Business Networking Group Skyrockets in Crown Heights

Crown Heights is the new Wall Street! Sound brash? Well… maybe, but surprisingly for some this Chassidic enclave seems headed in that direction.

Where once, mom and pop stores dotting one commercial street were this neighborhood’s idea of business, today’s Crown Heights is booming with a young, entrepreneurial spirit.

You can see it all around you: the stores along Kingston Avenue are now more likely to sell the latest smartphones than pickles out of a barrel, and you can even pick up crusty artisanal bread and kosher brie while you shop. The Chassidim all eat sushi now – or so it would seem from the sheer number of establishments that offer it – and just last week, the Wall Street Journal mentioned the trend toward new condo construction for the area’s increasingly affluent homebuyers.

There’s even an organized way to tap into this new spirit of enterprise; modeling themselves on the plethora of business and professional networking groups in the secular world, brothers-in-law Mendy Lipsker and Akiva Perl run a largely Chassidic networking group called the Brooklyn Jewish Referral Exchange, or BJRX* that and it has been growing by leaps and bounds.

A visit to Café Rimon, a local restaurant on Albany Avenue, Wednesday mornings at 8:00 a.m. shows the group in full swing. At a recent meeting, around 25 participants (many wearing power suits and Italian ties over their beards and tzitzis) included several lawyers, an accountant, a psychologist, a web designer, a jeweler, a caterer, and people from industries as diverse as real estate, energy, printing, insurance, finance, marketing, and more. Need custom-imprinted promotional items for an upcoming trade show? Someone in the group sells that. Need to recover critical data from a crashed hard drive? Need to get out of debt? Someone does that too. Searching for a professional writer/editor? They have one. There were even (gasp!) a few women.

“Someone I know was active in professional networking groups like BNI and Le Tip, and used to invite me to attend their meetings in Manhattan,” says Mr. Lipsker one of the cofounders of the group and president of City Card International, a provider of credit card acceptance services. “I could never fit it into my schedule, but eventually I thought, ‘Why shouldn’t we bring this great idea right home to where we are?’ So we meet in Crown Heights at a nice kosher place, and the BNI guy is now a member of our group.”

Mr. Perl, the other cofounder whose IT firm, Data Recovery Laboratory, specializes in just that says he and Mr. Lipsker are modeling the local group after the more established networking organizations, incorporating the features that seem to work best. “Non-Chassidim, even non-Jews, attend our meetings,” he says, “but there’s no question that the group is largely Chassidic businesspeople from Crown Heights. Everyone understands one another on a fundamental level already, and we can build on that. We make it a point to review a Torah thought and pass around a charity box at each meeting.”

But that’s all the money they ask. Unlike the large commercial networking organizations, this group charges no membership fees, or annual dues (yet). “We can do that because of our relationship with Café Rimon,” Mr. Lipsker explains. “So far they give us a free place to meet, and in return, we encourage our members to have their coffee during the meetings, or to stay behind afterward and network over breakfast.”

Networking, after all, is the name of the game. As in all such groups, the ultimate goal of participation is to refer business to other members and, hopefully, have them refer business to you. And, like the other more well known professional networking groups, membership is limited to those not in competitions with existing members.

In addition, there are rules, that if a member does not attend the meeting twice, their membership is revoked for 90 days, and must re-apply. Mr. Perl explains, “As the requests for membership enrollments have increased, the need for additional meetings are now being arranged.”

Statistics show that the likelihood of closing a deal is 79% greater when business networking is involved. Likewise, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 70% of jobs are found through networking. On a more immediate level, numerous BJRX members reported doing business with new customers because of referrals received through the meetings. It may have taken a while to catch up, but it seems that Crown Heights is now firmly on the bandwagon.

The BJRX website is now being developed, and will feature the member’s name and their respective businesses. BJRX.info will also include an area for “Members Only” that will add even more benefits to the existing ones, thereby further increasing the bottom line of their own business. Webinars and professional business lecturers have been contacted to gives us some, “Tricks of the Trade” insights.