Monthly Meetings

Keith Duke sat in his chair, trying hard not to roll his eyes. It was 7:23 on a Tuesday morning. He had been up since 5:00. The drone of familiar voices around him, saying the same thing they said last week, and the week before, and the week before, made him restless in his seat. He understood the value of networking, but doing it this way—the way he’d always done it—was starting to take its toll on him.

“Before I found Network In Action, I had been in an organized networking organization for several years, and it had run its course for me. I was tired of the weekly meetings—of standing up and saying what I do every time, and if I had to hear the pest control person say he kills bugs one more time, I was going to go insane. I had to find something a step above the rest.”

One of the reasons he was first drawn to sign up as an NIA® member was because of our unique model of holding meetings once a month versus once a week. In fact, this is one of the biggest reasons people are either leaving traditional networking groups and looking for an alternative.

There are thousands of people across the country who recognize the need for networking, but they either don’t want to or simply can’t attend weekly, early-morning networking meetings. Some people join local chapters anyway in hopes that they can make it work and then either leave or are kicked out after missing more than a couple meetings per year. Either way, the end results are the same: they just flushed hundreds of dollars in membership fees down the drain, and they are back where they started.

There are several reasons you may not be able to consistently attend weekly gatherings: Perhaps your clients span the United States and you are required to travel often. Maybe you are the parent responsible for getting your children dressed and fed in the morning before they go to school. Many business owners are up at dawn putting out fires and don’t even breathe until after lunchtime. You may be one of the majority of Americans who don’t particularly like getting up before the sun. Or, perhaps you are like many others who are currently attending the weekly ritual of repetition, and you’re just done with it.

Whatever your reasons are for not enlisting in a morning meeting, you are not alone.

This issue was one of the first pain points I identified when I was researching reviews of networking groups. The reasons for this pain are easy enough to recognize. However, what I didn’t immediately see was how many benefits are associated with holding meetings once a month instead. These include:

• Saving an enormous amount of time
• Higher-quality members because owners are more likely to join instead of sending their underlings
• Expanded networking opportunities