff Brody is throwing Chum, bloody fish out into the ocean. For the first time, he sees the shark come out. It's the first time you really see the shark in the movie. He sees the shark, and remember, he turns to the captain and he says, You're going to need a bigger boat. That was my Brody moment, was in December of 1985, like 11 and a half months after I started being eye, where I had my Brody moment, and I said, This is going to be way, way bigger than I anticipated. That's when I sat down and started to write a plan to scale the business. At that point, I was thinking national. A little later, it became international. Today, we're in over 75 countries. Along that trajectory- Can I just add one thing to this? For those of you listening or watching, at some point, if you want to scale, whether you want to be global or just locally scale, you got to have a plan. You can't wing it. Winging it is not going to allow you to scale. Again, even if you just want to scale in your community, you have to sit down and think about how you're going to do that. What are you going to do specifically? And then start to do those things. Otherwise, had I not sat down and really created a plan, this organisation wouldn't have 11,300 chapters. Sorry to interrupt you. Well, no, not at all. I think that is important because a lot of people do accidentally fall into business. It can work, but if you want it to really work, it's going to need a plan. This is a really nosy question. But when you began, this is why I'm here, honestly. The first group, second group, I can look at this as it's just Ivan being a nice guy, get some friends together, just being helpful. When did that turn into this is a business? Well, it was a business from the beginning in the sense that there are costs in running any organisation. I charged dues from the very beginning and told people at the very first meeting, these are going to be the fees for us to be able to operate this and market the concept and get the things that we need, get badges and card holders and whatever things that we had. There were membership fees from day one in the organisation, even though I didn't plan on it, scaling it at that moment. There were fees. It was actually part of my consulting business. My consulting company My company was AIM Consulting. It was BNI, an AIM Consulting Affiliate. Technically, we had a different name when we first started BNI. It was called The Network, but we couldn't trademark that name, so we changed it to BNI. But it was an affiliate of my consulting business. I often look at something like BNI as a little bit of a game. It's a game that we like to play professionally. When you have game that you play with other people, everybody, you need to play by the rules. When everybody plays by the rules, you can get good at the game and the team can win. I think most BNI chapters, they do very well at a local level. I'm interested to hear from you What would your advice be to anybody who said, BNI is too local for me. How can I make this work on a bigger scale as a consultant or somebody whose opportunities don't occur very often in their local community? We have the opportunity in our organisation, we have the opportunity in our organisation. We have a platform called BNI Connect, which connects people globally. You can actually communicate with people. We have, as of this morning, over 326,000 members. I get a daily report on how many members we have in the organisation. By the way, we have 40 years of consecutive growth. Year on year, on year, 40 years of consecutive growth, including COVID, we grew as an organisation. One of the amazing things about BNI and what it's become is that you literally have a global network if you want to utilise it. Let me give you an For example, for those listening, imagine you're a member of an online platform like LinkedIn, and I like LinkedIn. I'm not going to beat up LinkedIn, but let's say you're on LinkedIn and you're in the United Kingdom and you want to meet somebody, you want to go to Manhattan and you want to You meet a bunch of people there because you'd like to do business in the US. You get on LinkedIn and you say, Hey, I'm coming to Manhattan. Can we meet? I'd love to meet you. Well, on a platform like that, they're like, Who are you? Unless you already know the person, they're like, Who are you and why do you want to meet with me? There's this hesitance. But with BNI, if you want to meet people in Manhattan, you would just reach out to multiple chapter residents and say, I'm coming to Manhattan. I'm a member in the United Kingdom. I would love to come to your meeting. They would open, they would welcome you with open arms, and you would have a chance for the entire week, every day, to go to groups and meet a lot of business people and talk about what you do. If you want to use the global element of BNI, you have to use the online platform effectively not to sell to Don't say, Hey, buy my product, buy my service. Instead, Hey, I'd like to connect with you. I'd like to talk to you. If you want to do business in another country, go to that country. But before you go, reach out to the BNI people there and set up meetings there so that you're having meaningful connexions as you go there. I have seen BNI members utilise our online platform unbelievably well, successfully in generating business globally. I think that's a really interesting perspective because I think it would be very tempting to look at something like BNI Connect as a prospect database. That would be a terrible way of looking at it. It would. It is. People do that sometimes, and we're like, No, you can't do that. Yes. But we're in the relationship marketing business. Yes. And using something like this proprietary database to establish relationships based on How can I add value to my network? But how can I add value to my network in a wider sense? My wider network. What goes around very much comes around, and I don't think enough people properly embrace that. I see that every day. That if you put enough good things into the world, it will come back to you. It will, but you got to also ask. It's okay to ask. Just don't ask too soon. Build the relationship first and then ask. There's nothing wrong with that. If we can, if you don't mind, I want to take the opposite position of for those people who want to do business globally, it's a great way to do business globally. However, there are a lot of people in BNI that don't want to do business globally. A dentist, a chiropractor, someone who does gardening and lawn care, they're not looking for global business, but it still works globally, and I'll tell you why. This happened to be, I'm I'm trying to think of the island. There's an island in the Mediterranean, and it's just not- Cyprus? Yeah, it might be Cyprus. Or Malta. No, I'm wrong. It definitely was Malta. It was absolutely Malta. We have chapters in Malta. The member there was born in the UK, and her mother still lived near London, outside London. Her mother calls her daughter in Malta and says, Hey, you're a member of this networking organisation. I really want I have my yard completely redone. I need a landscaper. Is there any way you could find some landscaper outside London that could help me with this? The daughter's like, Yeah, absolutely. She gets on me. I can actually find the landscaper. They make an introduction. The mother hires the local landscaper who's not looking to do business in Malta, but the referral came from a person in Malta to her mother outside London. A couple of months later, this was fantastic, a couple of months later, her mother calls her again and she says, Hey, do you happen to know any painters outside London? Because I need some rooms in the house painted. Of course, she said, Yeah, I can find some painters. I found some painters outside London. Yeah, it's great for doing business globally and you can get global referrals locally. It goes both ways. Yeah, that's an interesting perspective as well. I moved to City a few years ago. The very first thing When I was moving city, I looked for a lawyer to help with the home purchase and an agent to help with the home purchase. The first place I went was BNI because I knew those relationships were going to be a safety net for me. There was trust. I trusted those people because I know people who survive in these networks tend to be diligent, professional, reliable people. It's a very well-oiled self-policing organism, which is something I really appreciate. It tends to be if people are going to be shady operators, they don't survive very long in something like BNI. They don't. They're asked to step out. So I think coming back full circle, I guess, to the question of legacy. If you were speaking to yourself 20 years ago, what advice would you be giving to somebody in order that they could begin becoming intentional about building the personal brand that was going to leave something behind and serve them for the time that they're actually working. But when they do come to setting their tools down, they can do it really very happy. I think there's a couple of things. One is the older I get, the less I believe in words and the more I believe in behaviours. Now, words are powerful. Don't get me wrong. Words can sting, they can hurt, they can help. I understand that words are powerful, but the only thing more powerful than words are behaviours. I would tell people, focus on your behaviours. If somebody were walking around with a video camera and videotaping you all the time, do your behaviours or they congruent with your words. What you want to do then is you want to really get clear about what your personal values are. I did an entire book on this subject called Who's In Your Room, and it's all about the people that you surround yourself with. In order to surround yourself with the people that resonate with you, you can't do that until you know what your values are. When I ask people, Give me your top seven personal values, it's like deer in the headlights. They'll say, Well, honestly, great. What are six more? They're like, I don't know. They don't know their values. Well, you can't live an amazing life unless you're really good with your values, and then you live those values. If you want to leave any legacy, financial, interrelational, whatever legacy, you have to live those values. It's the values and the behaviours. Those are the things that I would tell people that they need to focus on in order to leave any positive legacy in life. There's so much that I could go into with that. Well, jump in. We got plenty of time. If you ask me that question, I don't have a set of values in terms of words, but I have a personal manifesto that powers the business and what I do. I do see a lot of business owners who this would be very useful for, not because I question that they don't have them. You haven't thought about them. Pardon? They probably haven't really thought about them. Well, yes. They haven't really consolidated them. This whole question around being intentional about how we spend our time is so important. From my perspective as somebody who's trying to support people becoming more visible and monetizing that visibility, a lot of people tend to firefight in their business. A lot of the time, this is the natural state for people. If I were to ask people, What are your values? They wouldn't tell me, Putting fires out. They would tell me, It's about creation. It's about building a future. And yet their behaviour often doesn't really align with that. And in my own work, I'm reflecting on what you're saying there, actually making people conscious of their values is foundational to all of the work that I really do. And it's going to really... I need to reflect on that. And I think everybody-I could tell you where to start, and we talk about it in the Who's In. And I'd urge you To check out the book, and anyone listening or watching, look at the book, Who's in your Room? Because I'll give you 60 seconds on the main concept of the book. Imagine that you lived your life in one room, and that one room has one door, and that one door is an enter-only door, so that when people come into your life, they're there forever. You can never get them out. Now, luckily, I love that you chuckle, but that's what most people do. Now, luckily, it's a metaphor, right? I mean, you could get people out of your room, right? Let's talk about that. Bob, think about somebody that you got out of your life that was toxic, they were caustic, they were difficult, and you're just like, That's enough. I want them out of my life. Now, I'm not going to make you name them, but do you have somebody in your mind? I'm generally... I I have a good sense for these things when people are still over on the horizon, but there are people who I've avoided bringing into my life. Okay. If you're listening to this, if anybody's listening to this, think of somebody that you got out of your life. Bob By the way, it could be a family member where you had no choice. I have no choice. Right? So think about somebody that you got out of your life and think about what they did to you that made you want them out of your life. And so if If you're thinking about somebody, they're still in your room. Because the room starts here and ends here. It's your mind. When we let people into our head, when we let people into our lives, they're in our head. When they're in our head, they're there forever. The behaviours that we do for the rest of our life are partially dependent on that. Good experience, bad experience, we reflect on those experiences and go, Yeah, I'm not going to do that again, or, Yeah, I do want to do that again. You want to bring people into your room or into your life, into your head, that are engines, not anchors, that help drive your life forward rather than pull you down. You have to be very selective about who you bring into your life. The way to be selective is based on values and having values that are congruent. They don't have to be the same, by the way. It just can't be dissonant with yours. They can't be incongruent with yours. You find people who have congruant values and you bring them into your life, and you're then curating the life that you want. I think this is one of the things that I've really enjoyed about being intentional about my own visibility. I'm a very self-conscious introvert. And what I love about my business now is that most of the time when people come into my business, they've already decided that they like me. And I think that's a lovely thing. But I achieved that largely because one of my values was I needed to lead for my clients and do the difficult things I was asking them to do. I think a lot of people, they are very... Because they haven't really thought about values, and I don't want to diminish people, and people are a terrible generalisation. But when I'm talking business strategy, a lot of people skip the values. Obviously, I include myself in this to an extent. But beginning there does make you prioritise very, very differently. And what you described about having that value radar when you're building relationships is very powerful, especially when it comes to- We talk about it in the book as your doorkeeper, and your doorkeeper is your conscious and subconscious self saying, Okay, before this person gets into my room, into my life, do they have values that are congruent with mine, resonant with mine. We use an example in the book, which I think is amazing, and I've seen it done live, not with pianos, but with another instrument. But we talk about it in the book is, imagine two grand pianos side by side and two different people sitting in each piano, and one person hits the middle C key on one piano, and the The second person hits no key but presses the sustain pedal on the second piano. The amazing thing is the second piano hums. It vibrates. You can hear it vibrate in the same key as the first piano. That's resonance. What you want to do is find... It doesn't have to be the same piano. It doesn't have to be the exact same value, but it's got be something that's resonant with your values. When you can surround yourself with people like that, then you're going to have a happier life. I think that's an important thing. As a business owner, it can be very lonely. I think this is where being part of organisations like BNI can be really useful. The reason I joined again, I moved city. I had no clients in the city. My My business is international. If you're listening and you haven't guessed that by now, you haven't really been listening. But I had no network. I had no support network. I have no trusted colleagues. I had no social life. I didn't really need the referrals, but they have been a welcome, welcome bonus. If you're in my chapter and you're listening, you're all awesome. Ivan, let's segue now into part two, where I get to really pick your brains. I found this since I began this particular section. It's the most exciting for me because I get to hear what's working for people right now. A lot of the time, the interviews are what is big picture stuff. But part two is where I invite you to share three things that you're really into right now. It can be mental models, books, podcasts you really like, tools or apps that you really enjoy. What have you got for us? Well, I tell you what I'm working on right now is a book called Garage to Global. How do you take your business from your garage? Because B&I, as you mentioned earlier, started in my house and started in a room above my garage. A lot of The packages that we put together were done in my garage. I literally went from my garage to a global enterprise with offices now all over the world. The thing that I'm working on the most is trying to codify the elements that allowed me to take this organisation from my house to a global enterprise. If you'd like, I'm happy to share some of the key elements that I talk about in the book. I would love that. Well, one of the first is the flame in the wax, a thing that I've already talked about in the beginning of this interview. If you're in business, actually, Actually, if you're doing whatever it is you're doing in life, you got to find your flame. If you're doing a job that you don't particularly like, well, then you need to find a hobby that's your flame. If you're an entrepreneur, you need to turn your business into your flame. You need to find elements of your business that become your flame. By the way, that can change over time. What was my flame in the '80s and '90s absolutely became my wax. I ran the company for 30 years. We're 40 years old. I ran it for 30 years. I had a great team. They also helped me. But when push came to shove, I was the final decision maker. I just got tired of it. Thirty years is a long time to be the final decision maker on things. I went from being King Arthur leading the charge, to being Colonel Sanders, where I'm the this spokesperson of the organisation. I found that 10 years ago or so, that's really became my passion. Find your flame, not your wax, and understand that it takes time to get there. Sometimes you got to do what you got to do. You get to do what you want to do. Find people to to build the spots that you don't want to do anymore and hire them to do the things you don't want to do. I remember one of my first big hires was a bookkeeper because I did all the accounting in the first few years. I did it all, the accounting. I hated it. Now, I know how to read a financial statement. I know how to do it. I just don't like it. I remember hiring her, and she did a great job. I'll never forget, she came to me one day and she said, soon after she started, she said, The books didn't balance. They were off by five pennies, five cents. Five cents, five-tenths of a dollar. It took me a couple of hours, but I found it. The books now balanced perfectly. I told to a friend of mine, and he said, Did you reprimand her? I said, Why would I reprimand her? He said, Because it took her a couple of hours to find five cents. I said, No, didn't reprimand her at all. I congratulated her. I told her, Well done. I'm proud of you. He said, Why would you say that? I said, Because what if it were $50? She couldn't go to sleep at night. She'd stay there until she found the $50. If she worked so hard to find five cents, that's her flame. If it had been $50, I'd have been close enough. I don't want to spend the time and effort to find that. That was her flame, and I I love that. That was her flame. That's certainly one of the first things. The second thing is, and this is probably the biggest, and this is a key element in the book, you want to be successful in business, do six things a thousand times. Not a thousand things things six times. What I find is that most business people are doing a thousand things six times. They do something and they do it a few times and it doesn't quite work as well as they'd hoped, and so they jump to something else and they do it a few times. They jump to something else, and they jump to something else and they jump to something else and they are never successful. By the way, it doesn't have to be six, it could be five, it could be seven. But you do a handful of things and you do it over and over and over again consistently. Now, what things? You find mentors, people who are successful. That's the key, people who are successful. Don't just listen to anybody. Listen to successful people, particularly successful people that are in a related industry or have a related skill that you need, and then do what they tell you to do. Don't say, Well, that sounds too easy. That sounds too difficult. Do what they tell you to do. You do it a thousand times. It's one of the reasons why BNI has been so successful is we are really about doing six things a thousand times. I believe, one of the most important reasons for our success. I could give you a boatload more. I'll give you one more. Particularly if you're a reasonably new entrepreneur and you're trying to build your team. I built BNI with one concept really in mind, an important concept in mind when I hired people, and that was that ignorance on fire is better than knowledge on ice. I'll repeat that. Ignorance on fire is better than knowledge on ice. Now, when you're big and successful, you can hire knowledge on fire because you can afford it. But when you're starting up, you can't afford knowledge on fire. You look for ignorance on fire and you train them. You teach them how to do the things that need to be done so that they're sponges and they want to learn and you teach them and they do it. That's the way you can scale your business. I built my business that way. I was looking for people, ignorance. The truth is, just between us, can't tell anybody this, I was ignorance on fire when I started being I. I didn't know what I was doing. I was 28 years old. I didn't know how to network. We don't teach this in colleges and universities anywhere in the world. Still, to this day, we don't teach it. I was method acting my way through the process. But I wrote everything down. I wrote down what worked, I I broke down what didn't work. And then I learned from that, did it, and trained other people to do it. But I was the poster child for Ignorance on Fire. But I would like to think I finally became knowledge on fire. I think that's extraordinarily good advice. I think to jump back to point number two, I just echo that time after time after time, the most successful people I know have not been successful through complexity. It's been through simplicity. Right. And getting really good at simple things and building processes around those things. 100% true. Can I tell you, one of your fellow countrymen, Sir Richard Branson. I've had an opportunity to meet him many times. I think I've spent five weeks on Necker Island over the years, one week at a time. One time I talked to him about this very subject, and he said something that he's written about. He's put this in his books. He told me, Any idiot can make something complicated. It takes a brilliant business person to keep it simple. Yeah. And I think that's what you're saying. It is. And I think the mentor question, again, time and again, I see people asking for advice and then not taking it. They ask advice of coaches and mentors. A friend of mine has written a book about it called something along the lines of Don't be an ask hole or the ask hole principle. It's somebody who asks for advice and then doesn't take it. Yeah. Such good advice the whole way through this interview, I think. I've really enjoyed this. I think one of the problems I have when I meet somebody like you is I have so many questions. It's overwhelming. Well, ask another one. I'm here. I'm here for you. I don't want to take up too much of your time. Quite honestly, I think once you're ready with this new book, I would love to really go deep into that and properly read it beforehand, because that book, I sense, is going to be important. I think it's going to be big. I'll tell you, I haven't told you a lot about it, but let me give you a couple more tidbits, which I think is incredible. First of all, we surveyed over 2,200 people and asked them what they thought it took to be successful at scaling. It's not just my opinion. And by the way, the book is not just about As a matter of fact, BNI only has slivers of comments so far in the book. It's about how do you scale locally, regionally, nationally, or globally? How do you scale? We have a survey of 2,200 people. We did 365 written interviews and more than a dozen in-person interviews. The first section of the book is written primarily by me about how do you take your business from your garage to make it an international company. The second part of the business, and this is what makes this book, I think, so unique. The second part of the business is, okay, I'm the owner of the company, but I'm tired. I'm tired I'm ready to have partners or ready to sell. I was not ready to sell the company completely. I just wanted partners, partners who could take over the managing of the business. I want to have some transaction. I don't want to be the King Arthur. I want to be the Colonel Sanders. Or maybe you want to just sell. What's that look like? What do you do? What do you think about? How do you calculate that? How do you plan that? That's not in very many books. Then the second half of that second section is the transaction part, the people who are buying in. What do you look for if you're going to invest in a company? Do you want the founder to stay? Do you want the founder to leave? So both halves of a transaction part because BNI has had a transaction. I'm still an owner. I'm still part owner in BNI, but there's a company that has a larger percentage. So first part is, how do you start to scale? Second part is, how do you have some transaction? The third part is, how do you make it a truly global enterprise, a professional global enterprise? And that section is written by the CEO who just stepped down from BNI, Graham Weymiller, and he's now the executive chair for BNI. I'm writing the first section, he's doing colour commentary. He and I are writing the second section. He's writing the third section and I'm adding colour commentary. This is a very unique book that- Well, I'm looking forward to. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it, and we're really excited to be doing this book. Well, Ivan, I'm going to say thank you very much. I would love to speak to you again sometime, but for the moment, on behalf of the listeners, thank you very much. You've been very generous with your time. Truly my pleasure. Can I just say for anyone who's interested in BNI, go to bni. Com. If you're interested in any of the material that I've written, I've been blogging for 17 years, ivanmisner. Com. A lot of free content up there, plus links to my books, if you're interested. Thank Bob. It's been a great interview. For you, home, that does bring us to the end of another episode. Thanks for listening. If you did enjoy the show, you will love the Personal Brand Business Roadmap. It's 50 pages of everything you need to start, scale, or fix your expert business. Just visit amplifimee. Agency/roadmap. Again, if you did enjoy the show, then I would encourage you to leave a five-star review. That's five. Like the fingers on your hand, count them wherever you listen to podcasts. Ivan, thank you very much for your time again and your home. Thanks for listening. See you next time.