Business cafe society still works in internet age

Matty Blomfield promotes the personal touch. Photo / Doug Sherring

We might be increasingly addicted to e-commerce and social networking but face-to-face contact can still rake in the bucks for business.

Business Networking International (BNI) New Zealand president Graham Southwell said his organisation, which holds breakfast meetings for businesspeople around the country, had been growing at a steady rate of about 3000 members a year for 13 years.

"We started the first group in March 1999 in Takapuna. Today there are 130 chapters."

Most chapters have 20 to 30 members. Terry Sage, past-president of BNI's Northland chapter, said in one year the group generated $490,000 in business for its members. "In the first year, I alone got $90,000 of business just from BNI."

Southwell said there was no overall national tally, "but it's a significant amount of money".

The latest addition to the country's networking arsenal, LetsLunch, is being launched in Auckland next Monday. It is being brought to New Zealand by Chirag Ahuja and Matty Blomfield.

Blomfield said LetsLunch was established on the principle that "increasing your business network can mean the difference between success and obscurity".

Online networking could not compare to the experience of sitting down, face-to-face and talking with another businessperson. Blomfield said that kind of interaction built trust between people. "[Ahuja] was finding he was getting thousands of contacts on Linked In but they didn't mean anything to him and he couldn't rely on them," Blomfield said.

"You need to take it further and have in-person interaction to build relationships."

Southwell agreed. "Rather than thinking about it as a threat, we think face-to-face networking complements online networking."

So far 500 people have signed up to LetsLunch. It is free to register. Blomfield said money would be made from "referral fees that we will recruit from a limited number of prospective restaurants that we feature on the site/recommend our lunchers to attend. There are further opportunities around affiliate businesses and paid lunches to dine with VIPs".

The programme gets an understanding of what a person is involved in when they input their details or submit their social networking profile, gives them a rating and matches them up with someone who could be useful. Afterwards, both parties rate how the lunch went.

The company has five unpaid "business VIPs" involved, with whom members can lunch if they build up their reputation and ranking through enough successful lunch dates. They are a telco entrepreneur and co-founder of Pacific Fibre, the CEO of eCentre, Steve Corbett, a co-founder of Rhythm and Vines, the director of Katabolt, Chris Boys, whom Blomfield describes as "a serial connector who helps take businesses global" and the founder of Gorilla Technology and co-host of the NZ Tech podcast, Paul Spain.

Sage said he knew of several businesses that existed purely because of the business generated by BNI referrals. Others relied on those connections to get through lean months.