Why agency owners should start online communities with Drew McLellan

Hey everybody. Drew here. You know, we are always looking for more ways to be helpful and meet you wherever you’re at to help you grow your agency. It’s one of the reasons why we’ve produced this podcast for so long, and I’m super grateful that you listen as often as you do. However, there are some topics that are better suited for quick hyper-focused answers in under 10 minutes. That’s where our YouTube channel really comes in. For quick doses of inspiration, best practices, tips and tricks, head over to youtube.com/the at sign agency management Institute. Again, that’s youtube.com/the at sign or symbol.

And then agency management Institute, all one word. Subscribe and search the existing video database for all sorts of actionable topics that you can implement in your shop today. Alright, let’s get to the show.

It doesn’t matter what kind of agency you run, traditional digital media buying, web dev, PRR brand, whatever your focus, you still need to run a profitable business. The Build, a Better, Agency Podcast, presented by a White Label IQ will expose you to the best practices that drive growth, client and employee retention and profitability, bringing his 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant. Please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Hey everybody. Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute. Glad to be back with you again, This week. Thanks for joining us. If you were with us about five weeks ago, I did a solo cast on building and caring for a community. Well, I got so worked up and so excited about the content that the solo cast was really long and so about an hour and a half. And so we decided after I recorded it to cut it into two episodes. So if you didn’t hear that one, you may want to go back to the early March episode. So it would’ve been March 11th that it came out. And listen to part one before you jump into this, which is now part two.

If you did already listen to that. Then where we’re gonna pick up is from where I left off, where we were talking about the power of communities and how from a business perspective, they can really make a huge difference in terms of sales and repeat business and marketing spend. Because in a lot of cases, a strong community does a lot of the marketing for you. So we’re gonna pick up from there and talk a little more about how to create and nurture a community. And if you don’t want to be a part of a community, then how you participate in one. So with that said, we’re gonna get started in just a second. But first, a little bit of housekeeping. So every solo cast, as you know, we give away a free seat to one of our workshops.

The way you get in, the way you get into the drawing for the workshop is to leave us a rating or review on the podcast. So wherever you download the podcast. So it could be Apple Podcasts, it could be Google, could be iHeart, wherever it is, go and leave us a rating and a review. Take a screenshot. Why the screenshot? Because, and most of those platforms, they ask you to create a username, and the username is rarely your name, and it’s never your name and your agency name. So if it’s, you know, beach or Die 22, I don’t know who that is. I, I think that’s a great, I’m all about beach or die, but I don’t know who you are and I don’t know how to get ahold of you.

So take a screenshot, email it to me at Drew at agency management Institute dot com, and we will put you in the drawing. Your name stays in the drawing until you win. So sooner or later you’re gonna win a $2,000 workshop seat just for leaving a rating and review, which seems like pretty good trade for a few minutes of time. So this month’s winner is Kimberly Rudd. Kim is the president of Rudd Resources. So Kim, I’ll be reaching out to you and letting you know how to get a hold of one of the workshop seats. So thank you very much for listening, Kim and all of you.

So, all right, let’s get to the episode or the back half of the episode and talk a little bit more about community. All right, so let’s say you’re like, you know what, Drew, this sounds pretty good. I, I might wanna create a community. How do I do that? So if we wanna create a community, we have to ask ourselves a few questions. Who, what, where, and most important why, and this is the deal breaker, I think for a lot of folks. You cannot create a community to monetize it. Yes, you may monetize it, but that cannot be the main reason why you communicate why you create this community.

The money that you make by creating this community has to be a byproduct, not the product. And this is really hard to wrap your head and heart around. And even if intellectually you’re like, totally get it, I’m in. We’re gonna do it for all the right reasons. It’s hard to break the habit of rushing for a sale when you start gathering people together. Who are your prospects? Where are your per your perfect prospects? So why would you do it if you can’t make a dime? And this again, is where I think it’ll, this, this may be where you decide, nope, I don’t wanna com create a community, I wanna create an audience. I’ll argue the same thing for an audience, by the way, is if they feel like you’re doing it just to monetize them, you’re not gonna keep them.

You have to have a bigger, more giving reason for your why. So again, when you ask yourself, why would I do this if I can’t make a dime? That’s the, that’s the question you have to ask yourself and have an answer for. And this again may be the deal breaker for a lot of you. So let’s look at a MI. Why did we create the a AMI community if we were not gonna make a dime from it? And the reality is owning an agency is hard and is lonely. And our goal is to be the most trusted source of industry specific information to make it easier, a little less lonely and more profitable.

So again, we want to be the go-to place for agency owners all over the globe because we would like to help them make it easier, less lonely, and more profitable. So would I do it if we couldn’t make a dime? Okay, I will admit I probably would not spend 10 to 12 hours a day on it like I do now. But I do have a passion around this and, and Danielle does too. We want to help. And so would we write a book about it? Yeah, probably. Or teach a class or take some phone calls from people who are frustrated. Heck, we do that seven days a week from people that are paying us. Some people aren’t.

Or we might mentor some young owners, which we have done on our own dime. So for us, this is bigger than making money. It’s a passion. It is a commitment to the industry. It’s a commitment to our peers that we know some secrets, we know some ways that you can make it easier, that you can make more money, that you don’t have to do it all by yourself. And we are committed to sharing that. So for us, it’s bigger than the money. But you know what? Don’t freak out. You’re going to make money too. If you do this, if you build an audience or a community, you absolutely will make money as well. If you think about your audience and then you build a smart value ladder of products and services that they actually need or want.

If when somebody buys something from you, you deliver it with the same level of commitment and excellence that really aligns with the values that you’ve shared in the community and out to the world so that there’s no sense of like a disconnect between, oh, well, when, when I was listening to his podcast, he said, you know, we lead with love, but when we went to the workshop, I didn’t feel any love or you know, whatever you, it’s gotta match, right? Another way that will help you make money is if you keep serving the community whether they buy from you or not. And this is a key that you keep giving your knowledge. You keep sharing, you keep teaching.

And knowing that a big part of the audience or the community depending on what you build, is never gonna buy from you. And you have to be okay with that. You know, a subset of people will, but the vast majority won’t. And that’s okay. And the way you keep serving that community is you keep asking yourself what else would be valuable to them? When I think about how a MI has grown over the years that I have owned it, quite honestly, I would love to tell you it was some grandiose plan, but it wasn’t. It was me either thinking proactively, boy, I bet they would really value a workshop on this.

Or Boy, I really need to get this person on the podcast ’cause they have a lot to teach. Or it was an agency owner or leader saying to me, Hey, do you have a podcast episode on fill in the blank? And me going, no, I don’t. But that would be a really great topic. I need to go find an expert and invite them on the show. Or no, I need to write a blog post. Or no, we should, that should be the focus of our research. Or no, we should do a salary and benefit survey. Whatever it is. Much of am i’s growth has come from people needing something and us saying, yeah, we should do that for them. They do need that. We should figure out a way to get that for them. And you’ll keep making money if you never lose sight of why you built the community that bigger.

Why? Because that always has to trump making money. And by the way, it has to be authentic. You can’t fake that. You can’t dial that in. And if you do, the audience is gonna figure it out and they’re gonna bail on you. If they think you’re just doing it to make money. They don’t begrudge you making money, they don’t begrudge that you have things to sell them, that you have services that they might be interested in buying. They don’t. That’s not a problem at all. As long as you’re really doing it for the bigger why, why you want to be helpful while you want to gather them together and teach, that’s what matters. Alright, so let’s assume you’ve identified the why.

And feel free if you’re listening to this, to hit this, you know, pause button, pull your team together, have a conversation, and not listen to the rest of the podcast until you’ve figured out the why. All right? So I’m gonna assume you figured it out whether you paused me or not. So the next question is, who, if you had to fill a room of people that would be excited to learn what you know, who would be in that audience? It is really, really hard to build an audience or a community of everybody. Why? Because there is no common connective tissue, there is no common thread, there is no socially significant characteristic of place or norms or values or all the things that I read to you before that that’s not, that’s not enough.

That they’re humans who think you’re funny or think you’re interesting or whatever, that’s not enough for them to keep coming back. There has to be a reason for them to keep coming back and to continue to find value in what you know and what you’re willing to teach them. So who would be in that audience? So obviously for a MI, the audience is small to mid-sized agency owners and leaders, right? Okay, but what if you had to fill three rooms with people, not the same people who would be excited to learn what you know, who would be in that audience? And now what I’m not suggesting is you say, oh, doctors and then chiropractors and then medical device manufacturers.

I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is think about the audience you identified and can you slice that audience even thinner? So again, using the AMI example, if my one audience is small to mid sized agency owners and leaders, what would my three rooms be filled with? So my three rooms, if I’m thinking about how would I thin slice the small to mid-sized agency owner and leader, what I might say is the first room would be filled with new agency owners, whether they bought their agency from the founder or they just started an agency from scratch. But they’ve been doing this for five years or less.

And they are freaking out because for a couple years things were going great. They were small, they were nimble, they didn’t have to make a lot of money, they were probably doing it outta their parents’ basement or they were doing it outta their house. But all of a sudden now they have an office or they have some employees and it’s getting harder and they don’t want, they, they don’t have enough margin, they have enough room to make a mistake ’cause they don’t have three months of retained earnings or anything like that ’cause they’re brand new. So that would be room number one. Room number two would be agency owners who have been stuck in the same place. They’ve been at 15 people or 20 people for the last five or six years and they can’t figure out, or they’ve been at, you know, 2 million a GI or 3 million a GI and they can’t figure out how to get over the hump.

They can’t figure out how to scale. And they’re frustrated because they know there’s opportunity on the other side of that hump if they can get over it, but they can’t figure out how to get over it. All right? That that’s two rooms. Number three would be an agency owner who’s in his fifties or in her fifties and she’s thinking about selling her agency and she’s not sure how to go about that. She’s not sure if any of her employees are interested. If they could afford it and she needs someone to walk alongside her or him to help them figure out how to exit gracefully making some money. How do they find the right buyer? How do they navigate all of that?

So those might be my three rooms. So you can see what I did. I took an audience and then I looked at that audience and said, well, there’s a lot of different interests inside that one audience that I could really focus on as a subject matter expert. These are things that we help people with every day. We have a lot to teach and share around that. So it begins to inform the products and services we sell. It begins to inform our content strategy. It begins to inform how we attract people to the community. In the example of my three rooms, we might decide that’s all one community, which is what we’ve decided, right? The A MI community, we might decide that it’s three communities.

So we might sub parse out and put all the people who wanna sell their agency together and let them learn and teach each other as they’re going through it together. We might put it almost like a, I wanna sell my agency support group together and and let them support each other and learn. So again, it’s a dialogue. It’s not just us teaching, but they’re teaching each other as well. So gotta figure out your why and then you have to figure out your who and what. Then what I want you to do is once you’ve identified your who, I want you to think about how do I break that who into smaller subsets that I can really think about how that is sort of the bones of what I’m gonna construct when it comes to the community.

Then I want you to think about once you’ve figured out who, so we figured out the why, we figured out the who. Now let’s talk about the what. What does the community or the audience need from you? And we’re gonna talk about some things that they might need and which ones are audience. So again, that monologue and which ones are community dialogue. So the first thing that probably pops into your head is they need educational content and resources, piece of cake. So we might do webinars or film tutorials or write guides. So all of those, for the most part are more monologue. Yes, a webinar people can ask questions, but for the most part, it’s more the teacher talking than the audience talking.

We might create podcasts or videos or courses. Again, more monologue, right? So this is super helpful and it’s great for an audience and it’s also great for a community, but we have to create more dialogue sooner or later on the community side if we’re gonna shift from audience to community. But we might create some documents that show best practices or case studies that they can learn from or checklists or tips, tip sheets, things like that. All of that is more monologue, all of that is more audience. And by the way, a community has to also be an audience. An audience doesn’t necessarily have to be a community, but of course a community is an audience.

It’s just a more interactive audience because they have relationship with each other as well as with you. Another thing you might do for educational content and resources are, you know, industry news trends, updates. Again, more audience, more monologue than dialogue. Alright, so let’s think about support or client services. So you might create a bunch of FAQs or knowledge-based articles or blog posts. Again, kind of monologue, but you might also bring together, so one of the things that one of our, one of our agencies did during COVID was they, they serve a specific industry.

And so during covid, when nobody was traveling to conferences, they couldn’t learn from each other. This agency convened a monthly sort of think tank of their clients and prospects who all had basically the same title in organizations across the us and they brought them together to sort of strategize and think how they were gonna survive covid and how they were gonna be ready once Covid lifted to sort of reengage with their customer base. So they created this peer-to-peer sort of support forum or support group to problem solve together, which by the way has now long lived past covid because it was so valuable.

That’s a great example of a community thing, right? Because now these people are forming relationship with each other. You’re the conduit for that, right? You’re the subject matter expert, the teacher, the coach, but they’re also learning from each other. They’re also creating ideas together. They’re, they’re teaching and learning, right? So another thing that you, that your community or audience needs, and again, this is something you could sell, is direct access to you or your team members. So they wanna build a strategy, they want some counsel on whether or not their website needs to be updated, whatever it may be. This is an opportunity for you either to teach and talk about it or to have a dialogue about it.

But it also creates a sales opportunity for you. And of course for many of you, consulting and building strategy is absolutely part of the support and client service that you provide. So you can begin to see how some of this is around content, some of it’s around products and services. And again, some of it’s more of a monologue or some of it’s more of a dialogue. So another thing your community might need from you is networking and collaboration. So you might, like I gave you the example, you might bring people together who have a common interest or title or they all work in the same industry together to kind of create a user group, if you will. So again, very community focused, right?

You could create networking events. So one of the things that a lot of agencies do is they will host social events pre, pre an industry conference and they will bring their pro, their clients and their prospects together for a couple reasons. One, so that the clients can tell the prospects how awesome they are, but two, because these are people who should know each other. And so you become the, the introduction bridge between these people. So it’s basically a networking event, you know, virtually or in person. But that’s a great way to build community is by creating connections between people. And you can even sort of lead collaborative projects or challenges.

You could lead a nonprofit challenge or project inside your client group or inside a prospect and client group that the community would kind of rally around together, which would be great for you, it’s great for them and it’s great to start to build again that community. So, all right, what else does the community need from me? You can see how this goes. You could just keep asking yourself questions. So for it to be a community, one of the things you could think about is are there ways for members to, of this community, so again, probably clients and prospects to teach or contribute. So can they sort of flip the switch and become the teacher?

So we talked about the user groups by industry or interest, we talked about networking events or collaborative projects. You might set up a mentorship program, you might help them mentor each other. You might have them share success stories that other people could learn from. As your community grows, you get to a point where if it’s really a robust community, like imagine Harley’s community, I guarantee you that a lot of the teaching that happens inside Harley’s community is done by bike owners, not people who work at Harley. So you might even, as your community grows, you might even ask some of your more active community members to teach on your behalf. You know, at a MI, we’ve done that.

We’ve got, you know, different people leading like the key exec group and the COO group and the soon to be announced CFO group. We have other people, other agency owners who have been part of the a MI community for a really long time. So there are indoctrinated in our brand and sort of how we show up and what our beliefs are. But they’re doing that. Danielle and I aren’t doing that. So it’s an opportunity for the community to grow by inviting members to teach. So what else does your community need from you? Well, they need, everybody loves rewards recognition. You could create loyalty programs. You could create, back to what I was talking about in the introduction.

You know, if you have intellectual property that would be beneficial to your clients and prospects, you could create certifications or accreditations. You could highlight community members who really contribute a lot of content or are helping younger people get better in their career. You can also offer them sneak peeks into things that you’re doing, whether it’s client work or what you’re doing with AI or all kinds of things. So you could make them feel special by making them part of this club where they get special perks. So all of that is the what. But again, the big difference between an audience and a community is an audience is the audience is connected to you, the teacher, the coach, and it’s, and, and you have a reciprocal relationship, but it’s really between the teacher slash coach and an audience member.

There’s not a lot of interaction between the audience members, but in a community, the members of a community feel very connected to one another. They feel a loyalty and a bond with each other. They have a very clear shared reason for belonging. And there are rituals and traditions and inside jokes that create even deeper connections. So that’s one of the defining characteristics of a community over an audience. So what do you get from the community? So you’re, you’re creating all these things. Why would you do this? Why would you invest in this? So again, the first reason should have come out of your mouth already, which is your bigger why, your bigger why in, in our case, the bigger why is we wanna help agency over owners all over the globe do this easier in a little less lonely fashion so they could feel like they have some support and some community around them.

And we want them to make more money. That’s our big why. But what else do you get from the community? Well, you know what, you get success stories and strategies you learn from them as much as they learn from you. So you’re learning tips and tricks that you can use with other clients. You are problem solving together sometimes you are getting, you are earning that recommendation or endorsement from them again as they feel closer and closer to you. And as you are helping them, not only let’s say they’re a client, not only are you helping them with their business, but you’re all also also helping them by creating this great content. If they’re inside an audience or you’re interacting and have created this community and made connections for them with other people.

If it’s a community, they’re beholden to you. And so you’re gonna get a lot of recommendations and endorsements. They’re much more likely to say to you, you know what? It would be awesome if you created this. If you offered, if you had a PR department, we would totally bring our PR work to you if you had this or that. We would totally give that work to you. So they will actively tell you what they wanna buy from you, which is a beautiful thing. It is a great time saver, it’s a great money saver. And it, it is a proof point that you should make some of the changes in your business that maybe you’ve been thinking about making, but you just haven’t done it yet. They can give you collaborative development on new use cases and they can give you feedback on what you’re already doing on your team members.

They are invested in you. They want you to be successful. Why? Because you’ve helped them be successful. So again, audience or community, the benefits to you are very similar. Testimonials, all kinds of reasons. Brand ambassador stuff where they’re out telling the world how awesome you are. They’re sharing your content, they’re inviting people to the build a better agency summit. They’re doing things like that because they’re a part of this community. So there’s a lot of benefit to you in making this investment. And by the way, let’s go back to the earlier part of the conversation. The number one reason, the benefit of this, besides your big why is it makes biz dev faster and easier and your win rate’s gonna skyrocket.

So it makes sales easier and faster. That’s it. Part of the understanding of community versus audience is that community is a mutual relationship and it’s mutual not just between you and a community member, but it’s amongst the whole community. So there’s this sort of mutual respect and trust. And if the community is really well run and it, and it attracts really great people, that it, you end up developing a mutual need, they need to be there. They need to interact with these people because it’s, it’s one of the main ways they learn, it’s one of the main ways they grow and they have this shared kind of purpose or value with you.

So when someone’s a part of your community, it’s hard for them to just walk away. It’s an, there’s an emotional cost. And remember, we are hardwired to belong. So that is a very difficult decision to say, I’m gonna separate from this because I, I want to hire a different agency or I wanna do something different. That’s hard for them. It literally hurts. Remember the MRI study, it literally hurts them. So there’s a stickiness factor, an opportunity for you to keep a client longer or to earn a prospect’s business when you create this community. Let’s take a quick break. Hey everybody, thanks for listening today.

Before I go back to the interview, I just wanna remind you that we are always offering some really amazing workshops and you can see the whole schedule at agency management Institute dot com on the navigation head to how we help scroll down and you’ll see workshops and you can see the whole list there with descriptions of each workshop. They are all in Denver and we’ve got them throughout the year for agency owners, account execs, agency leaders, CFOs. We have a little something for everybody no matter what it is that you’re struggling with, people, new business, money, all of those things we’ve got covered. So check ’em out and come join us. All right, let’s get back to the show.

Alright, welcome back. So again, the foundation of any community is two things. A group of people who have this shared interest, passion, calling profession, whatever it is that kind of is that socially impactful characteristic and a deep desire to learn. Nobody’s gonna hang around in your audience or your community if they’re not hungry to keep getting better and learning, which frankly is great for us because it means they’re gonna be a better client. And as they learn more, what they realize is one of the best ways to learn is to turn it around and share what they know.

They feel like they’ve gotten so much from the community, not just you, but everybody in the community that they want to pay it forward. They want to give it back. And so pretty soon everybody in your community is showing up as both a teacher and a student. I see that in the Facebook group all the time. Someone will pose a question, they show up as the student, but somebody else will ask a different question on a different topic. And that student knows the answer to that. They’ve wrestled that problem to the ground before. So now all of a sudden they’re showing up as a teacher. So absolutely at the helm is a teacher or teachers and coaches who set the example and create the community’s culture. And if they’re really consistent in how they do that, pretty soon everybody reflects the culture and becomes a teacher as well.

So that spirit, which you know is at the heart of a MI, which is we learn better and faster when we learn together, is just woven into this community, which is very powerful for you in terms of the stickiness of it. Because again, the longer a prospect stays in that community, the more likely they are to hire you, the more likely they are to, to have so much respect and trust for you that when they’re ready to hire an agency. ’cause we don’t get to control that when they’re ready to hire an agency, you are gonna be the choice. So that’s a really powerful reason why this makes sense. I think about a couple years ago at the summit, I talked about how I, I use the analogy that agencies are a ship out in the open sea and that the water is really rough some days, sometimes it’s calm, some days it’s really rough.

And honestly, that’s what daily life is like for our clients and prospects that, you know, they, there’s uncertainty everywhere. They’re not sure if they’re gonna get to spend their budget, they don’t know if they’re gonna lose their job, they’re not sure if they should hire another agency. And they’re looking, they’re out actively looking for resources that will, in essence, if you will, stay with the analogy, bring them into a safe harbor. Their jobs depend on it, their organization’s mission depends on it. This is important for them. And we can be kind of that lighthouse. We can bring them in to that safe harbor. We can do that if they’re in our audience, right? We the teacher, the coach, the subject matter expert, the authority can do that, or the community with us as the leader of that community can do that.

Because again, using my analogy, a lighthouse is like rock solid. It is embedded in the rock and it is focused and deliberate. It knows its only job is to shine the light in a way that everybody can safely get to harbor. And what’s cool is in the community, if you go that far, it’s not just the coach or teacher who fuels the lighthouse. Everybody does. And if you run the community well, everybody adds fuel and the light gets brighter and brighter. If you don’t do it well, if you create it kind of a set it and forget it, then pretty soon things are gonna start to go south and people are gonna start dimming that light. There’s no middle ground.

They either contribute or they detract. And so if you’re gonna do, if you’re gonna create a community, if you’re gonna do that rather than the audience route, you really do have to be ready to invest the time to manage that community, to stay present and to really have a, have a, have a voice there all the time. And that’s the role of the community creators, to inspire the members to care as much as you do about the building to growing and protecting that community, which can turn out to be a pretty cool thing when it works out great. So as I said before, this is probably not for everybody. I know it’s not for everybody, and that’s okay.

There are other ways to leverage the power of community. So you can build an audience like we’ve talked about, or you don’t have to start a community. You could find a community that has already gathered the prospect. So it might be a trade association, it might be some other organization that has created a community where you can be a significant community member. You can still teach support and benefit from the right community even if it’s not yours. So the power of community is true, whether it’s your community or not, do not get me wrong. It’s a lot more powerful if it’s your community.

But if you’ve listened to this podcast so far and you’re like, there is no freaking way Drew, that we are gonna put in that much energy and effort to create a community, we’re game to create an audience. But I really love the benefits of community. How do I get both great, create your audience, create your content, be a great teacher, and then find a community where that content can really benefit the members, even if it’s not yours. So sort of ask yourself these three questions to decide audience, our own community, someone else’s community. So question number one, can I or we the agency stay true to the idea of doing this in service of people that we love for a long time?

People we really respect and care about, are we willing to invest the time, the energy, and the focus for the next decade or longer? Question number one, what do the people we need, sorry, what do the people we serve need? That’s question number two. What do they need? And can we provide that for them? And this is the hardest question of all, are we willing to say no to money if it threatens the community? So for example, at a MI, we have sponsors at the summit and of course those sponsors want the attendee list. I am not selling that list.

My thing is, come to the summit, create relationships. I promise you, you will meet prospects and customers there. And when you create real relationships, then they’ll be open to your email or the demo or whatever you want to do to further your sale. But if I give you the list and you email a bunch of people, you didn’t show up at the summit or you did show up at the summit, but you email a bunch of people who have never met you, they don’t know who you are, that’s, that’s not helping your sales effort certainly isn’t helping our reputation in terms of protecting the community. So if somebody says, well, I won’t sponsor if I don’t get the list, then we say, well we’re, we’re really sorry, but we’re not a good fit for you because we’re not giving you the list.

We don’t even give the presenting sponsor or list. Nobody gets the list. You have to build the list by creating relationship. So can I stay true to the idea of doing this in service of people I love for a long time? Are we willing to invest the time, energy, focus for the next decade or longer? Question number one. Question number two, what do the people we serve that the who, the one room or the three rooms, what do those people need? And can we provide it on a consistent basis over a long period of time? And three, are we willing to say no to money if it threatens the health of the community? Those are your three questions.

All right, so let’s say you said, yep, we’re game, I wanna do that. Now how do you build the community? So number one, you have to define a purpose. Your shared and sustainable member-focused non-financial reason for beginning the community. It’s gotta be, there’s gotta be a belief system or a value system that comes out of your agency and gets woven into the community. And then what kind of a culture do you want? How do you want to create a culture where it’s safe for everyone to thrive, to ask questions, to not feel stupid? And how do you align that with everything you do in terms of how the community communicates with each other?

Then you map out the what, like what are we gonna teach? So again, go back to that list I read earlier, which was, you know, are we doing webinars? What are the topics? How are we creating that sort of content map of the teaching that we’re gonna do inside the audience or the community? Then the question is, how do I get people to command? How do I assemble people who wanna learn? How do I invite, how do I identify them? How do I invite them in? And then there really does need to be a continual reason for people to keep coming back. So you have to keep creating new content and sharing new information. How do the members invite other people to join?

How do they become part of that? Let’s go out and find good members. Let’s go out and talk about this in the world. Let’s go to our trade associations. Let’s go to our, you know, CEO round tables. Let’s go wherever we go and attract people back to this community that the agency has built. And you know, then how do they take a leadership role, whether it’s formal or informal. And then ultimately the question is you start to build it is how do I protect it? Because as it grows, it’s sort of ripe for being taken advantage of and you have to step up and defend it, even from members who decide that they wanna start selling inside the community or whatever it may be.

But you have to be willing to sort of stand up and go, Nope, that’s unacceptable. Here are the rules, I’ve reminded you. And if you can’t follow the rules, you can’t stay. So again, all of those things are the framework. And the last part of the framework is deciding how are you gonna gather these people together? Community requires a place to gather and learn together. It might be a virtual place, it might be a live place, but how are you going to, where are you gonna disseminate this information? Is it gonna be a Facebook group? Is it gonna be a private forum? Are you gonna hold a conference? Are you gonna go to a conference and hold an event the day before the conference? What makes sense for your audience, for your who?

And then begin to think about how you’re gonna build that out. So where they will gather is pretty diverse. It could be a your blog or your website. It could be on social media, it could be message boards or forums. For some brands it could be a gaming platform. You could host live q and as or webinars. Again, a little less interactive, right? So more teaching than, or sorry, more you know, monologue than dialogue, but still could be done. You might create a virtual meeting space or use the metaverse. You could create in-person discussions or support groups where you bring people together, you might host a conference or attend a conference.

So there’s lots of ways where you can gather the community. It just matters on who’s in the community and which platform. You might have a Slack channel. How do those people come together to share, to learn, to teach each other? How do you create that dialogue space cannot have a dialogue if we cannot interact with one another, right? We are almost to the end of this. But this is so important and I really want you to understand it because if you want to do it, I want you to have the blueprint. So a lot of this is about the minimal viability. So Consistency wins over complexity. You don’t have to have five, you don’t have to have a blog, a message board, do q and As, have a slack channel and host a conference.

That’s not the way to start. You think about what is the most likely place where these folks will gather to learn and then ultimately to return the favor and teach. Start there, start with one. Then after you build the community, they’ll let you know what other places they want to gather. They’ll let you know that they’re all going to a certain conference and it would be great if you hosted a dinner before the conference started or whatever it may be. But they, they will give you that feedback. And then you can add complexity after you’ve got a nucleus of a community built. But think of it this way, you don’t want them, you don’t want three people over here and three people over there and one on the blog and one on the message board and one in the slack channel.

You want them all in the same place, especially in the beginning when you’re trying to create connection and relationship and just have a big enough mass of people that it really does feel like community. So how are you gonna spread the word? How are you gonna tell people that you are creating content? How are you gonna out them find you if you’re creating an audience or find you, if you’re creating a community, nobody can join, no one can learn from you if they don’t know about you, your community or your company. So this is where you have to think about those macro tactics that we talk about in the book, which is what do you do? And the good news is, you’re an agency so you know how to do this, but what do you do when somebody out there doesn’t know who you are and you don’t know who they are?

How do you create something sticky enough that draws them in and attracts them to you? Well, you know, that’s, that’s all about the cornerstone content and the cobblestone content. That’s all about creating a podcast or writing a book or doing a video series or doing some research, doing something and then disseminating out into the world where other people will also share it on your behalf. That starts to attract people back to you. So you’ve got, you’ve, you have to be patient. This takes a while. This is not if you’re, if you’re listening to this in March of 24 in real time, when it, when it’s released and you’re like, I gotta have X in sales by June, this is not the strategy, this is not gonna happen that fast.

You have to be patient. So this is a, you know, this is a long game. This is something again, remember I said you’re gonna do it for a decade. I want you committed for a long time, otherwise don’t waste the effort. But while you are being patient, you have a couple things. Never lose sight of the purpose. The purpose really is again, that bigger. Why, why am I doing this? Let that in. Let that fuel you, let that inspire you to keep at this. Make sure that every gathering really is a dialogue so people get to know each other. And then again, remember Consistency over complexity. So wash, rinse, repeat, wash, rinse, repeat, wash, rinse, repeat, host a q and a every week.

Maybe you only have five people there. Sometimes maybe you’ll have 30 people next time. Maybe you’ll have 50 people at the time after that doesn’t matter. Just keep doing it. Keep attracting people to you. Keep being valuable because also remember by the way, you don’t need a hundred new clients. So you don’t have your, your universe, your community, your audience doesn’t have to be 20,000 people for it to be valuable to your agency. Two, three big wins a year and you’re set. So be realistic about the size of audience or the size of community you need to, A, give them value and B, to get value back for for the shop. So the last thing I want you to sort of think about is kind of what are the rules of engagement?

So who can be a member? Are there some qualifications? Remember the peak where they said, look, nobody can come in and sell. You gotta prove on LinkedIn that you are who you are. If everybody can be a member, then it’s not a community because there’s no shared connection. Again, what’s the core purpose? Why are we doing this? So that bigger why for you and how are you gonna communicate it to everyone? And then how are you gonna enforce it? So everybody else sort of honors that bigger purpose, right? I mean people join communities to learn to advocate for or change something. They have a passion around to grow in some way personally, professionally, to grow their organization.

Some people join a community to share a passion or a hobby or an experience. Some people join a community in support of someone they believe in. A lot of political causes are around that. I believe in that candidate, therefore I’m gonna join, you know, their political affiliation or I’m gonna join their fundraising effort. But honestly, for us as agency folks, people are gonna join your audience or your community ’cause they wanna learn and because they want to grow both probably professionally and their organization, they probably have a passion around the work that we all do. So really you’re checking a lot of boxes for them. But you need to think about how do you communicate that so that they can make the conscious choice to join you.

And so by now you’re saying this all sounds great, but oh my god, Drew, this sounds like a lot of work. How am I gonna make money? I sooner or later I I get it that I’m not supposed to monetize it. I get it that I am supposed to do it for a greater good purpose, but I also have to do it to make money. Absolutely, no doubt about it. I know you need to feed the kids. So here’s what happens when you create this audience or this community and you’re teaching them and you’re giving them all your trade secrets, you’re showing them how to do the things. That doesn’t mean they’re not gonna buy from you. So they’re gonna buy from you for a, a plethora of reasons. Number one, I saw how you did it.

Either I don’t understand it or I don’t have time or I don’t want to do it so I want to pay you to do it for me. Please. Happens all the time for agencies, yes, you taught me how to build a strategy, but I want an outside perspective so I just want you to do it for me. Or they might say, you know what? I want more. I want all of it at once. You’re teaching me all this stuff. You know, we see this with the Money Matters workshop. You know, we’re constantly teaching all of you all these financial metrics, but we do it in little bite sized pieces because money matters is a two day workshop. I can’t on a podcast or in a video, I can’t teach it all at once. So we, we give it to you in little bites and pieces. But a lot of people come to the workshop because they want more or they want all of it at once.

So again, when you think about your content, it’s okay to give it all away ’cause you’re giving it in these little snack size pieces. And a lot of your clients or prospects are gonna wanna become clients ’cause they want it more. They want more of it. Or maybe they want it faster. Like yeah, I could just keep listening to your podcast and get it. Or I could keep going to the Slack channel and interacting with the community, but I want it now. I need it now. So I’m gonna hire you to give it to me now. Or you know what, everything you teach is really useful, but it’s generic to our industry. I want it custom for me. I know I have to pay you for that, but I want it custom for me. Or I want access. I want more of your time. I want more of your attention.

I want to pay for that. It might be that they want a more intimate community within the community. So you may charge a fee to put together like a CMO Roundtable. We have one agency that does a lot of work in the trucking industry and they’ve brought together CMOs from variety of different trucking companies to learn from each other and they charge a fee for that. If your community has gotten robust enough that a lot of the teaching is happening amongst the community leaders and they want you, the subject matter expert, the authority, they will pay for that. And if you build a community that is robust, other people will want access to that community.

IEA sponsor for the summit. So there are a lot of ways that you can build an audience or a community and make money if you do it for the right reasons. And if it’s the byproduct, not the main product, like I said at the very beginning of this podcast, alright, so you can’t bait and switch, that’s the fine line. You need to give them meaty nourishment, not just tidbits, but you’re not obligated to give it all away for free. Some of it is so custom. So for example, I can show you in a podcast or in a blog post or in a video, I’m, I’m channeling you. Now I can show you why you need a marketing strategy as a home builder, right?

As in the home building industry, I can even show you how to develop the strategy. But what that strategy is, is gonna be very custom to each home builder. And so you probably want a subject matter expert like us to build that for you, right? So you can show them how, and even teach them why, but to actually do it for them that you’re not gonna do in a free forum or a podcast or something like that. A ’cause you can’t, you don’t have all the information, but B, ’cause that’s what you get paid to do. So again, no bait and switch, but you, you do wanna give them good content, but you don’t have to give it all away. And one of the keys to meaningful, valuable content creation without giving away the farm, is what I would call microdosing.

So again, it’s giving them little tidbits of it because what you do is complicated and it’s big and you can’t teach them all of it at once, which is good news for you because that means they need to pay for it. So you also, again, need to have a growth plan. So let’s say you’re gonna start with a Slack channel. Great, what are you gonna do after the Slack channel takes hold? So talking to the members or talking to the audience about what else they want. So you know what the next steps are is prudent on your part for sure. And you also need to protect the audience or the community. And this is my last point, and then I will let you go. ’cause I know this is a unusually long solo cast, but every once in a while, mama or Papa Bear needs to make an appearance.

You know, if someone is threatening the privacy of your members, they need to feel safe. They need to feel safe talking about whatever challenges they’re having. They need to know the community is is a safe and sacred place to maintain trust and confidence. You know, anytime you bring a lot of people together, sometimes people get cliquey or rumors fly or people get gossipy or whatever. And you can create an environment where no one knows what to believe. So you need to be the one that just shuts that down. It’s also human nature to have some toxicity or clicks or bullies or popularity contests or jealousies, whatever, whatever that is.

Again, you need to have very firm, sort of community member rules and hold people to those. If people are sharing things, if they are teaching, if they’re showing up to teach, you need to make it very clear that IP theft is not cool. Imitation is not flattery, it’s theft. And that people need to be really respectful of each other’s ip. And if somebody shares like a a template or a tool, they get to decide how that’s used. They can say, you know, I’m gonna share this with you, but please don’t share it outside your organization or whatever that may be. One of the big ones is nobody wants to be sold to. They don’t want, they don’t want you to sell to them, and they certainly don’t want other community people to sell to them.

So, you know, shutting that down when it happens is really important for you as a leader. Depending on who your audience is, you might have legal or compliance issues. Let’s say you’re a healthcare agency, you’re gonna have all kinds of HIPAA things you have to worry about. So you, again, writing a herd over the audience or the community gonna be super important. You wanna eventually have more than one way for these people to connect. So starting out with one channel is absolutely the right thing to do, but eventually you’re gonna wanna diversify that to give them more variety. Or for people who are more, you know, audio learners versus readers or people who love to meet in person versus people who love to meet online.

If you really build a robust community, you’re gonna wanna have options for them. And you have to be really careful that you don’t pumble them with so much stuff that they get fatigued by hearing from you too often or hearing from the community members too often. So finding that balance of being kind of consistently present, but not to the point where they’d sort of groan every time they see you in their inbox or they see, you know, 30 more slack messages or again, whatever it is. That’s it. All right. So I’m hoping that this was intriguing. I’m hoping that as you’re thinking about sales, for many of you, sales are getting stronger and better in 24 than they were in 23.

So you’re thinking about how to embrace the sale at your agency. How are you gonna do that? The idea of being a subject matter expert of, and again, remember, if you want a copy of Cell of Authority, all you have to do is email us and we’ll mail it to you. If you’re outside of the us, we’ll send you a PDF. If you’re inside the US or inside North America, we’ll mail you an actual copy of the book. We’re not asking you to pay for the postage, we’re not asking you to do anything. But if you’ve decided that that’s really a great way to sell, then part of that is about building an audience or going one step further and building a community. So I’m, I’m hoping this was worthy of your time.

I’m hoping this is thought provoking enough that you’ll take it back to your leadership team or your owner if you are one of the leaders and say, you know what, we should think about this. Let’s get intentional about building at the very least an audience. And do we wanna step even deeper in and build a community? And what could that mean for us and our agency in terms of our sales? So, that’s it. That’s what, that’s what I have for you This week. Hopefully this was helpful. Thanks for staying with me. If you’re still with me, I know this was a long one, but it’s complicated and it’s important, and I didn’t wanna, I didn’t wanna cut corners just to stay in a timeframe, so maybe you had to listen to it in bite sized pieces. So however you consumed it, I hope it was useful. So, before I let you go, two things.

Number one, I am super grateful for you. Thanks for, thanks for hanging out with me every week. Thanks for tolerating a long solo cast like this because, you know, my intention is a good one, that I really am trying to teach you something and give you something meaty and useful. But I’m grateful for you. I, I know how busy you are, and I, I love that we get to spend time together every week. So thank you for that. And of course, a big shout out to our friends at White Label IQ. They are the presenting sponsor of the podcast, so they do white Label, dev design, and PPC because they’re born up from an agency. They understand how to price their services so their agency clients still make money. So you can learn more about them at White Label IQ dot com slash mi.

And you know what? I’m gonna be back next week. I promise it’ll be a shorter episode. I’ll have a guest, but this was fun for me. I hope it was useful for you. I’d love to hear from you on what you thought and what you’re gonna do with it. Okay, I’ll see you next week. Thanks for listening.

Come back next week for another episode. Designed to help you build a stronger, more stable and sustainable agency. Check out our workshops, coaching and consulting packages, and other professional development opportunities at agency management Institute dot com.