The Positively Remarkable Forum with Guest, Hema Mathew - Podcast 49

Hema Mathew
CEO & Creative Director
Bijhem DevOps


Positivity Servant

Transcript
Cys Bronner: I'm Cys Bronner. I have the honor of being your co-host today. I am not just a BNI person, which I enjoy immensely as an Executive Director here in BNI Greater Los Angeles, but I don't know if you've ever noticed, my title here is Gratitude Evangelist, which I have been for more years. Then I can count and when I met Norm Dominguez who hosts here usually, I was also a Gratitude Evangelist and through the years and carrying on this relationship, I'm honored to be here with all of you as that to thank you so much and I'm excited to get started today.

But here's the moment I've been waiting for. And that is our guest today is Hema Matthew. I know her through a chance meeting in my BNI world. She is the CEO and Creative Director of Bijhem DevOps. She's also a positivity servant. I would love to go on and on about her, but I'm not going to.

As much as she touches my heart and is probably my new favorite top positivity people in the group that I know. I want you to meet her and have her speak to her and her topic today is Show That You Care.

Hema Mathew: Thank you, Cys, for such a warm welcome and introduction. I just adore you. So, thank you.

Thank you, Norm, for having me. I am just honored to be here among other positive servants.

You all are fantastic, and I feel like I've missed out all these years not knowing you all. So I'm so happy to be here. So, my name is Hema Mathew. I'm the CEO and the Creative Director of Bijhem DevOps.

I have a business here in San Antonio. We do web development, digital marketing and mobile apps, web apps. We help small businesses get online presence and grow and scale. So that's what we do.

So, a little bit about me. I was born in India. I was raised there in Chennai till I was about 10. And then my dad started his university here in Oklahoma and was doing his MBA. So, he just moved the entire family over here. So, from then we've been in Oklahoma. And I went to school at the University of Oklahoma, and I met my husband there at the tender age of 18 on the very first day of college, in the very first class. And he was this talkative guy and just extremely serious. He was a chemical engineering major, so extremely smart. We just hit it off right away. And we've been, we dated for 10 years and then we got married, and we've been married for 24 years, and he got recruited to the University of Texas here in San Antonio because they were trying to take small business ideas and take it to the market. And literally they've been looking for someone. To just come and help them do that. And they were looking for two to three years and anyway, they tracked him down in DC, so they made him an offer.

So, we moved here, and it's been a blessing for our family. We love it in San Antonio. I love the city. I love the state of Texas. We had three small kids. No, not small anymore but see sweet kids. Our oldest is 20 and he's studying biomedical engineering. He's hoping to go into medicine. He wants to be a surgeon so and he's one positive guy. So, I I would love for him to join us one of these days because he's so positive about health about God and. And just inspires everybody around him. So, he's studying biomedical.

Our second s

BNI4Success Podcasts

The Voice of BNI Greater Los Angeles; Where we’ll talk about referral networking that works!
http://bnipodcast4success.com

Each week we discuss the pillars of strength that make up Living Positively every day:

Show That You Care

Accept Responsibility

Keep Your Word

Enjoy A Little Craziness

Always Think Remarkable

Treat With Respect
and our newest Pillar from the 3rd Edition of The Magic of Positivity, Don’t Give Up

Our guest today will be sharing the Pillar of Keep Your Word and Enjoy a Little Craziness

A popular speaker, Chris has been featured in The Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Women’s Day and “O” The Oprah Magazine; as well as other media sharing the organizing skills for your home, office and life.

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Hullo, I’m Cys Bronner, BNI Executive Director, CRO and the Constant Social Media Networker.

We all know that events are the life blood of any organization, but do we know the power of those events and trainings can have in a BNI Chapter?

Today, I'm going to share with you how you can play your role as Events/Training/PR Coordinator of your BNI chapter. To you and the professionals in your business unit, this role is incredibly important and critical.

Do you believe that leaders are learners? Yes, or no?

That's the reason in BNI we have close to some 15 to 20 varieties of short mini workshops and trainings. We are continuously helping our members to understand their business. They understand how to even explain their business to their fellow members so that they can generate lots of referrals. That, right there, is the reason every chapter has a very important coordinator called the Events/Training/PR Coordinator.

If you this is your role as a BNI Coordinator, or your vision for next steps as a Leader, I’ve some suggestions for you that have come from various sources, including an amazing BNI Leader, Murali Sundaram of BNI Chennai.

Let’s talk about some simple ideas today and see which you can implement, helping all your members to attend trainings.

We know that it's important that every member including the new members attend BNI’s Member Success Program within the first thirty to sixty days of Membership or renewing membership. So please, start tracking your members whether they have attended MSP within the first critical days of starting their membership journey and keeping it fresh throughout. After that, it’s a sure win for everyone, if every member of your chapter attends at least one program session every quarter. That’s forward motion! Every quarter at least one training.

But Murali’s excellent suggestion and recommendation are this: “Can we encourage our members to attend at least one workshop or a training at least once in 60 days?”

You know what? I think we can, in fact, I’ve seen those members who are dedicated to making their membership work to their maximum ROI are the same ones who are already doing this.

There are at least six different workshops members can attend in a year (every 60 days) – there’s actually more, if you really want. Which means, what we can do is very simple. Check out your regional calendar, talk to your Chapter President, your Chapter Leadership, or your Director Consultant.

Having an excel spreadsheet with all the members name and all the varieties of workshops, member development, events and training programs at the top is fabulous, and all you need do, is maintain and work with it.

In fact, we are so committed to making this easy for our members that our regional team is working together to provide this to each chapter in the next few weeks with information for the upcoming year. With that, you can have a clear track record of which member attended which workshop on what day. That also helps you to talk to specific members and tell them, hey, you know, three months before you have attended a Success Program or Workshop, can you register for the next upcoming session? That’s number one.

Number two, talk to your Chapter Support Director or even the Regional Training Team. In our region, we have for you the current term’s event and training calendar in a tracking document to help you know what the various trainings are that's going to happen every month before it happens. With this, you can start marketing the training in your chapter meeting.

Our training team will help support you with a script for leveling up your marketing of every training progr

BNI4Success Podcasts

The Voice of BNI Greater Los Angeles; Where we’ll talk about referral networking that works!
http://bnipodcast4success.com

Each week at BNI4Success, we'll talk about referral networking networks. We'll discuss networking tips, strategies and action steps that are designed to help entrepreneurs and businesses work together to create quality referral business and explore new opportunities.

BNI4Success Podcasts

The Voice of BNI Greater Los Angeles; Where we’ll talk about referral networking that works!
http://bnipodcast4success.com

How Much? When To Have That Conversation

Do you miss out on potential members because you don’t want to lose them by discussing cost? Or worse yet, they join and then feel you didn’t disclose everything?

Cys Bronner, BNI Executive Director and CRO (Chief Referral Officer) shares with you the easy steps to an upfront business conversation by discussing how much at the very start of the application process.

Visitor Hosts, you’re gonna love this!

BNI4Success Podcasts

The Voice of BNI Greater Los Angeles; Where we’ll talk about referral networking that works!
http://bnipodcast4success.com

Each week at BNI4Success, we'll talk about referral networking networks. We'll discuss networking tips, strategies and action steps that are designed to help entrepreneurs and businesses work together to create quality referral business and explore new opportunities.

Welcome to this month's BNI Decoded. It's been a fabulous first week of September for us so far. Before we get into to our topic today, which is “Does Size Matter?” I want to talk a little bit about the format of BNI Decoded.

It is kind of a conversational thing. Whichever Director is staring in this, which today it's me, I'm Cys Bronner, I'm the Executive Director for BNI Greater Los Angeles Regions. Whichever Director we have will talk to us a little bit about a topic and then we kind of get the room going on it. This session is designed to be 30 minutes to 45 minutes. We have a hard stop at 45.

We tend to get a little excited and go over, and today I really want to commit to having it be a shorter run because that's part of running a successful meeting, isn't it? Starting and stopping on time.

Out here in LA on this fabulous Thursday, I had an opportunity to present this same topic with one of my favorite chapters and I have to admit I came back and I then Google the same topic afterwards and I found out that in BNI New Zealand - which is more than four steps away from LA, right? - we had another Director who was working with the chapter, Nikki Gunning, and she had almost the same things to say. It was so incredible to see this.

So, you know, we are different in our personalities and our professions, but business issues and what we're tackling are kind of the same worldwide, aren't they?

And you know, she had a chapter that was very strong at the end of last year. And you know, this chapter I was working with was very, very strong too. And the conversation that that we had really brings home how size matters.

We started our new year with this chapter going our first chapter back in person - all of our chapters here in Los Angeles have been slow to restart and some of them are just becoming hybrid. Some of them are still online and this is the only one that's fully in person and we lost in a huge swoop 19 members. But what really struck me about these people today is these are these members that are left are a very excellent dedicated Corp. They're not just dedicated in the fact of, “oh, I love BNI, and I love my people and I want to have breakfast with them”, but they're dedicated in their respect of having a meeting of excellence, and to me - and I think you might agree - that's pretty darn important, right?

So, in talking to these people and working with them, it becomes really inspirational. You know, when you have everybody who wants to be there, and everyone participating wants a fun and professional meeting it really kind of reinvigorates you, when the visitors come, you know the conversion rate begins to be high, even though there's small group, right? And I love it.

And so, I want you, everybody who's listening to this on the podcast, or who's ever here today wants you to take this into consideration when I ask you If size matters?

I think our first step really is to dream big. Because results go with goals, don't they?

Way back in the beginning of my time in BNI, I as a member, shall I share that with you?

I joined BNI in 1997. You know what? I don't even have kids that are. Well, I do have kids that were around, actually. 1997 was some time ago and we had a chapter that was also kind of ebbing and flowing in its numbers and it went from 26, it went down to 17, it went back up and there was a conversation of where we could end early.

BNI4Success Podcasts

The Voice of BNI Greater Los Angeles; Where we’ll talk about referral networking that works!
http://bnipodcast4success.com

From Network to Networth

BNI4Success Podcasts

The Voice of BNI Greater Los Angeles; Where we’ll talk about referral networking that works!
http://bnipodcast4success.com

On recurring Mondays, you are invited to attend the Life is Positively Remarkable Forum on Zoom. The Forum will be at 9:00 AM Pacific

Guest Host: BNI Executive Director Cys Bronner

Guest Speaker: Mike Fern - Podcast 44

Topic: Enjoy a little Craziness, by Murali Sundaram and Always Think Remarkable, by Norman Dominguez

BNI4Success Podcasts

The Voice of BNI Greater Los Angeles; Where we’ll talk about referral networking that works!
http://bnipodcast4success.com

BNI4Success Podcasts

The Voice of BNI Greater Los Angeles; Where we’ll talk about referral networking that works!
http://bnipodcast4success.com

On recurring Mondays, you are invited to attend the Life is Positively Remarkable Forum on Zoom. The Forum will be at 9:00 AM Pacific

Guest Host: BNI Executive Director Cys Bronner

Guest Speaker: Taneka Smith - Podcast 43

Topic: Show That You Care

BNI4Success Podcasts

The Voice of BNI Greater Los Angeles; Where we’ll talk about referral networking that works!
http://bnipodcast4success.com

BNI4Success Podcasts

The Voice of BNI Greater Los Angeles; Where we’ll talk about referral networking that works!
http://bnipodcast4success.com

Whats Your Sign - Visitor Hosts

BNI4Success Podcasts

The Voice of BNI Greater Los Angeles; Where we’ll talk about referral networking that works!
http://bnipodcast4success.com

BNI4Success Podcasts

The Voice of BNI Greater Los Angeles; Where we’ll talk about referral networking that works!
http://bnipodcast4success.com