Every business owner needs a sales force. Almost nobody can afford one.
So we built each other one. Every Tuesday evening in East Islip, a room of Long Island business owners shares what their best referrals are, and educating fellow members about what they do, and how they can help your network — because between Wednesday and Monday your fellow members are actively listening and finding customers for you. Year to date it came to $519,806 in closed business.
15
Industries represented — one professional each
76
Warm referrals passed in 12 months
$519,806
Closed business, tracked and verified
Weekly
50 Tuesdays a year we show up
The most valuable thing in your business is a conversation you'll never hear.
Think about the last five customers you were genuinely glad to get. Not the price shoppers. The good ones.
Almost every one of them arrived the same way. Somebody who already trusted you said your name to somebody who needed you. You weren't in the room. You didn't pitch. The sale was more than half closed before your phone ever rang.
Every business owner knows this. Referrals close faster, pay better, and argue less than anything an ad will ever drag in. And almost nobody does a single deliberate thing to make more of them happen. We wait. We hope. We call it word of mouth and leave it to chance.
Coastal Connections is what it looks like when you stop leaving it to chance.
We meet every Tuesday evening — currently on Zoom, back in person from 6:30PM to 8:00PM. Every member holds one industry, exclusively. While you hold your seat, nobody in your field can join.
That one rule changes everything. It means nobody across the table is quietly deciding whether to send you a referral or keep it for themselves. You're not competing for it. You're the only person it can go to.
Which is what turns a room into a sales team. The size of the room was never the point. What matters is that every person in it has exactly one name to give when somebody asks for what you do.
And before any of that happens, we talk. Register to visit and someone from leadership calls you first — what you do, who your best customer is, whether your seat is even open. A visit here is a fit check that runs both directions, not a pitch. We have told people no. We'd rather do that than take dues from somebody this was never going to work for.
Over the past twelve months this chapter passed $519,806 in closed business. That's not attendance. That's revenue, tracked, between people who started out as strangers.
Five rules — and one of them will annoy you.
Every group has values on a wall somewhere. These are the ones we actually enforce, including the one that costs us members.
Give first, and mean it.
Givers Gain® is the oldest rule in BNI and the least comfortable one to start with. You're expected to bring business to the table before you've taken any off it. It feels backwards for about six weeks. Then somebody hands you a job and it never feels backwards again.
You'll be the only one.
One professional per industry. No exceptions, no "adjacent" categories, no quiet workarounds where two people split a trade. If you're the mortgage broker here, you are the mortgage broker here.
We don't pass names. We pass introductions.
A referral in this room means somebody already spoke to the customer, already vouched for you, and already told them to expect your call. A name on a napkin isn't a referral. We don't log it as one, and it isn't in that $519,806.
Nobody pitches you on day one.
Trust takes longer than one meeting, and a referral is only worth something when the person giving it has skin in the game. So we build the relationship first. It's slower. It's also the reason the referrals close.
Show up, or lose the seat.
Attendance is taken. Referrals are logged. Members who stop contributing stop being members — we have asked people to leave. This is the rule nobody likes and it's the only reason the other four mean anything.
Visit Us This Week
Venue
Shandon Court
115 E Main St., East Islip, NY
When
September 22nd @
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM EST
Format
Summer Schedule (Virtual Meeting)
Long Island & Suffolk County, NY