Meet Tom Bovee, networking champion
September 6, 2007
 Tom Bovee of Corporate Express, left, spoke at the Progress Club of Miami, one of the area’s oldest networking groups, dating back to 1965. With him are Carlos Garcia of Please Hold Advertising, Robert Pearce of US Financial Advisors and Daniel Rojas of Kahn-Carlin. |
If you network in Miami-Dade for any length of time, you soon will run into Tom Bovee.
If there was a Networking Hall of Fame in our area, Tom would be in it. He’s a firm believer in the concept of networking and promotes it all the time, convincing people to join and get active in the business organizations. If he only had a dollar for everyone he introduced to networking, he could have retired long ago.
So when I saw that Tom Bovee was speaking at the Progress Club of Miami, I dragged myself out of bed and made my way to the Country Club of Coral Gables for the organization’s weekly 7 a.m. breakfast meeting.
Tom, with Corporate Express, took advantage of his microphone time to promote his company, noting that Corporate Express is in 20 countries and the leader in office supplies. He said giving up his own small business and entering the corporate world several years ago was difficult, but eventually he realized that both required the same skill set for success – know your customers, and give them personal attention.
Tom began networking back in 1960 with the key club in high school and has been involved with as many as nine business groups at a time.
“I’m only involved in five organizations right now,” he says, and he has held so many leadership roles that he has lost track. “Mostly the head of membership, VP, President, and always on one committee or the other. I’ve chaired a lot of committees.”
The Progress Club is one of his favorite groups. One of Miami’s oldest, it dates back to 1965. It is a leads group, which means one member per industry, and members are expected to do business with each other and to refer business to each other.
Tom began the talk by asking: “How much new business do you want to do in 2008?” and went around the room, calling on each club member for an answer. Then he said:
“If our 25 members each know 250 people, that’s 6,250 possible customers for members of the organization.” He did the math on a Corporate Express calculator. “If just 10% of those buy, and spend an average of $1,500 a year, that would generate $937,500 in new business for club members each year.”
He said that advertising is almost always a waste of money for small business because it means communicating with a large market of mostly people who are not potential customers. Networking, however, is very cost-effective, targeting one potential customer at a time.
If you want to talk networking, buy lunch for Tom Bovee and you will get a whole education. You can reach him at Tom.Bovee@cexp.com. Of course, he would appreciate an order for business supplies at the same time.
To learn more about the Progress Club, go to the Organizations page and click on the logo. Interesting, while the Progress Club was meeting, a BNI chapter was also meeting for breakfast elsewhere in the same building. There’s networking everywhere!
Skills Workshop a Sellout
The first Business Skills Workshop at Chamber South sold out, and that is pretty exciting. It seems to confirm what I’ve been saying for years – that the business community needs and wants programming that helps them be more successful. If the weekly sessions continue to fill the 35 seats around the table, we will have to consider alternatives.
I am leading the lunch group every Friday with executive and life coach Pat Morgan of Smooth Sailing.
The subject for Friday, Sept. 14, will be “What Your Business Card Says about You.” We will skip Sept 21, and come back on Sept. 28 with “Cost-Effective Marketing.”
One really cool innovation is that Pat created a blog to go with the workshops. It’s a place where we can post our notes, so people don’t have to take extensive notes during the session, and also where participants can post comments and suggestions, and communicate with each other. To check out the Business Skills Blog, click on the box at the top of this page.
To register for a future program, call Nicole at Chamber South at 305-661-1621 or online at www.chambersouth.com.
Cost is $15 for Chamber members and $20 for others, and if you want to assure a seat at future sessions, you can pay in advance for 5 programs and get 6.
