When I was a teen I would spend a lot of time with my grandparents.  My grandfather owned his own business, JR Custom Floors and I learned a lot from he and my grandmother as they ran that business.  Today as I was putting some dates and times on my calendar for some local “Tweetups”   I was brought back to a time when my grandparents did much the same thing with thei coffee meets.

My grandfather belonged to a club, it was called the “Metro CBers”.   You know, those guys who had two way radios known as Citizen Band Radios and they talked to each other all the time.  There were many a night when my grandfather would be on the Radio until 1:00am in the morning talking to his friends.   They talked about everything on those radios and they all had “handles”  like “Floorshine”, “Qupiedoll”, “Bigbelly” and so forth.  Once a month they would meetup and have coffee, introduce each other, welcome the new CBers and handout their CB Cards with their handles on it.  It was a lot of fun and I always looked forward to going with my grandparents.  I did not know then that I was actually learning to network and those lessons would follow me into adulthood when I would start using a tool called “Twitter”

Oddly, the more things change, the more they stay the same!  Oh, and my grandmother reminds me, that I was “Qupiedoll”.  The handle that my grandfather gave me!

Hazel M Walker, owns three award winning franchise’s. She is a 10 year owner of two BNI Franchises where she teaches members how to leverage their time and network to build each others businesses. She is also a Referral Institute franchise owner and teaches Business Owners how to harness the Science of Referrals to develop Referrals for Life. Hazel is a published author in New York Times best sellers Masters of Networking and Masters of Sales. As a member of the National Speakers Association she travels the world speaking to businesses and women’s organizations on the topics of networking to create a life you love.