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Through my involvement with the BNI business network which has more than 2,300 members countrywide, it’s become quickly obvious that the biggest threat to small and medium business owners in times of global uncertainty is giving in to the feeling of not being in control.

The remedy is to inject certainty into our immediate spheres of influence – such as around falling sales – and a good way to establish that personal control is to set some goals, or considering the time of year, some New Year’s resolutions.

Most business people may be affected by slow payers and falling sales, but rather than accepting this as an inevitable sign

of the times, they should move to set some goals, make plans and then put them into action. This gives certainty, momentum and traction.

When your back pocket is being squeezed, the most obvious panic button is to cut costs. I would suggest it should be to concentrate on making more sales or increasing your prices – both of which could solve a multitude of problems – and the best way to achieve that is by growing your word of mouth referral base.

Word of mouth is cheaper because there’s no huge advertising costs, and its more effective because we know, from research by Intelliseek – as reported in Business Day magazine and by other researchers that customers are ‘50 per cent more likely to be influenced by word-of-mouth recommendations from their peers than by radio/TV ads’.

Successful networking, like any other business activity, is more effective when you have clearly defined goals and structuring these, even as New Year’s resolutions, will go a along way to making them into positive habits.

Six steps to building a referral network:

1. Clearly articulate what you want to achieve;
2. Understand your target market, and then figure out who else shares the same target market. Companies and people with the same target market make ideal networking partners.
3. Pick up the phone to invite potential network partners for a coffee.
4. Attend the meeting with some ideas of how you might work together.
5. Expect to give before you receive. BNI calls the philosophy ‘Givers Gain’. When you start giving referrals you activate the need to reciprocate in your networking partners.
6. Identify possible networking groups to join, and apply the same principles to your networking partners in that group. Identify other potential network partners to join the group with you.

The most important component of the networking plan is to identify ways you can help your network partners through giving them referrals first. It’s the old saying: ‘The more interested you are, the more interesting you will be’.

BNI is New Zealand’s biggest structured referral network with 103 chapters from Otago to Northland. Each chapter typically consists of between 20 and 40 business owners and sales people who work to generate referrals – within a structured environment – for each other as part of a mutually supportive team.