

Thoughts about why we did a Think Big Event in Branson
We were sinking, our membership was down to 24 (at the time of the event) from 32 a few months before, mom’s were down, referrals were down, show me the money’s had fallen way off. The chapter was in a death spiral and something had to be done.
Now don’t get me wrong, we still had a great core group, we just needed a challenge to awake the fire within and get everyone moving. We had talked many times about stack day, but we were not acting on it, with no power teams in place, we lacked the fundamentals to grow the chapter.
So Mike Tobin our Director suggested that we plan a Think Big Event; the Think Big open house concept had been successful in other parts of the country and should work for us. So after a conversation with Jeff Bain, our newly appointed Vice President, I accepted the task and made plans to break the news to the entire chapter – we were going to war and we are fighting with the army we have.
As you might expect breaking the news to the troops was met with awe, skepticism and some small enthusiasm. I though that maybe I had gotten us in too deep, but I also felt this was what we needed to make the chapter healthy again.
The Plan.
With BNI's help we had a think big event kick-off meeting and discussed our plans with all members, we would for the next 5-weeks spend part of each meeting discussing, planning and executing all aspects of the BNI Big Event outline.
Following the plan is critical to the success of this event, don’t skip any steps. The demand for your time during this period is very high as a Chapter President I spend time trying to motivate other chapter members, get my mailing list in order and show as much leadership as I could, we were in a war and I was starting to see team leaders emerge from the chapter - they were starting to get-it, Think Big could work.
Think Big Mailing Day.
We challenged each other to bring as many letters as possible, 50 being the minimum; at the end of the meeting we had 900 letters ready for mailing, from just 24 members. Think Big was catching fire; we all were excited at the prospect of holding such an event. Now we had to do the follow-up calls and get our visitors to commit to come to our event.
The Big Event.
March 26, 2008 arrived; we were ready with a very special agenda, guest speakers, BNI Directors and 24 excited chapter members. We were not disappointed, we had 120 guests arrive and no one could believe their eyes, so many people wanting to find out about this thing called BNI. Everyone attending was given a BNI application and contract for profitability, I had 8 signed applications at the end of the meeting and several more applications arrived at my office by weeks end (We are up to 10 with more arriving in the next several weeks!)
The result of all this effort.
We are on fire, we’re at $4.6 mill up from $4.3 mill in March, our chapter membership is at 35, mom’s and referrals are up as well. We have a stack day planned for June 11th and plan to do two more this year. We have a chapter MSP training scheduled for May 28. We have a special meeting planned for June 18th to do a Chapter Mentor Training. We had to turn away so many applications, from Think Big Event because of classification conflicts that we could easily start another chapter. We moved to a larger and better meeting facility and I think we could be a 45 member chapter by the end of summer ’08.
And we’re just getting started…..
Larry Blaha
Chapter President
Show Me The Business - Branson
Owner of The UPS Store, Branson







