Summary: Synopsis More than 1000 members, representing every populated continent of the world, responded to the BNI Business Index Survey in 2013. Over 76% thought that business was better than in 2012. Only 6% felt that business was declining in 2013. For BNI members, everything is going in the right direction. The most common reasons given for doing well were restructuring or reorganizing, niche marketing, and networking. One of the most promising indicators was the response to the hiring survey. Just over 35% of respondents were definitely hiring. Of the businesses that were struggling, many attributed their difficulties to government regulation (irrespective of which country they were in). Go to BNIBusinessIndex.com to see the whole report. There's a lot to be learned here about why people survived the recession. What more can you do in the way of niche marketing, reorganizing, and networking? Use the comments to tell us whether your business is better or worse than it was this time last year? Will your business be hiring in 2014? Brought to you by Networking Now. Complete Transcript of BNI Podcast Episode 349 - Priscilla: Hello everyone and welcome back to The Official BNI Podcast brought to you by NetworkingNow.com, which is the leading site on the net for networking downloadables. I am Priscilla Rice, and I am coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkeley, CA. I am joined on the phone today by the Founder and Chairman of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner. Hello Ivan. How are you and where are you? Ivan: Hi Priscilla. I am doing great and I am in the 25th floor of the W hotel looking at the state capitol in Austin, Texas today, so that is my view as I record this podcast with you. Priscilla: Great. How is Austin? Do you like living there? Ivan: I do. It is not like a lot of the rest of Texas, but it is a happening town. Priscilla: Great. So tell us what you plan to share with us today. What is this BNI index? Ivan: I want to talk about the BNI Business Index results for 2013. The BNI Business Index was started a few years ago as a suggestion that someone made. We have over 160,000 members. It would be good to get sort of the pulse of the small business person, entrepreneur, salesperson, professional as to a number of topics, particularly the economy and how is business for you(them) today? So we have been doing a very similar survey every year for the last four years or so about business. It is called the BNI Business Index. I am going to talk a little bit about the results that we got for 2013. BNI doesn't take a position on politics and religion. We do not take a position on- some of these things and comments that I will be sharing today, comments that were made in the survey. BNI does not take a position on some of those kinds of issues. But I want to share with you what came out in terms of the survey. When I get there, I will mention it. So for the BNI Business Index 2013, we had over a thousand members in every populated continent in the world respond to the survey. According to the survey, almost 76% of the respondents said that business was better today than it was over the last few years, particularly than it was over 2012. That's up over 9% from the 2011 survey. In addition, only 6% felt that business was declining in 2013, which was far less than almost double that of the 10% in the survey from 2011. So everything is kind of going in the right direction as far as today compared to this time last year. We have the graphs for 2013 here on the podcast that you can look at. Almost 16% of the respondents said that business is growing substantially. Over 60% said that it's growing. Only about 18% of the respondents said that business was kind of flat. Like I said, only 6% said that it's declining or declining substantially. Only 2% said that business is declining substantially. The economy has definitely picked up from where it was a few years ago.
