And so the podcast is gonna be a pillar of my consulting business and then the community is the other pillar uh to help provide additional support. So just to give you a little bit of update on this new development because it's super new and I'll be reaching out to a lot of people in the next few weeks about this. Um, so find calm here. Community exclusively from my any network hosts. We help you building your money network with tools and resources that I use with my clients to help you have a successful launch, grow your membership and tackle any challenges with supportive peers in a safe space that's affordable and enjoyable inside the funds in your community. I bring together money network coast to feel overwhelmed with launching a community cultivating contribution and creating an onboarding plan with the tools, resources and support. They need to find calm so they can confidently lead a community on the platform. I am happy to introduce today's guest McKay rippy. I didn't even ask you about your name. I usually do Sorry, repeat if I say that wrong, You can correct me. He's a co founder of beyond protocols, a money network that helps health practitioners spine calm by offering them ongoing education with leading experts, a connection to a community of peers and the tools to learn new strategies so they can make better, more well informed decisions about how to test for toxicity integrate.

I'm gonna mess these words up. You're you're not you're economics functional medicine into their methodology to support revenue growth while getting inspiration and encouragement from others. I love this. His mission here. Our mission is to accelerate the transformation of functional medicine away from canned protocols and superficial diagnosis and towards individualized treatments. Roadmaps based on patient's genetics mm mm for genetics and unique life unique life history, One practitioner at a time. So I will uh take it and give it to you. They're welcome to the bike on your podcast. You know, that's one of the amazing things about hosting a community is really, each community has its own language. And so you're, you're trying to spit out these technical terms that we just throw around and we all know what they're talking about and you're doing a great job.

So don't don't don't worry about that. That's just our technical shop talk. You got it? Well, I'm glad you're here. Um, me too. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the community and uh, you know, why did you decide you wanted to bring people together in the money networks. Excellent. Basically all learning occurs in groups. I mean, that's why we've got classrooms right? We we just learned better. We're social animals. And we know that now, especially right with this past year of being isolated, especially the poor kids who are in school. I've heard stories of teachers attempting to teach through zoom and it's basically a lost year and a half. It's it's really gonna be interesting how that plays off. But to best learn, we do it in a community because the teacher knows what's going on, right? The person who's ahead of you and imparting knowledge or teaching you die tactically or even just guiding you. They've already done it one more time than you have 100 times more than you have 1000 more times and you're doing it maybe for the first time and it's so much better to have somebody alongside you who's struggling at the same pace and may have the same issues that are you're having and have that cross conversation as well as the conversation with the person.

So really if you're about teaching in any way you want to have a community, that's brilliant. I agree. I really think that from when I wanted to build a community and and a lot of other people I talk with, it's because you want to learn something that you want to learn it together and to help you implement it because you can learn to read a book or you can watch a webinar but that doesn't mean you're actually gonna retain that information or that you're actually gonna put it into practice in your life. And so that's what community really helps you do is like support you around accountability as well as like team support of like we're all going through this thing together. So I love that. Thank you for sharing. You're welcome. It's all about the implementation, right. Knowledge only gets you so far you can have a shelf full of books but if you don't do anything with it. What's the point? Exactly. So what did you pick the mighty networks for? That was the other part of that question. Um there's a lot of platforms out there facebook because facebook sucks. I think, I think we could all agree facebook sucks for sure.

Right? I mean that's really the main reason there is like facebook is so easy because everybody's always on it already on it. They know they have their log on, You don't have to mess with that. But facebook is awful. It's not designed for a supportive community. It's designed to suck you in, get your attention, waste your time, make you watch cat videos and then somebody's at and that's what the platform is all about, right. And they don't care if you do that. They do that by riling you up with politics or mask or vaccine scandal controversy. They don't care how they do it. They just care that you're riled up and you stay on their platform. So talking about calm, mighty Networks is a nice, calm place to gather and not have all those distractions and we've gone an extra step. Even like we, I've got an unofficial policy, they've only had to pull out once or twice that there's, there's no, we don't talk about the politics of the day.

We don't even like we try not to mention that it's arbor day even right. We're like, no, that stuff's for facebook. That's for instagram. We're just all business here. This is about helping you help your patients get better and we don't need to be distracted by, let's go plant a tree. Yeah. Even though it's good. We should all plant trees. Yes, I love it. Um, we should all play the trees. But I love, you know, I, I kind of think that, you know, some of these other platforms are the for everybody's solution, right? Because everybody's there, it's and it's a building an audience for businesses and that's kind of what facebook and some of these bigger social networks are for. But places like buddy networks, it's like free to find your tribe of people and connect with them. So I love that you said that you know how that's how you're finding calm. When did you launch your money Network? The official launch was January one of this year. Oh wow. So super new. This is, we're recording this at the end of april, so you've had about four months in, how is it going since you, since you launched?

It's going fantastic. And it's going terribly all at the same time. Which do you want to hear about? No, there's no terrible, but there's listen, it's not without challenges. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that so many people can relate to, you know, trying to launch a money network and there's just so many things to consider. What did you start with because I think a lot of people struggle with like where to start when you first launched On January one or how did we like back into that. Let me give you the whole story. let me give you the whole story basically. So I'm partnered with a woman, natural path named Emily Give her Actually, she hit me on the head for calling her natural path. She's a genomic resource, genetic nutrition counselor or something like that. I don't know what her exact title is, but she's not a naturopath, so sorry, Emily, anyway, she is the most brilliant person I know, she's just really amazing and I met her when we both were presenting at conferences and I would just when she was presenting, just kind of my jaw would drop and I would just stare entranced for about the hour and a half she was presenting and it was so much information coming out of it and she had it all, she had the book knowledge, he had the actual knowledge, she had knowledge about herbs, she had knowledge about genetics, just the whole package.

Amazing. So we, we hit it off really well, so we're good friends, Mhm and we started a mastermind together, very small group and in the back of my mind I was like, okay, I'm going to test if there is an audience for Emily essentially and there was an audience for Emily. So we had this nice small mastermind, there were just six of us total and we'd meet twice a week and I charged a little bit of money for it for practitioners. So this got going and then after a little bit in there, I hit Emily up with the idea and said, how'd you like to start an education, business, education community. And she says, oh I would love to, but I just don't have the time. I said perfect, because I've got the time I at this point had come across mighty Networks, that was part of another community. I had the platform that I wanted to put it on and just needed a little bit more on the content side of things. And so Emily and I partnered up and so we brought this mastermind slowly we started the mastermind on facebook, right, a private facebook group and then we migrated it over to muddy networks.

I'm pretty, I think the free level for a little bit, but maybe like the $30 or $29 a month level, whatever that was. And just slowly the idea was that we begin to populate it with a few posts and so it wasn't completely naked when we launched on january one. So There were six of us in there, It was very sparse, almost nothing happening, but at least we're beginning. And then Emily I got get together and we did take the Mighty Networks community building course. I did take that and one of the main suggestion there is launched with a course. So we launched with actually three courses because at that point we had built a team, so there's myself, there's Emily who's a content person, There's Brendan vermeer who's a content specialist and then we have a business specialist uh Sarah Nadler. So each of those, I lined them up to start with the course. So during Their initial one hour zoom calls that we had, so we have three of those a week at that point they were all had a their slide decks ready and mostly a presentation rather than interaction.

And that lasted for the first month. So the first month of content was simply didactic. It was them teaching. But then that left me with three products to use as bonuses to sign up to help sweeten the pot for a sign up because this is a paid Membership. It's and it's not cheap in the grand scheme of things in the medical world is not expensive either, but it's, we're charging to 99 a month, $299. So this is not a casual oh yeah, I'll just slap a credit card down. Somebody actually has to make a decision. So that's that's how we got started. And we had some networking, a mentor of Emily's allowed us to present in his kind of bi weekly webinar webinar. So we got, we had our initial five or was it four for them and we four or five of the mastermind. We got a handful of people from this webinar that we did and then we Gifted we scholarship in a handful of people too.

So we started with about 20 of us including the four content people and myself. So that's That's how we started with a nice little core of about 20 people. And I forget how many actual paid, we started with eight, maybe eight paid people in the beginning. And I have to say the other thing we did that I think is really smart and helped us a lot. We started lean, we we want to pay our content people a lot more than we're paying them now. But we essentially have growth metrics and we hit when we hit the growth metrics, their compensation increases and they were on board with that. So we they're invested in our vision to make this thing work. Oh my goodness. That's there's so much in there that I have like a million questions but I love how you uh first of all that you brought up about charging because I think a lot of people I talked to are not sure you know about charging. And even if they have a professional audience, you know, like business people, um they still feel like it's there, it's hard to validate those pricing structures.

And so I really appreciate and your expectation. I was curious what your expectation of what was when you launched This thing because you're saying eight people was that kind of what you know, you know, was that the ballpark of the expectation or was it more? No, I thought We could get going with about 20, I don't remember actually, but around 20-2 dozen. So 20, was my initial target for paid members. And I'll have you, we have not even hit that yet. So that's the, that's the that's the challenge side of things, right? Yeah. So the metrics you talked about, how are you measuring the growth? Because I I I love that you're combining like you're collaborating with people. So a lot of people I talked with the money network hosts are you know, trying to do this all on their own. And so I really, I really encourage them to reach out to like other people, you know, partner with other hosts or other people that in your network because uh you know, it's just so hard to do all of these things on your own.

So how, how are the metrics there and you deciding about reaching out to people and the stages of the clearly and at this point everyone is precious. So every new member is a celebration, right? You dance around the kitchen table and we've only had one paid member leave us. And that was like a funeral. So talking about you know, keeping calm and just, and just to know because the numbers are so low, that reminds me when I started my acupuncture practice in the beginning when you only have two or three patients a canceled session is like a knife in the heart, right? And it's just you just have to keep perspective and keep steady and keep going on now doing that like you said yourself is very difficult. So you at least need an accountability partner, you at least need another community. So joining a community like yours, if you're by yourself, you need to do that. What I did to help keep me going to keep me accountable and to cry on your shoulder a little bit is, so my partner Emily and I have a meeting every single sunday morning and these meetings were supposed to go for a half hour and they can, they've gone anywhere up to 2, 2.5 hours and some of it is just, you know, connecting socially because of the climate we're in right now, still disconnected and then a lot of it can be strategizing for how we're going to attempt to move things and we're still part of this is we, we, I went in having a very clear idea of how I wanted to build the community and there there are two ways that we were going to do this.

Well actually three ways. So number one was referrals from within the community, right? Number two was appearances at conferences because essentially whenever Emily speaks, it's like there's a crowd of people that gather around her and then basically all we have to do is hand out business cards at that point, except there are no in person conferences these days. Right? And so number three was Facebook advertising and I had done a ton of studying on that. No, hang on, I think you're shaking your head. I can I know the rest of you can't see it, but but Deb shaking her head back and forth there, It's actually got it's it's working to get leads very well. We haven't created a funnel to begin to convert those into sales yet, it's gonna happen and you can bring me back on in a year or so when it's actually working, but this is not something I had a little bit of a fantasy, but come on, we're all entrepreneurs were all delusional, right? It was like, okay, I we'll be able to get this rolling in maybe like three months, so it's probably gonna be more like nine months or a year before this funnel is is hammered out, but it's teaching us how we're communicating and it's also giving us feedback as our communication and what I mean by that is the message, like, so what is your elevator speech for your community?

You know, what is beyond protocols? You know, it's and essentially it's funny to say what one of our taglines is, we help you, help your patients get better faster and fewer adverse reactions. It's so funny to hear that phrase or very close facsimile come back at you out of the blue so that we know I know that one's bouncing around out there in people's heads in a good way. So it's beginning to help. And the other thing is still very lean. I'm not spending a lot of money on facebook ads so I'm not, I did not go all in the method that I've learned should give a shoutout to frank kern. So frank turns the group I'm following is spend, You know, like a dollar a day on an audience kind of thing. You're really, really small numbers again to test your message to see if it's, if it's responding. So it's not like we borrowed money and put $10,000 into Facebook advertising. Not at all. We haven't spent more than $500 in a month. That's what I budgeted and we haven't hit that budget yet. So it's, I mean we're really again be really, really lean in the beginning, be stingy with every single penny and make sure you have a good internet connection if you're doing zoom calls.

That's been our biggest headache actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Technology is a challenge in itself. Right? Uh I should, I was shaking my head about the facebook ads because it was reminding me about my launch with fine calm here was june 20th a year ago in 2020 and I did all the things that you know, I did a four hour virtual summit with 15 speakers on crowd cast, wow. I did for putting that together. That's awesome. I did an open and closed launch. So I was open for four days, like a big push with facebook ads and like all this stuff and by the end of that weekend, you know how many members I had, I'm, I don't want to be a doubting thomas, but I have a guess what was it? It was, it was, it was because I really didn't um, have what you're talking about, have the messaging clear know who I was serving a lot of those business foundational practices of like who you serve, what problem you solve and why you uniquely solve it, that makes you different from others in the space is the real big thing that I think a lot of people are struggle with in the beginning when they're launching a network and they're trying to figure that out, you know, it's, it is that foundational stuff and let's just call it stuff because it's a pain to work through is the foundation and it's so easy to bounce, pass that to go to the shiny objects, like hosting a webinar putting on this event, putting on that event and I mean some of that, you know, you can build the plane as you're flying it, but it helps at least if you have an idea of where you want to go with that.

So for one thing we did, I think was super, super helpful and again, this is all from other courses I've taken, Let's create a brand Pillar, three brand pillars for beyond protocols and It's very simple. So the three pillars are medicine 2.0, so that the transformation of medicine from 1.22 point oh, so 1.0 is acute care. What happens? Is there a bunch of people who are chronically ill either they've got mold, they've got Lyme disease, they've got fibromyalgia, they've got some chronic disease and basically doctors either say, I don't know if they're honest and nice doctors, if they're mean doctors, they say it's all in your head, you're crazy. Go see a psychiatrist And people are not being served. So it's time to move along to medicine 2.0, so we can actually take care of these people. We actually have the technology to do it. We don't have the will to do it yet. And that's one of our missions. So medicine two point Oh, genetics, that's self explanatory genetic tests now are super cheap. There's no reason that everybody shouldn't have genetics tests and be part of the conversation with their doctor.

And last is learning in small bites. So that's our secret weapon. Right? That's why to be part of a community rather than go to a conference or to do even like a six month mentorship? What are you going to do after the six months? What are you gonna do after the three month course, you know, or listen to hours and hours a day, you just, you can't process and what happens when you have a question, Who do you go to? Well if you're part of a community, guess what you can ask those questions. And as a community gets more confident and comfortable with each other, there's much more crosstalk. In the beginning, I could not get people to post a question or answer a question to save anybody's life. So if that's one of your struggles as a host at this point, just keep going. As, as your job, as the community manager, you like every single post you answer every single post, you have to model the behavior even if nobody else responds just even if you're commenting on your own comments, just just get in there and keep typing away, keep clicking that heart icon and, and just go at it.

And what's happened now is there's, there's a lot more, there was this tipping point about a Couple of weeks ago, maybe 3, 4 weeks ago where all of a sudden there's all this back and forth now though, times where things will go silent for a couple of days, it's like it's okay. There's nobody had a question. But in those quiet periods is where you should have a couple of posts in the background or be able to fill the void. So it stays fresh. So the content always stays fresh when somebody logs on, they need to see something new. Hmm that's a good point. I wanna, I wanna come back to the content calendar and community managing in general. But I want to go back to the point where you talked about retention and like, you know, when people leave, I feel like some of us take it really personally. They're like, oh, they left or they're not coming back and sometimes it's just, you don't know what life's people are dealing with in their own life. Obviously this year has been drastically crazy for a lot of reasons. And so like I like what you're talking about, Like sometimes it is like for a minute you're like, oh, this is a funeral sad story, but at the same time you're like, okay, it's a, it's just a part of the business.

You can have strategies around like reaching out to that person to ask them to say, Hey, is there a way I can help you? I noticed that your, um, you know, leaving our, our space and maybe you can give us some feedback so that we can help other people. I think that's an important component and that's, so this is, I've bottled my community on another community that was, that was part of, so it's not my idea. I don't use mighty Networks to collect the money. So in order to cancel, they need to email me, they need to go through me and it's an intentional bottleneck and it's not, you know, like I had the person who canceled had trouble getting hold of me. So she got charged an extra month and wasn't real happy about that And it wasn't about taking the money. Like I gave her all her money back, Right. That wasn't the issue at all. But the point is, I want to know and I want to be, have a little conversation with them is like, you know, is there anything we did wrong? Is there anything we can do better? And it turned out with this one person that just wasn't a good time. She didn't have time to invest in it and wasn't getting her money out of it.

And she said, I, I imagine myself coming back, you know, she had nothing but nice things to say. So that helped a lot to. The other thing that we found is a measurement of the value that we're creating that we feel really, really good that we have a good product is, she's the only one we've only had one person walk away at this point, which is, I was expecting a lot more than this at this point in four months in, but our retention rate is ridiculous. There's no way you can stay this high. It's just, it can't. But at this point it is so, and we have people who are, you know, it's a stretch for them to pay at this point because their businesses are down, but it's, they're getting that much value out of it. So that's a really good measure. I think. So you asked about metrics. So new members? Yes, retention is another one actually that I didn't realize I was paying so much attention to. I place a ton of value on that. It's so much easier to keep a member right than to bring A new one. Is, it's like I my spreadsheet for my dreams, you know, goes way out big numbers like into the thousands, right at some someday we're gonna have thousands of members and right now I have to chunk it down.

It's like each, my goal is get like every week now one member, it's like, let's just bring one new member in at this point. You know, either you fail or you or you succeed. But it's like, it's, it's really jumped down at this point because everything is so precious because there's no, there's no systems yet. There's no momentum. It's like you have to put 10 times the energy in to get one, 10 times units of energy in to get one unit of energy out. And that's just, that's just the start up of any nature, right? So a personal touch, right? You need much more of a personal touch. You need to be, you know, emailing people talking to him on the phone, getting on the zoom chat with them. Whatever you need to do to get that new member in there and then once they're in, welcome them, celebrate them, make sure they get connected, hold their hands, give them a tour? You know keep asking them what can I do anything, can I do anything? Is there anything I can do? Is there anything you need? How can we help you? Just be annoyingly helpful? Alright, be that person that's that's probably gonna be the quote I pull out from this episode.

Be annoyingly helpful because you know, I was going to ask you about your onboarding process, which basically that's what you're talking about right now and you're talking about a consignors, there's different kinds of um onboarding process and that's a concierge that's really um hand holding that person, making sure you're getting on a call with them on a zoom, can you get in, can you log in? Everything's cool. Here's where the content is, here's what we're doing here is what you're gonna do as a member and and you know, setting those expectations and things like that. So it sounds really great because you're really um that's why you don't have people leaving because you've really provided that highest level of customer support. They have no questions. They're not frustrated, they know what to do and now they're just processing through and you know sometimes I like how you're saying about the band flow of I think so many, so many money. Network hosts and community managers I talked to are like ah they're struggling with, they're not talking, they're not talking well, are they engaging on the zoom calls? Are they super like are they all showing up? That's part of engagement?

You know, are they you know, doing their homework and posting their, you know, things are telling some, you know, sharing something in the comments sometimes, but not all the time. Maybe they're implementing those things that you know, that's a great point. A couple of things. I wanna point out there. So one is our main content where the zoom calls, right? These hourly zoom calls and we are still fine tuning the content of these even four months in so we're adjusting and finding out what's working and and For example this this marketing network mighty net where they belong to there's like 1300 members in it, right? It's huge. And sometimes they have 20 people on a call. It's not like they have hundreds of people. So keep those metrics in mind, those those ratios in mind is for people to put aside an hour of the day is an amazing thing, right? And you know, there's no one time that works for everybody, blah blah, all that, you know, normal throwing a party kind of ideas that you should be keeping in mind.

So one of our calls Emily's call has been going great, it's like she could show up and talk about chewing gum and people would just show up and listen to her talking about chewing gum. They just love her that much, Brendan's calls have been up and down and we're still trying to find the sweet spot where he feels confident. So that's been interesting as one of our content members. His confidence has gone on and up because we've been on some calls, well it's been him and me and one other member, right, very low attendance. And it's a little sad if you know your, you want an audience to talk to. So we're trying to tweak that a little bit and it hasn't been a big tweak, but it's basically, what is he confident talking about that in parts of energy And the last call was just about full for our standards, which was awesome. And so we're celebrating a little bit. Actually paid for a transcript of that call partially just to celebrate it and let people know that I thought this was valuable and maybe you should be on there too because there's a lot of great information also to kind of boost his ego a little bit there too.

So Brendan, if you end up listening to that, it was done on purpose and brother, you're worth it. So congratulations. Now, 3rd thing though, our business call, I was really struggling so we're still experimenting, we pivoted and took it off of a weekly call and turned it into a monthly challenge instead of being just a general question answer kind of thing. It's like okay, we're going to teach you how to create an actual product for your business. So we've done things like how to automate an intake form, how to put together a nurture sequence, a welcome sequence for new patients. The next one coming up is how to put together a media kit and get your first booking on a podcast For example, and we're gonna see how this goes right. We're not still, I'm not sold 100% on this It's not been gangbusters, but at least it's creating some content that we've got there too. So don't be afraid to ask your members what they need, what they want, what's missing what's not working there.

There will be a handful of them who will tell you most of them are just gonna be politely quiet, but you will get a few people who are just who are willing to share their disgruntlement, so to speak and they listen to them, they will help you get better. Hmm that's, that's super powerful. I really appreciated what you were sharing as far as just the expectations, setting appropriate expectations for those metrics because sometimes, like you're saying, we can have these big wide eyed numbers about, you know, all the people are going to come and right now everybody, you're competing with so much of people's time and energy to show up on a zoom call. Like most people would rather either listen to a recording or podcast on their own time when they have the time versus showing up on a zoom call unless they're going to get some really massive benefit from it. Like it's super value personally or professionally for them. And so you have to really have that, that thought process. I feel like going into events. I did, I did over 30 virtual events last year. It was another thing I did and it's exhausting to, to schedule events to host events and then I was, sometimes I was the only person at the party and that's not fun either.

So, um, I just, I took away the events portion of it and then, you know, for the beginning of january and it's just not until now that I'm basically kind of easing back into a couple strategic events that people have told me would be helpful because I've asked them, but not like creating it and then saying, come to me, come join the party and I think that's the biggest lesson I've learned, is just to ask before I create because I've created so many things that nobody ever asked me to do. I was like, this will be really helpful. There's so many people and then like crickets because they just are like, I don't know, I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this. So I appreciate that you said that. Um, and about like new members and teams and just being, yeah, just, just being um supportive to each other of just shouting each other out and that positive. Um experience for your, for your new members as well as your team members is an amazing for having somebody manage the zoom call while you're doing the content.

So that's, you cannot, I learned this from my wife. Not it's not my great ideas. So she, her, she's a director of alumni relations at a local college and they were doing lots of in person events all over the country and they had to totally pivot to online and they, what amazed me is sometimes they'll have two or three facilitators on these zoom calls, right? And it just takes the pressure off the presenter, The presenter just has to show up and present. So if somebody's cat is meowing in the background, the host, the the facilitator can mute the person if there's an issue like that they get on early, the person just shows up and presents, you know, even if you have to pay somebody a little bit of money or you get your cousin to do it, or your brother or whoever spouse have somebody run the, the logistics of the meeting. So you don't have to worry about that. The other thing is I treat each of those zoom calls as like a little podcast and just like you had an intro, I do an intro on everyone.

So I'm reiterating our purpose on every introduction. So people know why they're there, I'm introducing them to other events that are coming up. So it's a little bit, you know, it's like a rate, it becomes a little bit like a radio show or tv show, you get a little preview of what's coming, so people know, so it's not just a zoom call itself, that's that contact point is is critical to help keep the momentum of the of the community going and so people know what's going on. Mhm. I might be feeling that from you from my upcoming zoom calls to to take a little bit of my intro and tweak a little bit and then put it in in front of the zoom because I'm gonna end up report, you know, using that content and having recordings and and your branding, It's just talking about your branding, it's just really instilling into people what you do, why we're all here. You know what the really big picture is and people really like to hear that because they don't lose that. Then there, it's like always in the forefront of their mind of like, this is what we're doing in this in this space, So I really think that's a great um and so transitioning, I want to I want to wrap up in just a little bit, but transitioning to content and so you mentioned a little bit about content, do you have a content calendar kind of tell me how you go about content.

We I spent all the time creating content calendar. We even spent an hour or so as a team putting together the plan for the year and then I abandoned it basically. Um I don't know why, but it has. So what basically what I do is I post in the beginning of the week, the zoom calls for the week. Um If I come across an interesting article on my own, I'll either just put that immediately or if I find that I've been pinging the members too much, I'll schedule it to show up a couple of days later And then again if neither of those have happened in a while and I'm logging on, so I'm logging on every day multiple times a day. I can't even tell you how many times uh basically just leave it open but I'm visiting the site 12 at least 12 times a day. I'm just there all the time. Um and I get notified.

I have all my notifications on. So if anybody hiccups and mighty networks I know about it. Um and so I'm responding to everything. Even if it's like gee I don't know, that's a great question, you know, and then tagging another member like maybe so and so can answer this or one of our experts. That's oh that's that's another, this is a golden nugget here. So what we found out really, really works for experts who aren't logging in as often as I am if you as the community manager, if you tag them in a comment, they can just go to their notifications and quickly find out the post that they need to address and not have to search through and hit or miss. So it's just, it's been a huge time saver and frustration saver for our members because the members used to be saying, well, you know, Emily hasn't answered my question or Brendan hasn't answered my question or Sarah hasn't answered my question. Well your question was asked three days ago, which seems to you like forever, But in normal time, three days is, you know, not that long and now it's buried under 20 other posts and they just missed it. So this way we, we don't miss it.

So back to the calendar. So basically I just make sure the content is fresh if, if the post, there's been a bunch of new posts about questions, I don't, I won't necessarily post unless I'm really excited about something and you know, if it's crickets that particular day monday and Tuesdays are particularly quiet. I'll post a couple extra things just to include some content and basically I'm just posting what's interesting to me and what's interesting to me is interesting to my community and its technical stuff of, you know, articles about different herbs or breakthroughs in science or genetics, something like that. Okay. Yeah, that's good to know, I, I like that you're saying um what's interesting to me is interesting to them and I think that when you have that connectivity, which is what I'm kind of trying to create my community of like I'm sharing these resources around community building because I'm working with community builders and so I think it's great when you're, you know you've got that cohesiveness, I was a community manager for a another community that somebody hired me to do and it was not a topic that I was at all familiar with, I was learning through her course for the very first time about this topic, I had no experience and it was a very deep um spiritual topic, let's say that and I had a really hard time in the beginning because I wasn't relating because I'm like, I can't just answer posts, you know, if people like sharing their deepest darkest things and then I'm like, you know, liking it, I don't know, I can't even, I can't even imagine that sounds actually very, very, very difficult because while I'm not on the level of Brendan or Emily I can hang in there conversations, I know enough to Answ.

I don't know 60%, of the questions and the rest, you know, you just make an intelligent comment about, but at least I know what they're talking about, I can't even imagine if I was didn't know anything about genomic nutrition, well I really like the person that I, that I worked with and and I was learning as I was going, so as I was learning that I was able to say, oh this kind of content is something they would enjoy. Oh, here's, I'll pull some content from the course. I'll create a little like pretty canvas quote thing from the course. Um, and so I was kind of doing that like, you know, weeks, you know, it was a week course for like weeks 33 Through eight. I was basically kind of like finally getting in the groove, but I wanted to just point that out if people are listening about hiring a community manager for their community, maybe that they're at the point where they really want somebody to offer this to the support because they really want to just focus on, you know, teaching the course and not necessarily doing all that responding and posting, which is a great idea and hopefully everybody can get to that point where They need a community manager and so they can hire one but it's really important to like get that person to say, is this the right person for this community?

Are they like in line with our values? Do we kind of grew together? Are they personable? I mean I'm in the travel community and that's, that's my jam, those are my people because I love travel, but you know, the other kind of communities and they might not be, I might not be as active in other communities that I'm in because I'm just not relating to the content. I think that's a good point. Um, yeah, let's see one of the other. So we've talked about a lot of learning. You did a lot of learning. What is the, you said you have some big numbers. So let's just wrap up with like maybe your, your favorite, Well, I mean before I say the vision and future, what's your favorite feature of my new network? Oh, you know, I just reviewed this and I've had an answer and I've totally forgotten what my favorite feature is. one of them. I really like the back end the the premium analytics. So I've used that to track down non active members just to reach out to them to make sure that they were getting what they wanted. And it's really funny. They're just not active. None of them have have left.

I don't understand why, but they're not active, but I could pinpoint them and send them private messages and say, hey, is everything okay? And eventually they pinned back? Yeah, yeah, we're good. Thanks. It's like, okay, Happy to have you anything I can do let me know. Yeah. So those, yeah, those analytics, you know, those anna writers being annoyingly helpful. Apparently, the, the analytics are very, very helpful. So I really enjoyed that. The other kind of hidden feature in there for us as we kind of generate content is the search bar. I tell people to use the search bar over and over and over and over again. The search bar is really powerful tool. Yeah. To build that content library that that everybody is doing as somebody network host or supporting money networks, it's such an important thing to use the search bar because it just comes, it pops up so you can just put a topic and it just comes up which is so much easier. Yeah, it's like simple things. Right? Search bar. Okay, um what do you wish the money network would offer or do? I wish there was more flexibility in creating courses for people outside the network.

So I I've told you, we've created courses based on the content that we've had and their bonuses and these bonuses are they get lifetime access. So come try out beyond protocols. We know you're gonna love it, but just in case you don't, you get to keep all these great bonuses just for trying us out of the way of saying thank you. And they're the context content is amazing these courses on them their own or with, you know, $1000 each easily. So it's it's really a lot of value that we're giving people but I've had to host them on a different platform because mighty Networks can't quite jam the way I wanted to, I would love to have it be kind of just outside access so they don't have access to the entire membership network and understand why they've done it that way. But that's the one thing I would like to have is some pathway into just of course not the membership. So it's a fussy thing. So I mean we're fine with it, but if I had a magic wand, yeah, if I had a magic wand, but that's why the muddy networks is different.

That's, that's why it's not teachable. That's why it's not you, to me that's exactly why it's different. But again, sometimes people do want to have some of that content if people, they have an audience and the audience says, I really just want to learn and I don't have time to be a part or contribute to a community. Heard that from a number of people. Um, you know, and you can do that, you just choose not to go and participate in the community and mighty Networks. You just say I'm going to go in the course and I don't participate and then when somebody like you comes and bugs me and says Deb, you know, you're not, you know, are you okay? I'd be like, yeah, I just don't have time for this community aspect. I'm just here to learn something and and peace out, but I'm still gonna stay in here because I want to access to the content. So I just, it would be awesome if like for example, somebody comes in, they see our courses, they say no thank you that they still have access to the courses within mighty networks, but not the membership part of it. So if that, again, a way to break it off rather than having them give them a separate log in to go through that anyway, that's that's my one little beef.

Tiny tiny little beef. Yeah. The only workaround that I would know about that was just creating an external other mighty network, right, that you would just have the course and there was nothing like there was no ability to to have any other content in there. Yeah, but you couldn't you can't duplicate the network and you can't transfer everything over. So it's it's the same. It would be it would be it would be a start, it would be a build. You would have to build it out for sure. Alright, so what's your vision for this year? Let's Just focus on this year, 20 21 now that you've kind of had four months, you know, at testing the waters of money networks, where do you want to be in december? I love you got a plan. So the plan for the end of this year is to Have 100 members. And just so you know, right now we're at 14 paid members. We've got 25 members in the group, total 14 paid. So I want a lot more. It's a big every day.

It gets a bigger and bigger ask but better to fail big than to win small in my month my mind. So that's that's the big metric that we're going for and part of that also to support that is to have a marketing funnel that's working that brings in clearly that's not gonna happen just by one at a timing people inviting them in network wise, networking wise. So, so 2fold, right to create a funnel that consistently brings new people in that's profitable and that I can scale and then to bring that Network up to a 100 people and we'll see Maybe it'll only get to 50 or something like that. But I'll let you know that's a that's a great goal. And it sounds realistic by the methods of your growing, even if you get half of that will still be beneficial for you. But I think the biggest point that you're making and you said a little earlier, and I wanted to repeat, it was you're you're really giving that khan shares in the beginning.

I think a lot of people get stuck with. I need to get email sequences, I need to like, do all of these, you know, automated things. Now, if you have an audience of 10,000 or 100,000 people, then you need an automated thing. If you just have a small audience or you're looking at building from scratch or, you know, something like that, you don't have a huge email list. You need to do what you're doing, you need to like, you know, the person, you can't overestimate that and, you know, we've created the welcome sequence within mighty networks. And so I've got that set up and on the list of things to do is to create an email nurture sequence to bring it in. It's just not the top of the list right now and it's just much easier to just, I mean I've got 14 paid members, right? So when somebody comes on new, I know who they are. I'm gonna have a conversation with them, I'm gonna welcome them to the party. I'm gonna show them around, I've got the time to do that. And I think even When we get to a 100 or you know, eventually to 1000 people, I'll pay somebody to do that. That's not something I'm going to stop. It's just, it's a community, you need an introduction just to kind of dive in and just have automated emails, you know, especially if you're charging a premium, it's like you need to, you need to treat them specially Because we want, you want them to stick around right.

You know, $300 a month is one thing, $300 a month for three years is another thing. And that's, you know, that's what we're going for really. We want to provide that kind of, we want to be, you know, as valuable as to the practitioners as their phone is right. You would never think of, okay, I'm gonna cancel my phone and we want to be the same way we we don't want people to cancel, we want them to be to be there for them, helping them, whatever stage they are and that they're getting that much value out of it. So you can't do that with automated emails. They can get that anywhere. So take care of your peeps. Yes. Oh, such a great example of an amazing on boarding experience. And so many people that I talked to when I say, what's your on boarding, you know, process? And they're like, huh? I don't know, you know, like, or they say the emails and I said, but it's a community and its people and people like that, their whole joining because they want to talk to other humans, not seeing emails, email sequences are helpful for certain things and getting them to pointing them to certain places in the community and things like that.

So definitely I'm not like saying never use emails because I use them and things, but it's not like, that's all I do. I don't like do the emails and I Go to the beach for the next two months. You know, I'm in the community, I'm showing up, I'm like getting on calls with people or I'm offering, even if they don't sign up to jump on a call with me, I'm, I'm just offering like, hey, I'm here if you need it, let me know. So yeah, uh any final things that I didn't ask that you might want to share with me or the audience because we are a community. Our main marketing funnel involves getting people to a webinar like you were doing the first webinar, nobody showed up. The second webinar, one person showed up, the third person webinar, one person showed up this last webinar, 12 people showed up right now. Out of those interestingly. Well, actually the very first one we did, we had a few more show up too. Well, that wasn't that many. But people register so you can follow up with email.

This is a point where it's a great thing to, to follow up with email, get their emails, follow up them, they indicated an interest. Those are the people send them a bunch of emails until they say thank you. I've had enough emails from you, goodbye. Just keep sending them different aspects, different interesting things, different valuable things. Stay engaged with these people. You collected their emails from, as long as you can see the other thing, you're a brand new community, chances are so they, they don't know us from adam, Right? They don't trust us yet. They, you know, it's like, really, I'm gonna trust my professional, you know, my patients with you. Like, why should I do that? Well, part of building trust is just to be around. It's like, oh yeah, I saw you guys last year. Right. And so they're always early adopters that people Russian will try anything new, but that's only 10% of the population. The rest of us are cowards right there on to the next day. They're on to the next, that's exactly right. They'll stay for a little while until they see something else. Cool, right? They're not your core audience.

So just so we're, we've got this webinar sequence that we're building, we're just going to keep going with it and eventually it'll will automate that and just have it be an on demand video that people can go to at their own time, but we'll probably always at least right now we're doing them twice a month. I was thinking one once a week, but that's just too much work. So we're doing it twice a month. Probably will go to when things start cranking a little bit better once a month. Um, and then having an on demand video, a copy of the thing where people just go to the, that just means there's a video on a web page and instead of going to a webinar, they watched that. But again, they're not gonna, they're not gonna opt in from watching a video, they're not gonna opt in from watching a webinar. You know, if you, if you have 10 people and one person joins you from 10 people, I mean that's like a home run, that's incredible. It happens from the constant interactions. If you get somebody send you a personal email after something you send out, that's worth its weight in gold. Start the conversation, keep you know what, how can I help you? What are you looking for? What kind of practitioner are you, whatever you're doing.

Those those individual emails are the ones where you're going to get your your new members from. Mm hmm. Such good points. Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Can you share with us if people that are listening or actually really interested in your community and want to check it out? Go to www beyond protocols with an S dot org and the reason you need the yes because otherwise you end up at some gaming site. I didn't know this when I chose the U. R. L. But it's like some space invader alien. That's the worst thing. So make sure you got the s at the end of beyond protocols, plural. Mm hmm, awesome. Yeah. I will have it in the show notes frame by listening. So definitely check out the show notes for some links to the community. And if you're interested in joining the pine cone here community, please reach out to me. Um I'm definitely available to jump on calls. I'm going to be starting to do that with some people in the next couple of weeks and if you have questions, get with Deb, get with somebody.

It's so great to have you said earlier and I was wrap it up by saying it's super important to have people to bounce ideas off because I last year I bounced ideas off my wall and went in circles and um I did have a community, I started running this mighty mastermind last year. And so then I with that small mastermind group of other money network hosts, you know, having that support and accountability of them. They showed up every week. I can, I just mind blown by the fact that they showed up every single week um for calls just because they were interested in building their community and they wanted to help each other and so when you have something like that in a small group, cohort something, it's just an amazing experience. So I'm excited to have more, more experiences like that. I'm going to be offering tech and strategy support in the fun, come here community like A Q and A one time per month. The other thing you said and I'm gonna work on this is less is more because we are busy, busy people, especially if you're a money network hosts and you have a full time business or you're trying to launch while you're doing other things um you can't consume a ton of content.

You're in launch mode. So anyway, I'm wrapping up. Thank you so much for joining. All right, thank you so much. Have a great day and take thank you and everybody have a great day, we'll talk to you next time on the phone, come on your podcast mm