About Yellow-Tie

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In this interview with Gill E. Wagner, president and founder of Yellow-Tie, you'll find answers to some of the most commonly asked questions about the association.

Q: How did this association get started?

A: The people who founded Yellow-Tie all use group collaboration as a business- and self-development tool. As a result of doing this successfully for years, we've all wound up in numerous conversations about the different programs out there, and what works for us and what doesn't. Through my work with clients on their sales and marketing issues, I had many similar conversations and began to spot commonality among the group goals people had, and the problems they had achieving those goals alone or in existing programs.

Simply put, I asked a half-dozen colleagues if they wanted to join forces so we could design a structure that worked while still being highly adaptable, and they all jumped at the chance to, once again, give first.

Q: What sets Yellow-Tie apart from other associations?

A: Most group programs and associations have fairly rigid structures within which you must participate. So if a given structure isn't a perfect fit, your success within that program will be limited.

Take one of my favorite associations, the National Speakers Association (NSA), for example. They have a phenomenal program built to help successful speakers become rock stars. But to join, you must already be earning at least $25,000 per year as a professional speaker. I know thousands of professional people who use speaking as a marketing tool, or who give presentations as part of their consulting work, but the NSA isn't a fit, because speaking isn't their primary career -- they don't earn that much as speakers.

Yellow-Tie helped one such professional, Steve Smith of M.I.S. Corp., create the St. Louis Speakers Special Interest Group, so he and others could achieve the same type of growth they would at the NSA, but without the $25k joining requirement. And in fewer than six months, Steve's group wowed local business people when they pulled off one of the best business conferences St. Louis has ever seen. (Talk about leveraging the power of the group!)

Yellow-Tie provides the tools, technology, contact lists, vendor relationships, ideas, energy and mentor-protege support people need to create their own groups, set their own objectives, and form their own sets of rules and structure, so they can achieve together what they can't achieve alone or within existing programs that don't quite fit.

Q: What is the primary reason for joining Yellow-Tie?

A: Actually, there are four:

Join Forces With Others Who Give Freely: All members of Yellow-Tie share a common bond -- we give freely without "keeping score," because we believe that is the true path to success.
Personal Help: All founders and chapter board of director members are ready, willing and able to personally help the association's members succeed. Feel free to call me personally if you want to discuss how. My cell phone number is (314) 416-1440.
Sharing Resources: All members get to take advantage of a single set of tools and technology to be successful. For example, with most trade associations, the board members of each chapter must design, build and host their chapter's website. Not true with Yellow-Tie -- we not only host chapter leaders' websites, the folks on our international board will actually build the chapter leaders' pages and teach them how to keep the pages updated. Another example is the Yellow-Tie merchant account -- all chapter leaders may build fee-based events and accept credit cards for payment, without having to open a bank account, pay for a merchant account, license a shopping cart, pay an IT professional to set it all up, manage the books and report to the IRS.
Leveraging The Power Of The Group: We figure that if giving generates success, by joining forces with others who give we will accomplish together what most of us could not have accomplished on our own.

This organization is all about giving and sharing. That's why it's a non-profit association run by volunteers, instead of a for-profit enterprise where everyone is competing for the same members or commissions.

Meet Our Mascot

Our yellow tabby cat, appropriately named "Tie," was born November 24, 2004 -- the very day that Phil Hamilton (a client in Austin, Texas) and I shook hands and agreed to create the Yellow-Tie International Business Development Association. (We didn't know what the association would be called -- we just knew we'd create it.)

Eight weeks later, after we had recruited four other board members, developed the initial concept, named the association and developed and launched the website, Cindy (my wife) and I found Tie at the Humane Society of America.

In the picture above, you can see Tie has a laser-like focus on the objective. (Okay, it's more like a focus on the laser objective.) But the point is, Tie's birth date and his incredible focus made him a natural for the association's mascot honors.

Pictured here two years later, Tie is on Cindy's desk.

As you can see, he hasn't a care in the world when it comes to business development, because he knows Yellow-Tie will help him succeed.

Q: Who should join Yellow-Tie?

A: Any businessperson who must market and sell as part of his or her profession, who must constantly improve his or her skills in a variety of areas (such as speaking, coaching, writing), who is willing to join forces with others to achieve greater things together than he or she can alone, and who believes that success comes to those who Give.

Q: Why is the organization called "Yellow-Tie"?

A: I named one company poorly in the past -- every time I said the name I had to spell it -- so to avoid making the same mistake again, we embarked on a branding effort to choose the name of this group. During that effort, we looked into several different branding strategies and seriously considered the following three:

Create a word that has never been used, such as "Acura," then put together a marketing and branding campaign to give that word meaning. (This might require us to spell the name every time we spoke it, at least for the first few years.)
Invent a name that attempts to describe the organization's purpose. (We couldn't come up with anything accurate that had fewer then 327 words.)
Choose a combination of words that together have no current business meaning, but separately are well-known and understood. And then put together a marketing and branding campaign to give the word combination meaning.

We chose the third strategy.

Next, we set some rules to follow in selecting potential names:

To avoid having people use an acronym when speaking about the group, the name must have a natural shortened version containing no more than two words and no more than three syllables.
The name must be easy to say and be immediately recognized, so we don't have to spell it every time we say it.
We wanted to establish a color identity for the brand, so the name had to include a color or create a visual image of a color in the mind of the person who hears it (such as "grass" making you think of green).
To facilitate brand recognition quickly, the name must elicit the thought of a common geometric shape or object that creates a memorable visual image.
There must be no competing association with the same name.
The domain name had to be available.

"Yellow-Tie" was the end result.

Q: Do you really think you can grow Yellow-Tie to 20,000 members?

A: As long as every person who joins Yellow-Tie adopts the Give First philosophy and works towards leveraging the power of the group, I think 20,000 members is conservative!

Q: What type of organization entity is Yellow-Tie?

A: The official name is "Yellow-Tie International Business Development Association." It is organized as a nonprofit, "For Public Benefit" corporation in the state of Missouri. Our certificate of incorporation is: