Dr. Ivan Misner, founder of the BNI (a business networking organisation), calls it the Wedding Mafia. I call it Power Team. It’s the same concept when you want to do business in a more effective way – the referral marketing way.

So what is ‘Wedding Mafia?’ If you are a creative entrepreneur, whether a handcrafting individual or a creative arts SME, you will definitely have in your network system people who can regularly give you business and you can also give them business back, in a symbiotic way.

In the ‘wedding mafia,’ the typical people in a contact sphere is the caterer, the florist, the photographer, and the travel agent. Their target market is the same, i.e. weddings. So, if the photographer is contacted for the wedding, he is bound to give the florist and the travel agent the business as well. It’s a matter of symbiosis in an effective way that business goes around and comes around. Note, it is usually one person from each industry (i.e. one photographer, one florist and one travel agent). That means no competition.

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