Business Owners Helping Business Owners

In Calgary and Red Deer business owners can meet with other business owners face-to-face. There are several advantages to being part of a weekly or monthly group.

Warm Leads Are The Best Kind Of Leads

As you meet you get to know, like and trust each other. This is when people people feel comfortable enough to share a warm lead with you. Warm leads are very important to your business. They tend to close 50% of the time. As long as you show up, follow up, and are a reasonably friendly person the lead is generally very open to doing business with you. The other Member of CIBN has told them something favorable about you. They mentioned that you are an expert. Possibly they told them that you are a busy person. Therefore when you get together with this warm lead, they have been pre-sold to use your product or service.

If you were using ad buying to get leads, you may get some, but these are very cold leads. These people don’t know you, and therefore they tend to shop on price alone. That is a painful way to get transactions to happen in your business. You are continually looking for clients who treat you with the respect you deserve and who want to pay you what you are worth. When another Member of our network tells someone about you, they speak about you as an expert. They share about you with warmth. The person is eager to meet you, and ready to do business as a result.

Getting warm leads is just one advantage to networking with other business owners. There are many others.

You Are Not Alone As An Entrepreneur

Have you ever felt like nobody understands what you are going through? Do you feel that your challenges are unique? Do you get overwhelmed with cash flow issues or time restraints?

Other business owners understand your pain. They have been there before. They may also have some great ideas how to help you, that you have never considered. As long as you isolate yourself, you will never know these things, and the discomfort will continue. You may even give up.

You Will Make Fewer Mistakes In Business

Business owners from other industries have a lot of knowledge that you need, but they also have experience with other service providers that will save your business.

As a lone sheep out in the world, wolves will surround you and take you out. Wolves like website designers who you don’t really know well who take your money and not produce a website, or a website that makes sales for you. Wolves come in the form of individuals who want to sell you things you don’t need, and as mistakes that you make because you just did not know better. You did not know how to keep your books properly, or you did not understand legal deductions, so you did your income taxes incorrectly and paid thousands of dollars you did not need to. Perhaps you registered your business as a sole proprietorship when you should have incorporated. Maybe you lost money on marketing that did not work. Or you left your money in your corporation when you should have been looking at tax free options.

You will miss out on “life” mistakes as well, and as a result you will retire in better shape than you would have without networking. If your marriage needs some work, that is concerning. There is nothing that will topple a business faster than splitting what is not enough, down the middle. In the network you will meet Life Coaches, Marriage Counselors, and Therapists who can assist you and turn this area of your life around. 

Financially you may not know how to restore your credit, or why you should not buy a new car, before you buy a home. You will likely never learn that you can retire owning three homes for the same mortgage and hassle of owning one home. You learn these things from mortgage brokers, and property managers in the network. Outside of the network you are also likely to be under-insured, or not insured properly because you simply don’t know that the bank is not your friend, and that the insurance purchased there is substandard to other insurance options.

Where do you learn all of this? Networking. You learn a lot through networking. 80% of businesses don’t go out networking. 80% of businesses fail. Networking is a life changing event in the life of a business owner.