Business group toasts £3m over breakfast

An East Lancashire business networking group is celebrating after generating £3million in business over three years of breakfast-time meetings.

Now meeting weekly at Whalley Village Hall, BNI Beacon is part of Business Network International, the world’s leading business referral organization with over 280,000 members in over 70 countries worldwide.

Established over 30 years, it provides weekly networking meetings for groups of businesses, known as chapters, who follow a structured meeting agenda that enables them to use their combined network of contacts to find business opportunities and referrals for one another.

At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, BNI globally closed all meetings for one week to provide member training for online meetings, then reopened purely online the following week. Throughout lockdown all meetings worldwide have been conducted online, still following the same structured agenda.

From October 2021, BNI meetings are now run on one of three models: in-person, online, or hybrid, where members meet in person for the first meeting of the month and the remaining meetings of the month are online.

BNI Beacon has opted for in-person meetings which are set to continue at Whalley Village Hall every Thursday at 6.45am, where the group recently celebrated its third birthday as well as passing £3m in business between its members since launch.   

BNI Beacon Chapter President Richard Webster said: “Recent times have obviously been a huge upheaval for many in business, but we are very proud not only to still be here but also to be celebrating passing this multi-million pound milestone in terms of business generated by the group.

“We’re very excited to be meeting again face-to-face in Whalley and are very keen to get some new members from the local business community. Our doors are always open to visitors who might be interested to find out more about what we do and see if it might be right for them.”

For more information about BNI in Lancashire, go to www.bni.co.uk.