Now the business world has its own equivalent for card-collecting executives in Bucuresti, the capital of Romania. The second meeting will be in September 2008 in Bucuresti.

The name of the club is Belgian Connection.

BC, a Bucuresti based business club, introduced "corporate speed dating" meetings for the business community that was invited by BC last year. They work with a very simple principle. Each month some people are invited by nationality in cooperation with the embassy of their country. They can enter with a valid ID of the target country or countries. So bring your ID if you come to a meeting.....

The BC meetings work the same as the company's regular networking events, with everyone encouraged to "unashamedly promote their business organization." But the meetings also have a "Speed business Dating Momentum". For 45-60 minutes we invite those that want at a speed business dating session. And if there's nothing you hate more than working a room for contacts, orange juice in hand, then perhaps "speed networking" could be for you.

At a speed networking meeting, you only get two minutes to impress possible clients or associates. "There's so much energy and people are really getting into the spirit of it, because they see the value of having that couple of minutes just focused on one person, a one-to-one with every single person in the room."

"The enjoyment, the fun and the pure adrenaline that's running through the room when the speed dating session is going on is absolutely amazing," says Freddy M.E. Jacobs, president of CIBR, Camera Imobiliara Belgia Romania. "This is one of the mean reasons that we started to support the meetings organized by BC. Networking is our business. It would be great to go be able to spend all day with people finding out about their business and maybe going to their place of work and looking at their brochure and their products and all that sort of thing," he says. "But we're trying to run a business and the rest of the day I need to be getting on with that. This means I can do the networking in the evening and then go back to my office in the morning and do a full day's work. And with the speed dating concept I have made more contacts then on an average networking session. The nice thing is that every meeting is concluded with a cocktail and some time to really make contact with some interesting people that I just met in the speed dating session. While two minutes might not be long enough to close a deal, it is more than enough time to know whether someone is worth talking to. "The whole idea is that this is just a first step," he says. "Your head is telling you in those few seconds whether you are comfortable with a person or not. "It doesn't matter if it's romance or business, it's human nature. Business runs the same as anything else. It's about people and how people relate to each other. It's a chemistry and that's where the real benefit of it lies."

BC is an initiative from (alphabetically) :
Freddy Jacobs, Camera Imobiliara Belgia Romania,
Frederik Deman, Novotel Bucuresti,
Luk Vangansbeke, Pentamid Group,
Pascal Plovie

The meetings of this community are in held in the Novotel in Bucuresti.
The attendency of the meetings is on invitation of BC only.
BC is a private business club.

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