Biz Group beginnings
I think most business networking groups suck. They’re too expensive, too exclusive, too clueless about the web. But many of them do one thing well - promote their members. But do they have to be so lame otherwise?
Organizations are a reflection of the people who comprise them. Cool people, cool org. Enter The Biz Group. In May 2005, I got tired of my wife Lara badgering me to join BNI (a group she’s been a member of for about 5 years). I’d visited several chapters without feeling any affinity, and because they only allow one person per profession to belong, it was virtually impossible to find a group in Seattle that needed a web developer. So I decided it was time to roll our own. I figured, if 300 people had showed up for our wedding party in March, we could get a few dozen to show up for something like this.
I put together a temporary website pretty quickly, based on the code for another project I was working on, and invited a few dozen friends, mostly Seattle Burners, to show up for breakfast at Salmon Bay Cafe in Ballard. It’s the same cafe where a couple years before we’d constructed a 1/3rd scale replica of the Parthenon for the Space Virgins, our Burning Man theme camp.
Membership was free, and pretty soon we had more than 50 members, and I was getting a lot of work from the group, and so were some of our friends. We held weekly meetings, typically over breakfast or lunch, in which we took turns presenting what we do best to everyone present, with a couple minutes for questions. The website started evolving into a pretty useful tool, with member photos, skill lists, and easy ways to refer business to other members. You could also invite new members, post members-only discounts, and give testimonials about other members.
