Building a community starts with a culture that is focused on strong relationships, that help build referrals. Alignable is an online network community that focuses on just that. It helps connect small business owners across North America to drive leads and prospects, generate referrals, land new business, build trusted relationships, and share great advice. Harry Brelsford of SMB Nation sits down with Beatrice Phillips of THE ALPHA GROUP INTERNATIONAL who received the Business Person of the Year award in Orlando, to discuss the best kept secret to grow your business.
Video Transcription
Harry Brelsford
Hey, Nation Nation back with Beatrice Phillips in Florida. How you doing? Beatrice?
Beatrice Phillips
antastic. Fantastic.
Harry Brelsford
All right. All right. Well, that's good to hear. Well, hey, I want to revisit something we passed over many months ago about this community organization, you won an award from them called Alignable. What is Alignable? You know,
Beatrice Phillips
Alignable is basically I don't want to say startup, but it's a startup, social platform, but it's really a business platform. So everyone's familiar with Facebook, which has like, what 2 billion users, and I think Lincoln just broke a million Alignable is like this beautiful little space, there's about seven and a half million users right now. And it's all about small business. So it's a small business community that really focuses on one to one relationships, and building business through referrals. And I there there, Amin they are hard to try it. Right now they started one initiative called Alignable. Alliance, where they actually are building local network groups. So you have Alignable online, and are having ambassadors in person. So if you're in a city, you can meet people for coffee in person, and then continue the conversation online. And they're also launching and networking university to get people together. I mean, there's a lot of stuff. So that's, that's happening there.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah. Now, do they have a an event model like a fall conference, that kind of thing? Do they have a national convention at this point,
Beatrice Phillips
they don't have a national convention or even like an invent model. In that sense. These sorts of initiatives that I know that are starting right now. And being you know, having my own business, I'm, I'm super excited, because I'm actually an ambassador for an alliance in Orlando. And our last meeting had 30 People join, you know, we had a lunch meeting, and it was awesome. And, um, I don't know if there was going to be conferences in the future. It would be awesome, you know, but that's where they're at right now. Is Still with the online model just expanding into in person groups.
Harry Brelsford
Yep. Well, what made me think of it is, I guess it was maybe two weeks ago, I gave a speech at a meetup group in San Marcos, which is just a little bit south of Boston. And it's called 1 Million Cups. So it's this meetup meets once a month, 1 Million Cups. And I gave a speech on a startup I'm involved in, and one of the ladies in the audience of a webmaster won an award from Alignable. For that, that region, next to San Marcos. And it was for, you know, best web design or something like that it was a sort of look like as a category. So that that's what made me think about it. Now you won an award in the last round, right? Let's revisit that.
Beatrice Phillips
Yeah, so this was 2021. I got I'm a Business Person of the Year in Orlando. And also nationally, I placed second overall. And literally, once I did that, you know it, once I got that exposure, the phone to start ringing, and I didn't have to do anything. And still Alignable to me is still the best kept secret. So I really shouldn't be talking to you about this publicly. But Alignable is the best kept secret. If you fill out your profile, the way people connect, like Alignable, you are not able to use like a software like you can do with other online platforms where you can have a software to go through the list of people, you literally have to reach out manually to connect with people. And I'm still getting people just calling me connecting with me. And I don't I'm not doing any advertising. If you look at me on LinkedIn, Facebook, I barely do anything there. So I'm pretty much 110% on Alignable at this point.
Harry Brelsford
All right. Well, thanks for your contribution. We'll see you next time. Thank you, Beatrice.
Beatrice Phillips
All right. Take care Harry.