ADELAIDE: PLATFORM | Piper Alderman’s Junior Professionals Networking: ‘Net-Work It!’

Simon Derrick-Roberts began his career in the ICT sector, initially in a technical role, later progressing into account management and then business development.

It was in a BDM role he learned the importance of relationship based selling and began networking across a variety of organisations, including several chambers of commerce, industry organisations and service clubs.

Based on a recommendation, he visited an information session for the world’s largest networking organisation, BNI, and became a founding member of their second chapter in South Australia.

After almost 3 years as a member, where BNI was directly responsible for over 82% of his new sales, he took an opportunity to run the organisation full time.

In less than 7 years, he scaled BNI’s local membership base from 56 to 438, prior to splitting and selling half his franchise territory in mid-2019.

During his 12 year tenure, Simon has trained hundreds of people with tools to network more effectively. By leveraging these tools, local BNI members report generating over $17.2M in networking related revenue in the last 12 months.

Additionally, he has delivered in-house group training to organisations across a board variety of industry sectors including:

• Australasian College of Health Service Management
• Canteen
• Essential Services Commission
• Rotary
• SA Health
• UniSA