I’ll have a coffee please!

1/9/11

What’s a coffee cost these days? £2.10p? More? And, in the course of a One2One how many cups might you drink? Two? Then how about your average business week: how many cups might you drink in total?

I mention this because of something I heard this week. A chapter needed to put up their weekly meeting fees and it caused something of a fuss. Now I don’t know about you, but I think our weekly meeting fees are very good value – at my chapter they are currently about £50.00 per month.

For this we get a meeting room for up to four hours every week, often storage for our BNI boxes, sometimes the use of a flipchart, a venue that opens at 6.00am, plus all sorts of other things. And, a breakfast - all in my chapter's case- for £11.75 per week. Now that has got to be great value in anybody's book!

So, I have to say that it always amazes me that members complain when a chapter needs to put up its meeting fees, as in most cases it is never by more than the cost of one coffee per week.

Furthermore, what an investment the cost of that extra ‘cup of coffee’ is: the opportunity to do business with dozens of business owners and thereby make more money for our company.

Plus meeting fees should be looked at as an investment, not a cost. Chapters only put up fees when they need to and I think that you will agree with me, if you think about it, that at less than the price of a coffee that there is nothing to make a fuss about!