Okay, hi there all and welcome to the Fine come here podcast. I'm Deb Schell creator of fine calm here, a consultant agency and community helping muddy network host build launch and grow their thriving money networks on this podcast. I share conversations I've had with money network host who built launched and have grown their money networks. They share what's worked for them and offer resources that have helped them find calm in the process of community building. If you're a money network host, I'd like to invite you to join us inside the find calm your community, you'll receive support and tools that I use with my clients to help you have a successful launch, grow your membership and tackle any challenges with the support of peers in a safe space as affordable and enjoyable. We just started hosting monday monday's a monthly live tech and strategy session. I hope you'll join us there. Welcome um, Jason more today is our podcast guest and he's the co founder of location Indie.

He's, that's a mighty network I've been a member of for actually four years. This is my anniversary month actually in june which this episode will be coming out in june which is my anniversary of being a four year member of location indie. And actually another milestone for me a year ago june I launched my own community find column here. So big month for me in june. Um, but thank you, Jason for joining us here today. He's got, they launched with just a few members and now currently they have over 300 their money network. They have a full time community manager part time full time, however that goes community manager as well as a lot of other amazing people in the community that there is a global space for people who are interested in leaving their 9 to 5 job and becoming location independent. So welcome Jason to the five come here podcast. I'm so excited to be here with you Deb. And uh, first of all, happy anniversary uh because yes, four years in location in D so that's super kind and we got to meet in person when you know, when we could do good old fashioned meetups in person and hang out a bunch and uh you've always been such a wonderful presence in the community and you know, as soon as you were launching your own community and everything, I'm like, you know, Deb's going to do a great job because she's, she's a wonderful person and we're both from pennsylvania, so we've got to throw that out there and um yeah, I'm just excited to be here and excited that you're podcasting and doing everything that you've been doing.

So congratulations. And uh yeah, it's an honor. Thanks for having me. Well, it's an honor to have you here because you have an amazing podcast called Zero to Travel. So shout out to your podcast if anybody's listening and it enjoys travel, definitely check that out. You have some really amazing interviews there you have over what like 800 I don't even know how many, no, I think now I've done about, I've done over 400 shows there and with the location Indie Podcast, we've probably done, another I don't know, 100 and 50 at least maybe A Couple 100. So yeah, I've easily recorded over 600 podcasts I think in my life quite quite a lot of podcasting, but I'd like to talk so you know, your job here is going to be, to manage, manage me, don't, you know, when you bring a podcaster on your show, you got to be careful because you know, be careful what you wish for kind of thing. You know, you'll be interviewing me at this point, you know, it's good to have you on here, I'd like to dig into, you're a little little bit about your history, like tell us how location he started, like the foundation of location Indeed.

And then kind of um yeah, just let's start there. How did it, how did it all come to be okay. Yeah, well, you know Travis who's the co founder of location indie and, and back in the damn thing, at least we started it now, it was almost, I looked this up today, it was almost seven years ago now that we started the community and the reason why was because, well we have been doing the location, independent entrepreneur, lifestyle, business thing, digital nomad thing, whatever you wanna call it, some version of that uh for a little while, and Travis and I met at a conference and you know, after we connected and we did a project together, we just, we wanted to get around more people living this lifestyle you know, now because of Covid, I think remote work has become more mainstream, but it's, it's still in its early stages in many ways and you know, working for yourself and doing it in a way in a lifestyle business way where, where we, that's, that's kind of what we preach, right?

It's like, hey, let's instead of having a job and then trying to fit all your fun around that job, like most people do want, when you create a business, create a lifestyle business, create your ideal lifestyle first and then build a business that fits into that. So you have like a more holistic approach to your entire life and we saw so much value in just being around each other, helping each other grow and then some of our location independent entrepreneur friends, and we're just like, well why don't we just start a community and then we can bring people together who are doing this at all levels, right? So they can help each other, you know, it's much bigger than us, it's about creating a platform for other people to connect and grow, but you know, on the selfish and we also get to be a part of that, so we get to get around other people, amazing people like you and have uh people at events online in person and we all just try to collaborate and help each other out as much as possible. And just to create a space where people can create value for each other and grow. I think that's a, that's the point.

So you know, after we created it, we, we just realized immediately, I think we had 50 members join Around 50 to 60 members join. Uh, the first time we launched the community and back then there was no Mighty Networks that it wasn't a company, I don't think. Um the founder of Mighty Networks I believe was the founder of this other private social network called ning if that's right. And anyway, so we have like a forum and and all this um stuff which is pretty typical of a lot of communities even still, but we just found that forums weren't as much fun if we didn't enjoy going to the forum and it was hard to find stuff then we thought, well the Mighty Network was a much more social platform for the social part of the community. So we decided to move it over there and we've been on there now for I think Around four years I think or something like that. So um, so yeah, the genesis of the community was just us wanting to bring like minded people together to support each other and sort of that philosophy if you want to sum it up in a sentence of a rising tide, lifts all boats, so to speak.

It's not easy, you know, Deb like living this unconventional lifestyle, whether it's, you know, travel based or starting a lifestyle business, something like that. It's, it's hard. So you need to get around other people that are doing it in order to really make it happen. I really believe that. High five. So true. High five here. High fiving the museum. Um True. Yeah, I was just confirming for you. Um, and and listeners nick was the company that Gina, uh Belushi, I always mess up for the, I'm sorry Gina, she actually told me she's gonna listen to the podcast. Like cool Gina is the co founder of Money Networks um the Ceo and co founder um and she started singing, she was at a lot of other places, but high five Money networks, by the way, we were bringing it up because They just raised 50 million dollars to improve their platform. Um so yeah, they're gonna be Growing. They've got a lot of upgrades and updates coming for 2021 that I'm super excited about. Um so tell me a little bit about why you picked buddy network.

So it was, it was because you were with already with Ning and then you just transitioned over now. Again, we wanted to get away from the forum because we found it a bit clunky and hard to consolidate information and we had been looking for a solution for a while that also served our community, which, you know, the people in our community are not the type to stay at home. They want to travel around Being different places. So one of the first things we noticed at mining networks was that you could set your location and then there was a feature where you could find members near you. So we thought that was pretty useful for our community, especially because people are traveling around and as long as we could encourage the habit of kind of changing your location, then you'd be able to find out when other members were near you and you could set meetups in your own city and and know who to invite or direct message. If you wanted to meet somebody for coffee in person, then you could figure that out pretty easily if they were nearby.

Uh, so that was really cool. And then of course the social aspect, it's got a very, very much intuitive kind of facebook type of interface. So uh, it's like one of those things where even though it's a different platform, everybody kind of knows how to use it almost intuitively because it functions the same way as facebook, he got posts and there's a, there's a feed and things like that. Uh, you can easily kind of put all your events in there. It just seemed like it solved a lot of the problems and checked a lot of the boxes and uh really the main thing was, was it going to serve the community in a better way. And when we looked at the forum and we looked at mighty networks, we thought this is a better way to connect people within the community and that's really at the heart of everything that you do. If you're listening to this and you're going to run a community, you know, the decisions aren't about what you like, it's about what's going to be good for the community and of course, you know, an element of that is, you know, some of your taste and things like that and how you curate and content and things like that.

But when it comes to the sort of the core parts of the community, like the platform and things like that, you choose something that's gonna bring people together as much as possible because that's the point of the community. Now. We have a content side to location indie as you know, where we, you know, put all The content that we've created over the last six plus years, it's a crazy vault of awesome content, all about location, pen, business travel and things like that. And that lives on a Wordpress side. So we just thought it's, it's easier to organize the content within like a Wordpress environment and now we've set it up in a way where people can easily go back and forth between the two. So the binding network side is you can think of it more as like sort of the social component, find out where the events are happening. DM connect post. Another cool thing is it has form functionality in some ways. That's another thing we liked is you can you can post things but you can put them under a category. So if you wanted to have like a jobs board in your community like we do and people post, you know, some remote job they heard about or something like that, they can post it under that.

So if somebody wants to go and search under just like a job board or people want to, you know, work with each other and they're putting out their own office or whatever. They can post there and people can search their and things like that. So it's it's searchable in some ways as well, like a forum. So it kind of just solved some of those problems for us. So we switched over and it was a good move I think. Yeah, I think it was um and you're talking about there's a lot of features now that weren't available a couple years ago. So I think when you're talking about the job, when you're talking about the group's section I believe because depending on what you call that section it could be you could rename the section like the topics you can post under topics I guess was the topics, but then there's also groups and private groups. Yes. Right? So there's the groups in the topic. So you pretty much utilize those. You don't utilize courses at this point because you actually had your courses on different platforms. Yes. And that's why you don't utilize the course functionality of the money network, correct?

Um the other things that features that you're mentioning is organizing and if you um post comments under them, then that pushes it up in the activity feed. So whenever you're like creating a post and then let's say, I've seen a number of them, especially from yours, maybe like from 20 17 that a lot of people answered. I think maybe that would be the prompting question, like when they come in and you set a prompting question, like, you know, why do you want to really be a location? I forget. What is your biggest struggle when it comes to location? Independence? What is your number one struggle? There you go. See, that's a great question because then already they're like, well this is it. And so they wouldn't contribute. So that's a great call. I mean you've got tons of people answering that one. Yes. If people are looking for a really actionable thing to do, definitely set up that prompt question and and Just steal that that format there. What's your number one struggle when it comes to insert whatever it is you're trying to help the community with because it's a it's a way to really help solve people's problems and that's what the best businesses do you like?

Your you can speak the language and solve the problem. And so looking at that, you know, we could just go through that stream of a couple 100 comments or whatever. We can use that to inform the content we create. We can use that to inform the copy or what we include in our courses. Our um our expert Q. And A. S are monthly events and things like that. Because and sometimes we go back to that. I was actually just going back to that the other week because I was trying to come up with some ideas on some different things that we might be able to do with the community. And it's like, oh look yeah, here's the struggle that keeps coming up. Have we addressed this in a while? Like you know, maybe we should do an accountability call around this specific topic. So it really is a goldmine of information that you can keep coming back to. So I definitely recommend setting that up if you're operating under the mighty networks. Yeah, that was a good point about combining it. This is like a business pillar, right? Because you already have you have your own business and Travis has his own business and then you kind of come together with location indie and used to have the Paradise Pack which was what you had done before a couple of years ago, which is kind of like the offspring, I think of uh like location and you like after you have done a couple of years of the Paradise pack, which is like this bundle of different courses that you offered, a like a lower price for people that are listening.

Um and then you brought those people who are taking all those courses together in location, in the US. Actually, that's how I found you through because I I got interested in the Paradise Pack. I was like, really excited about that. I was at my corporate job. I'm like, oh, I gotta get out of here. I don't know how to do, like, I don't know where to start. So like, I got the Paradise pack, but then it's like super overwhelming because there's like a bazillion courses, It's like, where do you start? And you have a road map, But at the same time, I was like, I really want to connect with other people. And that's when you had like, you know, said, oh, well, we have this community. And so like, I was like, well, sign me up. And so, but the thing that you said um earlier was about the business strategy and like how it's helping you create, like, just making the decision on what content you're gonna create for the community. And that goes back to like, the community is a really important factor in your business, but it's like a pillar. It's not like the only thing you do and you decided at some point that you weren't gonna have us be a free, you know, thing, this was a paid place, right?

It was paid from the beginning, it was paid from the beginning. Yeah, I mean part of that was just, you know, we want people that are have a certain level of commitment and people just value things that they pay for more, so that's part of it. Also, if we want to make it sustainable for us, we wanted to run it more like a business where we could keep this going, you know, and we also believe we're providing the value or you know, hopefully ideally exceeding the value in terms of the events, bring people together, you know, the content, everything that we're doing over there. So um, so yeah, we, we, when we created it was funny because the Travis and I went to Ocean City, New Jersey for three days in the dead of winter and there was nothing to do there. There are no bars is a dry town. I think some places open in the boardwalk where we could play skee ball for like a couple hours or like we'd go play skee ball for like 45 minutes a day.

There were like three places to eat, It was the wa wa you appreciate that Deb and uh, you know, a pizza place and maybe one other place or something, All as we did was just hole up and create this community and part of creating a product or service, which is what a community is. If you look at it from a business standpoint, you have to figure out, Okay, well, what is this thing? You know, what what do people get when they sign up? What are they actually getting? What are what are the deliverables? And it forced us to just, you know, because it was a product that was a monthly membership site. We're like, all right, well what's included? And then you just kind of figure out, alright, well what are people gonna get when they sign up? Where can we provide value? How can we exceed their expectations? Um and then we need to create a page that explains all of that and attracts the right people. So that's essentially was the process that we went through, We did all that we launched it and luckily, I think we hit the nail on the head because that, you know, right away. The first group we came in, they were like our people man, where like, these are our peeps, like these are the people that we want to attract these people we want to hang out with, um and thankfully they want to hang out with us and then we can get together and they're all on the same level in terms of like, kind of this unconventional lifestyle and and helping each other out and providing value and also not being afraid to ask for help and not being afraid to get the support by joining the community and and all of these things contribute to the energy of the community, which I think is maybe one of the, one of the things that is not talked about as much uh in terms of business, but there's an energy to every community, right?

And I mean it's better to ask you Deb because you've been in location in you for four years. I feel like there's a great energy to the community, but you know, correct me if I'm wrong, Mhm You brought up a good point because you have a specific business model of opening and closing. Um you're not open all the time. Like you don't um invite members in at any time, There's specific times of the year when you open up and you and you say we're going to be open for this amount of time and then you close the doors basically essentially to the location of the community and then like nobody, you know, there's a wait list or something for people to find out, like when it opens again. And that's, you know, that's how I tried to launch my commute. I, I like literally took like the blueprint of what location Indy was and then like tried to replicate that, but the, the thing, the component that I missed was that you spent 5, 6, 7 years or whatever with your podcast. Travis spent about that same amount with his podcast and so you had a huge audience, you did the paradise packed together.

You had these people that were already interested in what you were talking about and they really were interested in learning and like then you already, once you opened it up, people were like, of course I'm going to join, like there's no reason why would I, how would I not have this in my life? But you built that energy before any of this other stuff happens and I think that's what a lot of money network hosts are struggling with because some of them, they don't have a business for Five years, they haven't built an audience, they don't have an email list of 500,000 people or even 50 people there, they're just kind of starting from zero. And so I was wondering what you would tell somebody like that when they're starting out, because you already also had content created and so somebody like me or other people who are like kind of starting from the beginning and I don't have all kinds of content and I don't have a, you know, a huge email list, um but I want to have that energy in the community and I'm starting smaller, right? So I'm going to have maybe 20 people in there. Um what advice would you have for somebody like that?

Maybe such a great question, yep, isn't this the eternal business question? The chicken and egg thing, Right? Um now let me be clear when Travis and I started out, yeah, that's a multitiered question, and I'm gonna share some advice like you asked, uh but people are gonna have to take with it from it what they think might work for them, right? Uh first of all, we all start with nothing, right, we all started zero. So there's that, so anybody that you look up to in the business world or you think, oh well they have this crazy community, I'll never be able to build. They started from zero to so just be encouraged and remind yourself of that. Um secondly, when we did the first Paradise Pack, which as you mentioned, was a bundle sale, so we brought together some different, for lack of a better term, I'll say, influencers with air quotes, but some different people that created courses and products that had communities and emails, followings, email communities as well, like an email list.

Uh we brought them together in a package where we, we basically took all these courses to help you become location, independent travel, more, live that freedom lifestyle, and we sold at a discount and we promoted it. Now when we put that first one together, Travis didn't know, but I had 100 people on my email list or less when I asked came to Travis with this idea and I was like, I don't think I can do this alone. Do you want to do this? And I only met Travis at a conference, I didn't know him. So the point of this story is not to tell you that you need to meet somebody into a bundle sale. It is to let you know that partnerships are very valuable. And if you can figure out ways to get, you know, if you don't have the people directly under you in terms of like a podcast following or an email list, that doesn't mean you can't get access to other people that do right or create something in some way that creates value for people that solves a problem and that can give you access essentially can think about is getting on somebody else's stage in front of their audience, right?

So those are some questions to ask yourself, what are some things you might be able to create and or do that would allow you to reach more people for a community launch? Um that's one way to look at it, because like I said, I wasn't starting out with hardly anything, and I didn't tell Travis that at the time, sorry, if you're listening to this trap, I think he already knows this. Travis had a much bigger following and influential website that had traffic and all this stuff. I didn't have hardly anything. So, so my thing was let me let me find some people who have some stuff and let's just try to make some stuff happen. Now you're right in that the bundle sale worked pretty well. And then we thought, well how can we, It's another important business question. It's like, well what are other ways? You can serve people that you're not serving them already? Well, the answer to that was a community. Well, these people have this product, but you know, they don't have anywhere to like gather with other people doing this. So let's create this community where we can bring these people together. And of course after that, then like you said, we're able to launch that and bring people in that way, but you know, we didn't just, it didn't start off that way.

We started off with nothing like everybody else. So, um there are advantages to having like less, you know, in terms of like an email list, I don't know how many people you have or whatever, but when I had less people on my email and somebody still do this to this day, but you know, you can, you could literally, If email us to 50 people, you could literally have a phone call with every single one of them, you know, and and and you know, why did you sign up? Like what are you, what are your struggles, what kind of things can I make that could help you? You know, and you could just learn a lot just through the conversations, you just have to get used to the fact that you're going to do some work for quote unquote for free and you can't think of it like that when you're running a business, you just have to have faith that it's all going somewhere and it takes a lot of time. But um, So you know, just for some overarching advice, number one is just because you don't have an audience doesn't mean you can't get in front of somebody else's right and make something happen um through JV partnerships or things like that.

Um, another thing you can do is model a business that, you know, works right? So you can look at some existing communities that are in your space. If you're creating a community, assume you might be if you're listening to this podcast or if it's some something else, what's probably going to be something else at some point because with business you have to keep evolving, you have to create new products and services and different things and tweet things and that's just the way it is. So, but you know, when you're starting out, look at what other people are doing it, use it as inspiration more than inspiration. I mean you can essentially model what they're doing, but just do it in your own unique way with your own unique twist and if you do research right, you can, you can really figure out like who's doing this successfully, right? And and if it's really working for them, if it's working for them, you know, it's a proven thing, right? If you want to start a community for nine people that love knitting and you find that there's like a few membership communities where people are paying to be a part of them and they're working well, you don't need to like reinvent the wheel.

You already see that's a proven business model. Now, if that's something you want to do, figure it out, how are you going to do it? How are you gonna put your own unique spin on it? How are you gonna find customers and clients? That's the struggle for every business is you have to figure out a way to find customers and clients. And the third strategy I'll just share is, you know, it it takes a lot of time to build relationships and relationships. You know, I think a lot of people uh they go under this uh sort of assumption that, hey, I'm just gonna sit behind my laptop and I'm just gonna, you know, make passive income online and you know, that's not how it works online businesses like any business, a lot of it's about relationships, things like this like Deb and I, we've hung out in person, we're hanging out right now. Like I can be totally comfortable inequality debt because we've like hung out, we've had beers together, like it's we're both from pennsylvania, like we we've connected over several years. So, um, and these things take time, you know, but it does take the same amount of time to build a relationship uh, regardless of like who it's with essentially.

Like it just, it takes time to build relationships I guess is the point. So you know, when you're doing your outreach and trying to build your community or business or whatever, when it comes to business relationships, you know, okay, so first of all, you have to be authentic and actually want to connect with the person and provide value and not expect anything in return. Those are just like general rules don't expect because you're going to do something for somebody that like don't do something for somebody just so they do something for you just be authentic and provide value and do cool stuff for people when you do outreach and you build relationships and things like that, you just want to provide value. That's it. There are a lot of easy ways to do it. You can leave somebody a review on their podcast. You want to build a relationship with Deb. You know, don't email her and say, hey, can I pick your brain and have coffee. You know, Leave her a five star review on her podcast, share it With five your friends, then email her and say, hey, here's a screenshot of this five star review. I left your podcast, I hope it helps you get the word out. I love your podcast. I also shared it with like five of my friends anyway.

Like I love what you're doing. You know, I'm thinking about blah blah, blah, maybe there's an ask in there or maybe there's not depending on like what you're doing, like is Deb gonna be more likely to answer that email over the person. That's just like, hey, can I just pick your Brain for 15 minutes on a call? Like, I don't even know you, you know what it's, you know, it's, it's kind of common sense, but it's a, it's an important point. And um, so think about those types of things and when you're trying to do outreach and things like that you also want to look for and we teach us in our lifestyle launch academy, which is our Program for one on 1 coaching and we have a course and all that helps people uh start a side hustle so they Can eventually leave their nine to five job and do the whole location, independent lifestyle thing. And one of the things we teach is, is this big levers idea, which is, you know, if you are, um, let's see, I'm thinking of a hypothetical example, let's let's, okay, let's say you sell a knitting course, we'll go back to the knitting thing, right?

You saw an online course all about knitting Norwegian sweaters because I live in Norway. So that's like a, that's like a special thing, right? Um, you know, are you going to spend time trying to find individual customers and clients to buy your sweater recipe of course? Or might your time be better spent like building relationships With those three people, those three imaginary people I mentioned that run knitting communities that have, you know, 3000 people that knit under them. Right? So the answer is obvious. You want to build the relationships with the people that have the knitting following because you make a Relationship with one person, You might be able to reach 3000 people under that one person. It takes the same amount of time almost. I mean it varies of course. But to build a relationship with one person as opposed to like the individual customer that might buy your course, which is why you see people doing like facebook ads and running big challenges and things because you can stream to a 1000 people.

So you know, these are things to think about when your time is valuable and you have so much time. So again broad strokes, it's very general. Excuse me advice, but I hope it's helpful and I'll get off my soapbox now. Thank you super helpful. A lot of great points in there. I wanted to make Some distinctions, it sounds like um two two things I was noticing what you're talking about is starting small and so when when, when money network hosts are starting out and they don't have an email list, they don't have a they might not even have a strategy for business. Hello me, I was trying to figure stuff out for the last year and still running my own community and trying to do all the things and I think what happens right now, especially in the last year for me anyway, I I got caught up in this whole funnel, like sales funnels and like creating, you know, these like systems and ways for people to like come in and then like you're going to make all this money and it just doesn't work that way and it's not authentic that way. And so it's kind of at the end of the day, people aren't going to pay you because they're like, I don't know who you are, Like you're saying like pick your brain and like, well people don't want their big brains picked, they want value and like you have to continue to offer value Without expecting anything back.

And I think that's a really great point because a lot of money to work host or like how can this community, um you know, provide my income, like I need to make $5,000 a month from this community. So how does that work? And that's their their point. That's how they look at things and instead of looking at it and you have to look at it in the user perspective, I'm creating a community because I like people number one, you have to like people that create a community because it's about people and then how can I help these people versus how are they going to help me? And they think that's a different mind shift perspective if you want to just create a course and you want to sell a Course on U two, Me and you wanna like tim Ferriss four hour work week, you know, like sleep on the beach and and drink, you know, cocktails while you're making money. Hey, that doesn't, that takes a long time. Like you're saying, even if you think you're going To do that, that while also doesn't work, I don't think in 2021 because people don't have time to take courses because they're way too busy necessarily unless they're really invested in the course, but just going back to like the sales funnels and things like that, you can just get so caught up in that that you kind of lose track.

And so I've had clients that are like, well, you know, I have to do, I have to have the pretty website and I have to have an email list and I have to have a system for them to go through. And then I said, well what's your real goal? And they said, well I want members in my course or I want course, participants to take my course in my mighty network and then stay as a member? Okay, well how many do you want to start with for your founding member launcher for your first course? I'd love to have like 30 people. Okay, what about 10, You know 10 people that like when you went back to going to your email list, if you have 50 people cut that list in half and call it 25 of those people email 25 of those people and just not say to pick their brain, but to say, hey, I know you signed up like you're saying you already asked to have some information for me because you signed up on my email? S right, So then how can I help you? Because you're interested in the conversation of what we're talking about but how can I help you to like those people and starting that conversation authentically without expecting that back.

And then also that gives you then what you're saying earlier to the conversation about content is those member ideal member interviews is what we call them. They are the words that you use when you create your sales pages, when you create your landing pages, When you write up your plans, when you're inviting people I know you don't use the money network plans and things like that. But a lot of people that I work with are using these money network plans and the share links for them to get into different bundles that we're creating? Sorry, I'm going into the tech part but that's the copy and those are the words because then they're telling you and then they're already relating it to and that's going back to like just general sales and just, you know, using their language to like this is what we do here. That's exactly right. I mean that's what surveys and phone calls are helpful for, right? Your because then people are reading and they're like, oh my God, this person is reading my mind, they know me because you know them. So you have to get to know them and then use their words just like you said, I totally agree.

Um a couple of things you brought up. Well, first of all, I don't know what you call these discovery calls, but yes, those listening, when you're starting out, you might need to get on sales calls and sell people on your thing. It's true. You might not be able to just sit back and create a funnel and collect all the cash. Okay? You might actually have to build relationships and sell people and stuff on calls, uncomfortable maybe, but a part of business, Right? So, um it's just another thing to learn. Uh but yeah, on the general like advice until you brought something up that I should have brought up on my little soapbox rant, which is the K. T. L. The no, like trust factor. Um so when you can establish the no, like trust factor, you have a much greater chance of bringing people into the community and there are ways where you can do that without having to have a podcast for seven years like I have, right? I mean you could host one master class and teach somebody something awesome and get them and tell them your story and just they can come out of an hour with you feeling connected with you and you can bring them into a community like that, right?

You can partner with people and do a master class or training or something like that and you can, you can get that no, like trust factor in a short period of time. It doesn't have to come through years of content. Um and I will say, you know, we're not poo pooing the passive income thing. I mean it's totally possible and that's one of the great parts about having a community is their recurring revenue, right? So you know, there are things that are auto billing every day of course when you have community members and things like that or you can, of course I've created things where you're like, yeah, you just get the email. Oh yeah, okay, cool. I just made 100 bucks. That's awesome. You know, whatever the case is, I mean that's totally possible, but it's not, you put the work into that to, to create That. Like you didn't just just, you can't just like create that in 24 hours and then all of a sudden you're like, all right, no, and I mean, you know, it's probably going to be a part of your business, but all passive income, I think a lot of it, I should say still needs to be actively managed in many ways. So good, good segue because I want to talk about community management and about how you handle that because I know Casey um for a long time was the community manager and Lynn just became the community manager and so you you've always had as far as I as long as I've been in, was it always the plan to have somebody like supporting the members?

Was it always the plan? I don't know, I very much resonated with you with what you said earlier, which everybody will be happy to know, you're kind of making a lot of stuff up as you go and figuring out as you go right, of course you can model their businesses, you can, but you still gotta kind of figure things out for yourself and it's an ongoing education being an entrepreneur, that's one of the fun parts about it, like Deb you love to read books and learn new things and you know, develop new skills and things like that and you have to be into that I think to work for yourself in this way. Um but uh I guess I'm getting a little off topic here, I think, you know, getting to the heart of your question, I don't remember if it was always the plan, but probably in some ways because the goal, I think as a business owner is too try your best to keep everybody in their zone of genius, right? And you know, you can't possibly do the job on your own when it comes down to it.

If you want to grow your business, have new courses, you know, focus on creating content and awesome podcasts and all the other stuff that we do, then you need help. And for us, the community manager role was essential because it's nice to have somebody that's a face for the community and somebody that people in the community can know and trust and somebody that people can go to for help because Travis and I as much as we'd like to, we can't possibly answer every individual question all the time. We do our best to like, you know, we we host a lot of the events and you know, we're we're presence in the community. But when it comes to some of the nitty gritty stuff, it's really helpful to have a community manager kind of in their facilitating conversations connecting people. It's really, it's a, it's a, it's a job if you're running a community in the right way and you're the spirit of is to connect people, you need somebody in there actively doing that all the time.

And it's very difficult for us to do that. And also kind of keep the boat afloat and bring new people in and all the other things that need to get done. So toss a community manager is essential for us and also for the community to have somebody to go to when they need help. Did you decide like there was a number? Like once we hit this many members, we have to look at like bringing somebody else on the team? No, I I think what you're asking is the, a tough question for everybody that works from this house is at what point do you get help? Right. My answer to that is as soon as humanly, as soon as humanly possible because if you're a solo preneurs or you're just going to burn out, you just are and at first it's not comfortable because you're not used to spending money when you know, oh, if I spend this, then this could have gone in my pocket or I could just do this, you know?

But all those, I could just do this tasks adds up to your whole day and then the next day and the next day and then you don't have time to do the high level stuff higher level stuff it takes to like keep the business growing and running. So, um, there's always a tricky point, I think where yeah, you and you reinvest and it means you're not going to do as well, but you're looking at the big picture and the long term goals. So yeah, it's just a different mindset and you didn't necessarily have the monetary means where you had that established first before you had brought. So I can't remember, I mean anytime you pay somebody to do something, you know, that's coming out of the business of course, um, we weren't like going into the negative to pay somebody though, right? If that's your question. Yeah, yeah, just like, because a lot of people, first of all, a lot of people think that they can do it themselves, like people that I talk to you all the time, my network hosts are wearing both hats, they're wearing the host hat where they're creating the vision for the community, what we're gonna do here, they're creating their big purpose, they're trying to figure everything out and then they're also trying to create engagement, trying to get people to talk to each other, trying to figure out like how do I leave these events, how many events should I have all of those things and, and it's hard to do both was just what you're saying and when I talk to people and I've talked to people and I just talked to somebody in Australia and he's, he's literally trying to do this huge like three and I don't know how many people are in locations right now, but this guy was like had 300 actually five 100, some people in his community and he's realizing he had to personally reach out to each one of them for them to like want to stay because they needed this like additional onboarding support because he doesn't have a community manager and he doesn't have the time.

So he's like asking me, can you be the community manager? And well his, his um, it's a good point to, to talk about like the specialty, right? Your, your community is all about travel and location independence. And so, um, bringing somebody as a community manager that really knows that industry is super important, is like, has the passion about that because like, this guy was asking me and I've had a couple of people asked me about community management in a sense of um, their community when it's like topics like, um, this is Bitcoin and trading and stocks and I don't know anything about Bitcoin or trading or stocks, I'm like, I have a hard time balancing my bank account, like it's just like, I'm bad with money period. So like what I recommended to him was, well, I could help somebody that is in your community as an active participant who's already excited about it. Maybe you reach out to somebody in the community, you see that they're active in there. They want to participate more and maybe you say, hey, well, would you be willing to like either volunteer, if you can't maybe have the budget initially, maybe you volunteer for them to do something small, but if you want to hire them as like a community manager, you say, hey, would you be interested in a position like this is what I'd like to do and um, you'd be great at it and seeing that that offer is there for them.

And then I was saying to them, well I can train them on the mighty Networks. The mighty Networks is not the challenge. It's more about connecting to your members. Did I lose you? It said my connection was unstable. So yeah, just for a second, but we're here. So, um yes, I think, well you can do it all on your own, but then you will burn out eventually. That's all, it's just inevitable. So it depends on how, how far you want to take it and, and really for us Deb I mean this goes back to, to the core of what we do, which is when you create a lifestyle business, you're as a, as a service provider, as a business person. If you're gonna think of customers and clients in that way, our community members, it, you know, we want to improve their lifestyles, we want them to achieve their ideal lifestyles. And we also want that for ourselves. And I think as a business owner, when you take the lifestyle business mentality and you say, hey, I'm gonna create this ideal lifestyle and then I'm gonna make my business fit into that.

I truly believe it makes you a better business person because if you want to have the freedom to wake up late and hang out with your kids in the morning or go to lunch in the middle of the day or all the things that we love to do because we can, well then you better get some help and you better get some systems in place and you know, if you're protecting your time and your lifestyle in that way, you're looking at things differently and then you start thinking, well what are some of the tasks that I don't need to do? What are some of the things I could get help for? And I'm not saying it's easy, you know, hiring people and getting people involved and things like that, it's it's a whole different animal, but you can do it in a way that is, is I think fun and organic and to your point, you know, we we always brought our community managers from the community itself, so we would see who's active and who's really excited and whose positive and just who has the vibe for the community, and then we have that conversation and say, hey, is this something a role you'd be interested in?

And I think that's a good advice you gave. You know, you might be able to get somebody to volunteer and things like that, but we find that, you know, if somebody's paid to be a community manager, a they really own the role and be there more committed to it and they can really also be a face for the community and you can think of that person as you know, it's just really helpful to have. So I'm a big fan of having community managers and I wouldn't I would definitely tell people to make that a goal for their community to have one at some point. Yeah, I think um so much advice there was helpful um and I love Casey and now Lynn and I'm excited to to connect with, so I have a surprise, I didn't tell you this, I was going to tell you before, and then we had all these tacky sheets at the beginning, but I have a surprise, so what I'm thinking and I haven't um asked you yet, but I'm hoping it's okay, I'd like to do this as a three part series in an in depth look at location indie, and I'm interviewing a community member of location inde Cali later today, and I just talked to Lynn and I'm interviewing Lynn on thursday tomorrow.

So um We're going to do a three part series line, come here is gonna do a three part series on location indie to really get in depth look between the community host and the feedback from that uh feedback from a community member, one that I don't know, and so I can get a genuine feedback from it has a different perspective because she went through your um what's the course lifestyle catch. Yeah, I didn't go through that, but she did and then um Lynn can share us some experience about running a community and just starting as a new community manager and and and the skills that she's been learning as she's growing as a community manager. So that's gonna, this is our first and announcement everybody. This is the first of three episodes that will come out um to really get an instep, look at a community that I'm super familiar with um for other people to see like the layers because I think there's so many amazing layers that you can get from like talking to a host versus talking to the community manager versus talking to an actual member.

And so that's something that's going to be coming up in the next couple of weeks. So if you're listening to this and you enjoy this podcast and you want to learn more about location indie. Um definitely subscribe to the front on your podcast, you can listen to the other ones. Um Jason, let's talk travel for just a minute. I know you're in Norway. Where are you going if anywhere this year? Well first of all, thank you. That's cool to hear. It's a three part series and you know, I should mention if anybody wants to check out our stuff its location in the I. N. D. I. E. Dot com because I know some people spell it different ways. Um And we actually we just put up a side hustle quiz there. So if you want to like take the quiz and figure out what your side hustle personality is. It's kind of a fun thing to do and you get to that location in the dot com slash quiz and put it on the same email list anyway, then you can keep in touch and get our newsletter and all that. Um, yeah, yeah, so, um, and thank you for the opportunity and humbled and honored to hear that you're doing a three part series on our community. That's so cool. Deb. Um, thank you. Um, yeah, so I live in Oslo Norway as an expat I and married to a Norwegian, We have two kids and we haven't been traveling because, well, I'm pretty settled down here, I guess I spent many, many years, I spent about 10 years as a nomad a little bit more and you know, then I started Zero to Travel podcast because I just really got passionate about helping other people do this.

Now, I had no idea that the world was going to become what it has, where, you know, remote work and you know, when I was living my nomad life, I just thought, well this is just the way I'm living and this is kind of weird, but you know, it's cool. I like it and it turns out that, you know, then there were digital nomads and all this other nomadic, this whole being nomadic living in vans and all this stuff became a thing, right? I thought it was just uh me, you know, as somewhat people might have said, you're just throwing your life away, when are you gonna get a real job and all this stuff? So I like being a nomad. Um, but now I'm pretty settled down and but I am looking forward to traveling again. And I just finally got a vaccine appointment for saturday because it's been slow here in Norway. And so the plan, the next trip is for camp indie and not, not to like try to over plug anything, but I'm just being sincere. My next trip is to go back to the United States and we're hosting an in person event for the location of the members and anybody else who wants to come around the whole unconventional travel location pendant lifestyle thing.

Uh it's at a summer camp and it's camp in D I N D IIi dot com is the website and that's in september. So the plan is to go back, spend a little time with family that I haven't seen in 2.5 years, which is crazy and go to this summer camp run this summer camp and have some fun and eat some good american food, which I really miss. So my mom just sent me to box of boxes of cheez its a few weeks ago. Deb So I'm down to like half a box now that you can't get those in Norway, so savoring that last half a box of cheez, its here. Really? Hey listen, you'd be surprised, you'd be surprised at what you miss when you're out of your country for a couple of years. You'd be surprised at the foods that you crave. You haven't been to the US in in a while, I guess over a year. Huh? Definitely over a year to over two years. Oh wow. Well 2019 in Mexico right before that? Yes, so, and that was I think or something two years ago, right, something like that.

So yeah, yeah, I'm glad you brought up the location in the um camp in the event because I'm planning to come hopefully um barring any other commitments that I have um that come up, but that's one connection I wanted to make is that I think it makes a big difference when you can meet people in person. So not, it's not always um possible, I guess to do this, but like building an online community is amazing and great and it has lots of benefits and right now you can really have genuine authentic conversations and connect with people online, but to meet people and actually give them a hug in person when we can do that again and when people feel comfortable and to do that. Um I remember meeting you in 2018, I mean that change the game, you know, I might not have been, I honestly might not have been 100% committed had I not like seems met you and Trav and like met all heath and Jason and all these other people um and felt that really create post bond that you can only get from an in person experience.

So I feel that's an important component. And again, it's not always possible when you have an online community, especially if you have a really large one to have some kind of an in person event or a hybrid event would be a really great thing right now. I know that's what a lot of people are going to be doing in 2021 at the end of this year or next year. So just keeping that in mind because that's another way to really connect your members. And so if you are like a, have a local or if you, I love the other idea that you were mentioning in the beginning about um having people meet up in person like that are in that area. So there's a lot of communities that have chapters and so those like little chapters, they can like then take it off. So like the host doesn't have to lead those chapters, you can have somebody and the philadelphia chapter being the philadelphia host and then creating their own events and that's kind of how cmx, if you're familiar with cmx, that's kind of how cmx like blew up across the world was because they had these like little events that like became more bigger and bigger and so now there's like huge company owned by bevy and it's an amazing, it's an amazing community for community professionals, for people building communities.

So shout out to them. I wanted before one more shout out since we were talking about it earlier, I want to shout out to my friend Adrian. She has a, she has an affinity and love for the zero to travel podcast and Jason, she has, Jason's one of Jason's super Fans. I am one as well. Um, so Adrian has a podcast called the Pirate Life podcast and that's a community that I'm actually a part of as well. And I get to hang out with them in person. This year. We're going to thank New Jersey Beach. I'm not quite sure exactly what beach, but we're going to meet in person. So it's nice Jersey Shore, Nice to have those connections to meet people. I mean isn't community what it's such a huge part of being a human being, right? I mean that there's so much power in community and we're social animals, right? Like we want to get around other humans and you know, having a community is just such a great way when you're the one that can facilitate those connections.

It's so rewarding, you know, having those in person experiences by the way. Thanks for the kind words and I'm so glad that you were able to come to the impersonal experiences, but the most satisfying thing for me at those experiences outside of, you know, getting to meet everybody and connect and hang out is those moments where I just sit back, you know, like take a sip of beer or something and right now we're at a brewery or playing ping pong or you know, doing whatever we're doing at one of the business sessions or whatever and just watching the magic happen, you know, seeing people connecting, you know, with their mastermind groups that formed like in our Mexico thing that are still going and you know, just watching people connect and help each other out and knowing that hey, okay, we were able to create something that facilitated this and and just feeling that magic and seeing it happen, it's so rewarding, you know, and uh it's just really makes me feel good. So yeah, creating the magic of the people um that connection that people get and like that whole um that whole sense of this is my tribe and these are my people, I think that's if you can create and capture that in your community because, and you do it authentically and um it's gonna, you're gonna have a successful space and it's going to be amazing.

So thank you for sharing, thank you for having me and is location indeed going to be open if anybody's interested like when is the next open. I know, I think you just did an open, Right, But you know, again, going back to giving value, I mean we like to, you know, if you hop on the email list then we get a weekly newsletter. We have an awesome newsletter that goes out with curated content all about the location dependent lifestyle, you know, remote. We're building a resource now for remote work visas. So we're gonna update that every month where you can go on and see, hey, where are some of the places that I can live in the world and work now that you know, some of you listening might have the flexibility now, even if you're working for somebody to work remotely or if you're creating that lifestyle for yourself and we can help you do that. You can jump in the location India or at least just jump on the list and get these free, awesome resources. We have the podcast and everything like that. And then um when we open up, we just let everybody know, hey, you know, we're open up the community now and um, then you're welcome to join.

So yeah, well thank you so much for sharing. Um, and thank you for being a part of my Life. Obviously I left my corporate job in 2019. It's become location independent and so far so good. I am still a location independent doing this crazy thing called entrepreneurial ship, which is insanely nuts. And I'm learning things every day about like how to just Go through, but one quick note that I'm thinking of at the moment that just came to me was that you, you mentioned earlier about creating a lifestyle before you create a community and I think a lot of people try to fit community, like trying to fit their life into their business instead of their business into their life and so I feel like that's a really something that I really wanted to intentionally work on this year was identifying like what's really valuable to me as a person and part of that is like health, like I want to get out for walks, I want to take care of myself, have really great care when I talked to entrepreneurs in the last year, a lot of them have like myself included has like their self care just completely dropped because they were just constantly trying to figure out how to like re re shift from all of this stuff that happened last year and I think um the biggest thing that I've tried to do that I'm still working on is like how do I have an amazing life that I want while still figuring this whole business thing out and I think that's such an important point is if you figure out how to work your business around your life instead of having or it's a combination maybe of both.

Um but it's got to be a combination, it can't just be like you just drop everything about in your life and focus on a business for three years because that's going to be leading to burnout. So I love that you created that. You pointed that out. Thanks for Yeah, tying it up with that. I think it's a hugely important point and you know, we have to just be authentic and honest here. It's, it's never fully figured out, it's not like you get to a point and you're like, okay, I've got it all figured out now, but I think it's more about that the intention and the awareness around it is top of mind, therefore you're making decisions based on, you know, this holistic view of having the lifestyle protecting your time and your freedom that you value actually being able to take advantage of it, right? Because you don't want to do all this work just to not be able to do all the things you want to do. Um and then, you know, figuring how to run the business, so it fits into that and, and it's, you know, you're always tweaking kind of figuring things out.

But I think the important thing is you're looking at it through that lens and that makes the decision making process, It just changes it right. You're not like you might not be running around is crazy trying to like just squeeze all your fun into your off time and spending all your hours on your business because nobody Wants to quit a 40 hour week job for an 80 hour a week. One, there's this, there's an entrepreneurial saying it's like, you know, entrepreneurs are, you know, the kind of people that I'm probably butchering it, but to paraphrase like entrepreneurs are the kind of people that will work 80 hours a week just so they don't have to work like for themselves, just so they don't have to work 40 hours a week for somebody else. Okay, well that, that might be true and I've certainly had those weeks, you know, but is that really what you want to shoot for? You know, isn't it better to kind of, I think the theme of a lot of people coming to the community is like, It's reasonable. Nobody's saying they want to work four hours a week. They're saying, Hey, I want to work like a reasonable 20 2, 30 hours a week and live a good life and make some good money replace my income or, or you know, do better than that and that is possible.

You know, that is my life, you know, so it's just, you know, it's some weeks are busier than others, but that's reasonable and that can be done and that's a good balance. I feel, I think nobody's, I like to work, you know, I like to create content, I love to create value with for people and do these things and uh yeah, so I think all that is possible, just putting it through the lifestyle business lens is kind of a game changer. I feel so thanks for pointing that out. Yeah, yeah, certainly thank you so much. And thanks for sharing, appreciate all of the amazing things that you've shared again. Um, everybody's listening is interested scenes. Um, check out the links in the show notes. I'll have some links to the location in the community and to learn more about them and their amazing community that I've been a part of for a long time uh, for everybody else, stay tuned. Like I said, there's going to be two episodes following this 1, 1 with a location in the member and Then one with the community manager application indie. So make sure you subscribe to the fine, come here podcast on ITunes or wherever else you listen to podcasts.

Until the next time. I hope you're finding calm in your day, evening, night, weekend, afternoon, morning or whatever you are whenever it is, I hope you're finding calm and take care until the next time by now. Mhm