Getting up in the morning has never been my strong point so you can imagine how I felt when I first got up at 05.30 so that I could attend a 07.00 breakfast networking meeting. To cap it all, it was winter time and outside it was cold, wet and dark.
Of course getting out of bed is the worst part and when I was a showered, dressed and off in my automobile I was starting to feel a little more alive and by the time the networking meeting started I was positively buzzing (and it wasn’t the coffee!).
The business networking event was run by “the moderator”, a volunteer from the group who had agreed to chair the meetings for six months she also had another member of the team on reception helping meet and greet newbies like me. I was quickly put at ease and introduced to other members of the group and found that I was thoroughly enjoying myself.
Having visited twice I decided to join the group at a cost of $600 for the year and that included one meeting every two weeks and breakfast was extra on top (another $15). Summing it up, my total outlay for the year was $990, quite a lot of money considering that my business was doing OK – just OK, but I thought that given how much I’d learned in the first two meetings that it was worth a punt. After all, I’d spent more than double that in the previous years on advertising and mail shots with little impact.
So six months down the line, how was I doing and was I getting value for money? Well actually I’d volunteered to become the moderator and was really enjoying it. I have to admit that it was now summertime and the light mornings made getting up really easy. I was getting referrals from my fellow networkers and business was picking up, certainly to the extent that I’d recovered my initial outlay and then some. I also had met “the franchisee” a couple of times, this being the guy who had bought the license to run five business networking events at various venues in the locality.
It was talking to him that made me think that if I bought a franchise not only would I make money from the franchise, I could also extend my network to other groups, save myself the $600 per group entrance fee and still continue to build my existing business. The icing on the cake of course is that the franchisee doesn’t run the business so if I didn’t want to attend I didn’t have you – surely the perfect combination?
How wrong I was. My strategy was flawed by one incorrect assumption and that wasn’t my lack of enthusiasm for getting up in the mornings. I had assumed that everyone in the groups would make as good a moderator as me (or the lady who first did it when I joined) and that there would be an abundance of quality volunteers. This didn’t prove to be the case and I spent more and more time supporting my business networking groups and less and less time on my own business. As a result, my business suffered to the extent that I became a busy fool.
So my word of warning does not mean that you shouldn’t invest in a business networking franchise, I just want to give you my experience so that you can make a more informed decision. And having said all of the above, I still learned an awful lot in my time as a franchisee and eventually sold a thriving networking licence for a healthy profit.
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