‘You don’t business on your own; you do business with other people you know, like and trust!’ |11 December 2017

“That’s what people will gain by joining ‘Eden Island VIP’, a networking group where members meet regularly early in the morning at Eden Bleu Hotel to discuss business and support each other’s businesses by sharing referrals. It’s all about networking with business people and helping each other out and coming together. I figured that in Seychelles, although people know each other they don’t actually do business even with people they’ve known for a long time.”

This is what Claude Bonté, a Seychellois who has lived and worked in England for a long time but also worked in Seychelles for the last seven years as an insurance professional, said of his six-month old networking group, ‘Eden Island VIP’.

The aim of this initiative is to teach Seychellois that business is not done in isolation but with other people through networking, giving and getting referrals. The meetings have been described as a breakfast club where members meet early in the morning at Eden Bleu Hotel on a monthly basis.

What does a person gain from joining such a group ?  Claude explains:

“If you run your own business you have little or no support. You’ve just got to go out there and do it. You have to make sales or you don’t have a business, so you need lots of support and lots of good quality business to make ends meet and feed your family. You also need to learn more business and people skills if you want to get to the next level. So rapid business growth coupled with real life business support from entrepreneurs who are in the place you want to be is what you would gain from being a member of a vibrant business network.

“The idea of a local networking organisation is based on an ancient concept which started in America.. ‘If you help me, I’ll help you and we’ll both do better as a result’. The international body covers many countries across the world and has a few thousand meetings every single morning of the working week. Members who join ‘Eden Island VIP’ on invitation or upon recommendation by other members, meet regularly at Eden Bleu to discuss business and support each other’s businesses by sharing referrals.

“Some business owners are far too comfortable with their lives and their business -- money in the bank, small profits, staff get paid on time and the wife and children are well taken take of, a bit like an old pair of shoes that you’ve always had. So if you are new to a place how do you meet more new business people? If you meet new business people how do you know they are any good before you use them. It is about us moving our business ahead, telling the other members of the group what we do and how we can help to solve challenges with our unique expertise.”

But he acknowledges the challenges here in Seychelles are not the same as in England.

“Here we do not have all those challenges that we have in England which doesn’t push us to become better at what we’re doing and learn cutting edge business concepts from our peers. That’s the reason I started this group, ‘Eden Island VIP’, which was a very difficult task to get off the ground. I don’t really care whether someone just started their business last week or if they’ve been around for twenty years with a four-million-rupee turnover. All I care about is that they consider themselves and their business to be work in progress rather than the finished product.

“We understand that we all have to learn from each other. No man is an island. We all need each other’s ideas. One person does not make a family. One person does not make a community. It takes more than one. It takes all of us to make the unique contribution for each of us to change our life or business in any manner we wish,” Claude explains.

It’s very prevalent, he added, in this day and age if we want to progress we actually have to help each other. That’s the only way we can all become better in what we do. Like they say competition is healthy. And so is a network.

Where is Claude going with this?

At the moment ‘Eden Island VIP’is a monthly group but Claude has high hopes for a weekly one to be fulfilling more of a support function for young entrepreneurs which he believes is not really being served as well as it could be. So ‘Eden Island VIP’ is a real life working model of what they may learning at other institutions.

“When you’re sitting in a classroom learning, it’s quite nice, you take it all in. When you become a member of a networking group you can actually see real life examples of what you’ve learned. It’s like the difference between being a spectator and a participant,” says Claude.

What advice does Claude have for people reading this who have their own business?

“You don’t do business on your own, you do business with other people you know, like trust respect and need.  Everybody wants either more clients, more family time or more free time but there’s something that they have to learn. It’s called ‘The art of living!’ Most people who are lucky enough to be in that position are very reluctant to share the knowledge. So how do you progress?

As there is no networking group on every island every week, Claude says those interested can log on to Facebook, join the forum called Seychelles Club where he will be more than happy to listen to their views and questions.

As to who can join, Claude says you don’t have to be a high profile person or businessman to join the group. As is the case in his previous groups, he has had people from one extreme to the other.

“Even if your business is embryonic, it could be inspiring to see where you could be in the next year after you’ve seen others prosper even before you get off the starting block,” he says.

At last month’s breakfast meeting at Eden Bleu, Claude introduced members to one of the first personal development books he used to prosper through various businesses for many years -- Think and Grow Rich, a 1937 book by Napoleon Hill. In Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill teaches what is called the ‘Thirteen steps to riches’.

Those thirteen steps, he claimed, were the secret to building wealth. Karpman was also mentioned, a gentleman in psychology which explains a typical selling situation no matter what you are selling.

It is worth noting that Claude always has referral slips which members can complete whenever he holds such meetings. The ‘Eden Island VIP’ group broke a worldwide networking record when one very lucky participant received a golden referral from a large corporate institution at the inaugural meeting before it had even finished, which resulted into many tens of thousands of rupees.