No, I don’t mean what some of you might be thinking, but
I do mean the most important thing that you can do for your chapter and
yourself.
The answer, of course, is invited someone to your chapter
meeting.
Visitors, and in turn new members, are the life blood of
every chapter because without them a chapter will at some point die. That may
seem overly dramatic, but it’s true.
Many members invite, at best, occasionally. Or maybe when
their chapter has a visitor drive on. But I believe, as members, we should
invite someone every single day. I’ve always done this for two reasons; one,
I’m a bit lazy (don’t like hard work) and two, every visitor is a potential
customer for me whatever happens.
Now you might be thinking that inviting someone every day
sounds like a lot of hard work but, I promise, it really isn’t.
Think about it this way. Your chapter has a visitor drive
on and you need to bring a visitor for a particular date. Firstly, you are
under pressure from the start. Then you have to build a list of people to
invite and then you have to invite them. Plus, of course, you are not practiced
at inviting people. I’m sure this is why many people don’t like inviting
people; they don’t do it often enough.
Then think about what I call ‘continuous inviting’.
Invite someone every day. There’s no pressure. The person can come to any
meeting. And, it can take just seconds to do – in fact at times I hardly notice
that I’m inviting people.
The best part is that if you do this, after a while, you
will have a continuous ‘pipe-line’ of visitors coming to your chapter.
So where do you find these people to invite? Simple
answer – everywhere. Doesn’t matter what you are doing or where you are. I was
taking part in a kart race and found someone to invite. This very week I have
someone coming to my meeting whose business card I picked up in a coffee shop
last week.
How to invite? Whatever is convenient at the time. In
person, on the phone, by text, letter, Linkedin, Facebook, postcard or email.
Anything will do – as long as you do it.
On some days I might invite a few people, I’ve also been
known to invite 20 or 30 at a time (again easy). But the most important thing
is to invite one person.
Do you know that if you invited just one person a day
(week days), for 46 weeks of the year, that you would invite a total of 230
people to your chapter by the year end. And the best part? Many will come along
and some will become members.
So you may have not done ‘it’ today but how about getting
started tomorrow? I think you will be surprised at the results.
