The Benefits Of Building A Genuine Business Community With Tracy Card

As society evolves in isolation and moves away from in-person work set-ups, it has become more of a challenge to build a strong, genuine business community. Tracy Card, president of Elevated Results Group, talks about how this growing network has helped many businesspeople develop relationships and gain opportunities. Unlike other networking groups, they have maintained a positive environment and expanded each person’s reach while keeping that genuine yet professional connections with people from various industries. In this episode, Tracy talks about the Elevated Results experience and how members benefit from their approach. --- Listen to the podcast here The Benefits Of Building A Genuine Business Community With Tracy Card Those of you who have read some of my episodes know that I have a strong interest in community everywhere. I go around me. I see the results of the lack of community. When I look at some of these horrible outcomes such as depression, anxiety, drug addiction, suicide and violence, I see the results of loneliness, isolation and lack of community. Oftentimes, when people think about community, they think about the community that we once had. One of the things that I often struggle with this vision of community is that sometimes, it seems to require some of the restrictiveness that we had in the last century. A lot of people will tell me, “The only time I had community is when I had a rigid 9:00 to 5:00, everyone in the office work schedule.” Relationships come first. Leads will follow. Share on X That's something that our society is most definitely moving away from. There are some definite mental health benefits to us moving toward a more flexible and fluid work schedule. That's why I'm hoping to find a whole new way to approach and find community. I was pleasantly surprised when I first attended a group known as the Elevated Results network. I hopped on a Zoom call because everything is remote here during the pandemic. The first thing I noticed was the members were frequent guests that were talking amongst each other seem to have a genuine community-like understanding of each other's lives. It has become the community where you can walk up to someone and you don't have to always be on or always be playing catch up. You are saying, “How did fill-in-the-blank whatever your latest endeavor go?” I have as my guest Tracy Card the leader of the Elevated Results Network Group for a couple of years. --- Tracy, thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for having me, Stephen. I appreciate it. The first question I had on my mind is, how did you go about getting this community? You inherited it in 2014 from another former leader but how does this community revolve? How does it work? How do people stay in the known each of their lives? Thank you so much for asking about this group. I'm a leader since 2014 and it is a community. That's a great word for it. We do know each other's lives. We care about each other not only personal lives but definitely in business life. How can we help each other succeed? Expand each other's circles of influence. It's a lot different from many other groups. I was the same way when I first met this group that you felt and I knew this is my home. It's a different feel. There's a lot of ways that we are different from other networking groups. The group is very engaged. One way that I can share with you is our attendance policy. All networking groups have, “You need to come or you maybe need to send a substitute if you can't come.” That is not our policy at all. We want our members to be there. Anything else comes up before the meeting, go and take care of that. We'll be here for you when you come back next time. Send us a substitute. Our relationship is with the members. We want our members to be there and we have a great attendance every meeting but it's not required. That's a part of why we have great attendance. One of the questions I often have is that whole not required hints. A lot of people think that requirement is what's necessary. I found my community when we all had to be at the office, Monday through Friday, 8:00 AM, every day. How does that not requirement translate into people still being engaged and still people showing up like your typical member? How often do they miss these meetings? How often do they make it? Does it often happen where they'll skip enough meetings where the relationships start to falter a little bit? We might have 50, 60 people at those events. It's large enough where you have a good mix of people, but small enough where you can have great conversations with people, and get to know them, and not feel like, oh I need to spend one minute with…Share on X The reason people come is because of the underlying philosophy of this group, which is relationships come first and then leads will follow. We encourage one-on-ones, people to introduce each other to people that are going to help them in their business, leads to being shared and closed business to be accomplished but the relationships happen first. It's not a hard and fast rule that I've also seen other groups that in your first meeting, you can't even talk about anything business. We're not sending a bunch of roles. We have a great foundation. We support our members with a great environment and meeting. Every meeting has a great presentation. Members get a lot out of it because we have about 80% attendance at every meeting. There are times when we have a member that we haven't seen in a while. Maybe they've got busy or they think they're too busy for us. That does happen. They get too many leads and they can't network with us anymore but we check on them, “Are you okay? Is everything all right? Is there anything we can do for you to help you get through this? We hope that you're still wanting to be active.” Our dues are collected quarterly so we know pretty quickly if someone is not interested in continuing. They can't pay for the whole year too if they want to. Our dues are very low. We also don't collect a lot of money. We're not building a bank account or anything. We're collecting money to maintain the group, our meetup page, our website and things like that. The mistake I feel a lot of people make both in forming networking groups as well as on the job, in general, is that they inadvertently replace an internal motivation with external motivation. Obligatory attendance is an example. That's an external motivation. All of our grade schools and high schools should get rid of the perfect attendance award. Even worked under bosses that have inadvertently made that replacement where it seems like here you're focusing on the member experience as far as, “I'm coming here because of what I'm getting out of it. Not because it seems like some obligation.” It seems to work well so that's a wonderful testament to what I feel is a fear-based response of starting to crank down on requirements and mandates anywhere in life and saying, “If someone's enjoying the group, they're going to come.” Some people like the more structured. That's great that there are those. That's not what we are. We're very successful in our group. They are happy to be members. We have a waiting list to be a member. That's a great problem to have. I was unaware that there was a waiting list. That makes me feel special for getting through it. Business Community: It is a community. We care not only about each other’s personal life but business life as well. You are special for sure. One of the other questions I wanted to ask about Elevated Results is a lot of people when they think of networking and networking groups, they think of what was my initial networking experience a couple of years ago before I learned how to do it better. You come home with a stack of business cards but then you never form relationships with the people. Maybe you meet up for coffee once or you see them around from time-to-time but they don't become someone who I observed when I first hopped on Elevated Results who knows about what's going on in your life and can quickly ask, “How is your latest initiative? How is your newest business? How is your push to market yourself to this particular demographic group?” What sets you apart from those types of groups? We do host events that are very welcoming. I can't wait until we can do those in person again. We've been doing those on Zoom. Everyone is tired into Zoom and ready to be back in person. I'm hoping by the next quarterly event. We're looking forward to that because it a great atmosphere. Those events attract a lot of people that have been there in the past and know the quality of people that come. They're not giant events. We might have 50 to 60 people but it's large enough to where you go. It’s a good mix of people but small enough where you can have great conversations with them and get to know them and not feel like, “I need to spend one minute with 100 people,” then you're not getting any depth or anything there so you're getting to know anyone. When you do follow up, you're like, “I remember them, their face, what we talked about,” and not, “What is this card? I don't remember what this person looked like.” It's a different experience and that's a great one. The one thing I'm also wondering as far as the membership and the people you have at your events seems like making this whole atmosphere happen requires to be some control as to who you're bringing in. How does that whole thing work? I do have two people in my life that doesn't speak to me anymore because I've asked them no longer to come to our events because they were coming not for business networking. One was a female coming there to meet possible dates. She was asking me, “Is that person married?” It's like, “I don't know and that is not the appropriate question to be asking here. This is a networking event....