68 | MENTORS MAGAZINE | EDITION 2
sold three-quarters of a billion books. In my
dreams would I have sold three-quarters of a
billion books. And his ego does not enter the
room before him. He is a very down-to-earth
guy, I really respect people who are very suc-
cessful, but also down-to-earth.
Neil: Thank you for that Ivan. Ivan what I
would like to do now is talk to you about the
time before you were an entrepreneur. What
difficulties did you have to overcome when
you started your business?
Ivan Misner: You know I think there were a
few things when I started BNI imparticular. It
was a fairly unknown concept - there was a
lack of concept recognition. You see that, if
you think about it, you see it in a number of
roles. The first time I saw it was on a tele-
phone answering machine back in the 70's
where I remember calling someone with a
buddy, and we called our friend and there
was a telephone answering machine. Our
friend had a telephone answering machine
and my buddy said 'oh god who would ever
leave their message on one of these things?'
It is weird. And he hung up.
A year, two years later calling another friend,
a different situation and the phone rang and
rang and rang and my buddy said the guy
doesn't have a tape machine, everybody has
a tape machine, why doesn't he have a tape
machine. So, what happened in that two-
year period where someone said oh, I would
never leave my voice on a tape machine and
then someone saying oh he doesn't have atape machine.
I saw that happen with fax machines, I saw
that happen with email, it happened with
networking. People didn't understand what
a group like BNI was at all, nobody. And so,
we had to really create an industry with this
concept of business networking. And we
don't teach it in colleges and universities, an-
ywhere in the world, we don't teach net-
working or word of mouth marketing or re-
ferral marketing. And so, the biggest thing
that I had to overcome was teaching people
what it was and what it was when it was
done right and that took some time. That is
part of the reason I say I am a 20-year over-
night success because we really had to cre-
ate that industry as we went.
Neil: Did you have any doubts that delayed
you starting your business?
Ivan Misner: It delayed me starting it. I you
know, I stumbled in to it, as I said in the first
part of the interview, I did not intend to run
a network, I was a management consultant,
my doctoral work is in organisational behav-
iour. So, I would not say there were doubts, I
just did not see it until it had hit me over the
head. You know, so when you are marketing
something, you can push and push and
push. Or sometimes, you see some element
of what you are doing where you just get
pulled right in. You get pulled through rather
than have to push through.
It was at that point that I recognised, when