BNI Riverside Articles

In these tough economic times, people may be tempted to ‘cut costs’ and consider not using the services of a lawyer to assist them in buying or selling a business. Our litigation division has plenty of ‘war stories’ of people burnt who have tried to cut costs and not obtained professional advice. For example, do [...]

Business Networking Tips When you receive a referral, how long do you wait to follow it up? What are your first steps? Call the referee to get more information on their requirements Research the prospect to get a feel for their business and possibly personality Google?? I had a conversation with a frolleague (a colleague [...]

Do you remember the Dread Pirate Roberts from the classic film ‘The Princess Bride’? The Dread Pirate Roberts legend has existed for hundreds of years. He maintains the legend by handing on the name to a young protégé when he retires. The longevity of the legend gives it further weight. Santa Claus uses the same [...]

Networking Education Session The people in this room are your sales team. When you only have 45 seconds per week to train them, you need to get to the point, and quickly. Often, we concentrate on explaining a different aspect of our business and run out of time to tell the group what exact referrals [...]

Most people in business know the value of alliances. These are other business people, in non-competing categories, who can (and do) refer business to you. Yet are you as creative as you could be in setting up these alliances? My accountant told me about one recently that immediately grabbed my attention. Here is the story! [...]

If asked this question many of us would say yes. Yet when faced with real change we often resist simply because it is that – change. We suddenly think of all the reasons why an idea won’t work because change moves us out of our “comfort zone” and into unchartered territory. Suddenly we are in [...]

While listening to Rachael Bermingham speak this week – she is Australia’s most successful female author – I was confronted with this thought. You see the audience had been asked to introduce themselves for 30 seconds earlier in the programme and Rachael was listening. She then challenged us about how we described ourselves. One of [...]

There are numerous myths about networking! Here are just a few…. • Attend as many events as possible – more is better. • Get as many business cards as possible – 20 or 30 is excellent. • Exchanging cards will get you business so take plenty. Yet all of these (and many other myths) overlook [...]

When new members join my networking group one of the questions we ask is “how are you different from your competition” and it is amazing how many people give you answers like “we provide great customer service”. I am sure that if we asked their competition they would say exactly the same thing. So where [...]

I was asked recently what value I brought to a meeting and the question caused me to think about the topic of the value of meetings. You may remember the brilliant John Cleese video “Meetings Bloody Meetings” where Cleese and his team send up the concept of the Monday morning meeting in a medium sized [...]