I lead a group of trusted advisors for ProVisors in the Inland Empire, and we celebrated our five year anniversary in September. It was a fun celebration and interesting to see how many long-term members we have, who have gained significant benefit from participating in the group. I very much appreciate my executive committee as they helped create this amazing success. A BIG THANK YOU to Kathy McEntee, Gus Marantidis, James Valmonte, Jan Palmer, Dana Mitchellweiler, Steve Nosenchuck, John Tulac and Mike Kouyoumdjian.
At the anniversary event, we talked about our best referrals, introductions, resources or assistance gained during our tenure in the group. What I thought was quite interesting is the common theme behind the stories – it is more about the intent behind the referral than the referral itself. You might think a referral that turned into $50,000 or $100,000 would be quite valuable (and it is!), however, many folks who have received big referrals talked about the more personally meaningful ones.
For example, one of the stars of our group is Brian Reider (partner with BB&K, a business attorney and outside general counsel) who clearly takes it the extra mile with his referrals. Several folks mentioned stories that relate to Brian, and although I didn’t bring it up (as there were too many great stories to fit into our short meeting), Brian saved the day once by helping my APICS Inland Empire chapter (a non-profit group of supply chain and operations professionals) with someone who signed up for our class who didn’t have the best intentions. We are not attorneys; we are operations gurus. So, we greatly appreciated Brian’s help in resolving the issue so that we didn’t have to make our regular members suffer because of one bad apple.
What stands out in your mind as the most valuable introduction, resource or help provided by your colleagues and contacts? I bet you’ll be surprised by what you come up with. Perhaps we should all give pause to what is truly meaningful to us.