Super Powered Community, with Jillian Benbow

Welcome to amplify the personal brand entrepreneur show. Today on the show, Bob is speaking with Gillian Benbo. Have your members in a Facebook group be getting emails from you. It doesn't need to be all the time. It doesn't need to be weekly, digest even. But make sure they know how to contact you should they get kicked out of Facebook, or even if you do, or your group gets, you know, frozen or taken away. Because ultimately, Facebook does not care about groups. They care about advertising dollars. And so they make decisions sometimes. And I've seen it happen. This isn't just Fodder, like it literally happens. They'll make a decision and it will impact your business on such a significant level. Hi there, and welcome back to The Personal Brand, the Business Show. My name is Paul Gentle, and every week I speak with incredible people who share their secrets to building, marketing and monetizing their expertise. Intentionally growing a unique personal brand and the mindset you need for your business to grow and thrive. If you're new to the show, then while you still have your device in your hand, take a second to subscribe. That way you won't miss a single episode. And if you're a regular listener, then consider sharing the show with just one person or two. So so okay, because it's the very best way you can help the show grow and help me to reach more people. And if you're watching on YouTube hi, this is new on YouTube. Thank you so much for watching on YouTube. I really appreciate that. While you're here, don't forget to give it a subscribe and also consider liking this episode. And if you have any questions as you listen, tap them into the comments section below. And I will be waiting to have a conversation with you. So if brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room, then community becomes very important. Establishing yourself as a thought leader is one thing, but becoming a true leader of people is quite another. And this week, my guest is Gillian Bamboo, director of Community Experience, SPI Media, host of the Community Experience podcast, one of the leading gathering places for online business owners anywhere in the world. Gillian, I am thrilled to have you joining me today. Thank you so much, Bob. I am so honoured to be on the show. Thanks for inviting me. Well, honestly, a lot of the time I say no, I'm honoured. But honestly, SPI Media for me is a legendary organisation. I'm thrilled to have a chance to ring you for information, if I'm honest. No problem. Rather than me explaining what SBI Media is to people and making a mess of it. And I will share my own experiences today, of which I have many. And generally there are positive. But it's important to establish things correctly, and for one person at least, to explain things properly is just good manners. Gillian, could you explain for the listener all about SPI Media, your role in it, and what we're going to be speaking about today. Yeah, happy to. So SPI Media, if you haven't heard of it, SPI is an acronym for Smart Passive Income. And if that sounds familiar, or if you know who Pat Flynn is, then that is who I work for. And Pat Flynn is the founder of the company. He started it as well. It's a whole story, but basically he was an architect, he got laid off and he created a course to help existing architects pass this hard test. I'm not an architect, so I don't really know all the specifics. And through that, through creating what essentially became an online course, he has built an empire of courses and content and support for people trying to create their own passion project or business, et cetera. So fast forward over a decade, I think, and you have SPI Media. And so we are a small but mighty team, and we offer all sorts of online courses. We have podcasts and we have several communities that help entrepreneurs connect with each other in a safe, non spammy way. And also recently, which we'll talk about, we recently just this week launched our All Access Pass, which is a new way of doing online courses connected to community, so that you have that accountability to actually go through programming. So that's the best way I can explain it. We do a lot. We help. Basically, if you are in the digital realm and you want peer support or you want to level up some skill sets, we're here to help. I think for a lot of people, pat Flynn is essentially one of these mythical creatures online. It's probably very different when you're there speaking to him every day, the polish probably rubs off, but for a lot of people, Pat Flynn is a hero. And he does seem to attract some wonderful people around him. So I am really excited to spend some time unpicking some of the recipe to that success today. For me, SBI Pro is something that I joined back in the summer because I was very aware that, you know, this whole thing of I hate this cliche or it's not a cliche, I hate this saying. But also I hate that it's true that your income rises to the level of the five people you spend most time with. And a lot of people leave that to chance. But with joining a community like SBI Pro, obviously it's more than five people. I think there's something like 500 members. You probably have the numbers, but there are a lot of people who are working at a very high level in there. And there are also some people at the beginning of the journey. It's a very interesting mix and it's also very supportive. So for me, it's been a great experience joining that and spending time learning and supporting at the same time. But what's interesting is I have my own modest community and I know it's very hard, it sounds very easy lock up a Facebook group people will join, it'll be great fun. But it's really difficult to cultivate and maintain an active and engaged community. Nobody wants to go to a boring party, but a lot of people seem quite happy hosting boring parties. This is such a great analogy. So really what I want to spend a bit of time on, first of all, is how can you be intentional about community? In a small way, maybe a better question is how do you go about planning a week in SPI Pro? What goes into making that community worth being part of? Yeah, well, first let me just tell your audience what SPI Pro is because I think that will help with the context because I fail to do so with the first question. So SPI Pro is a paid membership community and we have an application process because we really want people and to your point, there's sort of a spread of sort of beginner more at the beginning stages of business to much more. I mean, we have some insanely successful people in there that is just like an honour that they're there. But we do have an application, we do kindly say no to people that aren't ready for it because we don't want it to be too beginner. And we have about off the top of my head, I think we're around 700 members total in there and and we've been, I should say too, like we plan to cap it at 1000, so we're not rushing to get 1000 people just for the sake of it. But if we get to a thousand, we suspect like that's, that's plenty. It will lose its magic if we if we let it scale beyond that. And so doing the actual we have people in the room, obviously people are at the party. So choosing how to do programming, I think it actually gets harder the bigger you get because it just gets noisier. And then there's a more diverse group of people, which is lovely, but at the same time creates a whole new set of challenges and I actually think it's easier when it's smaller. So I say that because I just want to point out that community is ever changing. Community is constant. You never get to a point where you're like and it's done, I can walk away and the community is great happily ever after. Community is not passive, you don't have to be in there every moment of every day, but it definitely takes a lot of dedication and I think that's not something people talk about right now with community being very popular as a thing to add to your business. A lot of people, I think, even feel, I dare say pressured because it's like the new thing and I would just tell anybody listening like this is your sign, this is your permission. If it doesn't feel right to you, it's okay. And if anything, maybe find a community to join versus launch one if you're not sure, because that will really help you decide if you want to do it. So to get to your actual question, how we go about planning the programming and the events in Pro is we think of everything as an events calendar, and then we plan that a month ahead of time. So right now we'd be looking at January. We're probably still filling in a couple of things in December because we allow members to host events. So one thing as we've grown we've found is, sure, we can host events as a staff, but our members all have really great experience and we don't know everything. And that's not our job to know everything. Like you don't join or hopefully you don't join SBI Pro thinking, I'll come in here and the SPI team will coach me to a gazillion dollars because they know all things we don't. We're people, we have our strength. But same with all our members. Our members have amazing expertise. So we opened up hosting events to our members and that was one of the best things we've ever done. And if you go look at our events calendar, which if Bob can go do this and confirm, but you'll see the events that my team hosts, like our company hosts, and then you'll see the events that members have created, and usually the member events have more RSVPs because you're talking to your people. So Bob, if you did an event about something you have expertise in, like for agency client acquisition or something, people are going to be like, oh, that's what Bob does. This is great, I got to go to this. It's an expert event, you know, so actual live events is a part of it, as, you know, being in Glasgow and us, the company anyways, being based in the States, all our employees are in the States. We have a global community, so we don't just do live events. And that's something to consider when you have a community. Like, what is the demographics of the people joining? Are they localised to your time zone? Do they have day jobs? Things like that? So we want to make sure we have programming that is time zone irrelevant, I guess, for lack of a better term. So that's what we call asynchronous programming. So that is things we post in our community, which is kind of forumish, I guess you could say. It's kind of like modern forum style. And so those are things that you can hop on anytime, interact with or comment or read, et cetera. It doesn't matter if it's 03:00 A.m. For me and twelve in the afternoon for you. So things like that are we do a challenge of the month. It's optional to participate. We had it on hiatus for a while and just restructured how we do it based on feedback. And so we're about to actually this afternoon, one of my tasks is to post the December challenge of the month. Get ready. And so we're kind of doing things based on who are our members, what do they want, what do they find valuable? And you'll see, sometimes we try things and then they go away because we determine actually this wasn't the right fit, let's figure something out. And then for Pro, because it is a peer to peer support network, it's networking, it's skill set building through peer relationships. I would say the signature programming that we focus on because it makes sense for this community is Masterminds. So we spend a lot of time, they're all member led masterminds right now. So what we do is help, really just try to facilitate the creation of groups that fit together and then just making sure the people leaving those have the support they need. And then it's kind of up to the members to run them. And so that takes a lot of work. It's a lot because you don't always match the right people together. Time zones again get in the way, commitment levels can get in the way, platforms, technology, all those fun things. So I'd say we spend the bulk of our time trying to make those work and just reiterating how we create them, how we put people together. All of that is a big part of Dave at our community manager's time. So what you described there is, from a hosting perspective, quite generous. There's a lot of value there. You're providing an awful lot of space for your members to shine, but also space for your members to derive value through things like masterminds and personal connections. One of the things I always intrigued by is it doesn't seem to matter where you go, what kind of community it is. You have a very visible minority and then you have a very quiet minority. What do you do to try and stimulate this quiet minority? Because a lot of the time it isn't that they don't have opinions that they are not consuming, but they haven't broken the ice, so to speak. That for me is always a bit of a big challenge, especially in things like for most people, when they think of online communities, they're immediately thinking Facebook groups. So you've got the algorithm that you're fighting against there. But even when you have people in a very bespoke environment like you have, where you have direct lines of communication, you don't have an algorithm to fight with in the same way, you still have the same challenges. So how do you approach that in particular? That is such a good question. And I'd say so, I am very vocally anti Facebook. I will say as a caveat, creating a group on Facebook is a great way to test and see if it's viable. Like kind of an MVP, it's also a great way to create a funnel, a sales funnel, into real community or into whatever it is you're doing. I do not like Facebook. I would never use it. I understand other people use it for reasons, but if you are using it, please make sure you're collecting your member data, like their emails, and be using that now. So have your members in a Facebook group be getting emails from you. It doesn't need to be all the time. It doesn't need to be weekly, digest even. But make sure they know how to contact you should they get kicked out of Facebook, or even if you do, or your group gets frozen or taken away. Because ultimately, Facebook does not care about groups, they care about advertising dollars. And so they make decisions sometimes. And I've seen it happen. This isn't just Fodder, it literally happens. They'll make a decision and it will impact your business on such a significant level. So just make sure your members know they have your contact information and vice versa, because it's the game you play on Facebook and I can see them someday, maybe having like a paid programme that gives you a little more access. But I just feel I have to tell people that because people don't think about it. And I've seen people lose their entire groups overnight over something silly. And Facebook's mods hold the key, so please make sure. This is how I imagine it goes. People get to the point where they've maybe got three, four or 500 people in a Facebook group and they know it's not working, but then they have the option to move them across to something like Circle or a custom forum. And it's a little bit like you say, okay, everybody, I've got this platform ready now. Everybody come across here and nobody pays any attention, nobody comes. There's a lot of fear there. It's hard. So, yeah, that's a whole conversation. If you want to move a community, and I would say so, the challenge you have when you're on Facebook, you're fighting the algorithm, you're fighting whatever Mark Zuckerberg is thinking that day. When you have a community on a platform like Circle, like you have a community that people go to a specific place to get to your community and log in, they have to make that decision to do it. That's another set of challenges, because the thing that worked so well for Facebook for so long was everybody was on it. So it's convenient you could get people, they're going on to post a picture of their baby's, second month of life or whatever, right? And then they'll see notifications for this group they're in, and then they'll go interact that maybe they weren't even thinking of it. So it was kind of like easy as far as getting people to come in. I think with more and more people leaving Facebook, the OG Facebook group owners are seeing that it's getting harder. And the same thing with having your community on another platform. So for you to come to SBI Pro, you need to have the motivation and thought process to be like, okay, I'm going to go log into Pro, I'm going to make this choice and interact there. And that itself is a hurdle, right? So it happens on I would say it's different, but the same set of challenges kind of applies to any platform. And so that all comes down to again having a reason why will someone take the time to come log into your platform and whether it's engage there? However they do, it can be done, though, if you're in that. Situation. If you have, like, a Facebook group and you want to move it, I would say give yourself a few months, expect to lose a lot of people, but it's okay, because the people you're losing probably weren't ideal anyways, or they weren't active enough to beg to come over. I would incentivize it. I would make it fun, make it exciting, really have things ready to go. Tell people, tell people in advance this is happening. What questions do you have? What concerns do you have? Talk to people through those things. Have them get excited about how the new platform will be a better experience, no bots, no harassment, all that kind of stuff. You don't have to worry. And we could do a whole episode, honestly on just how you do that. And we have done it, we did it with all of at the time, Pat's had a few courses that had Facebook Groups as, quote unquote, community. And part of me joining SPI was like, I'm not doing anything on Facebook other than moving things off of it. I will not manage Facebook groups. And and Matt, fortunately, was on the same page as me. So that's how the academy or other community was formed, was moving the Facebook course groups off and onto Circle, and not everybody came and that was totally fine. And, you know, those groups are now closed, but if someone happens to, they're like, oh, I have a podcasting question. I'm going to go out in this group I was in. They'll see how to get to the academy, and if they want to come over, they can. But anyways, to your original question, can you tell I just go off on all sorts of things, just talking about as far, hey, good, this must be why I love podcasting, because it's just like, yes, I will talk about community. So talking about different members, there are different kind of community member avatars, if you will. There's the social butterflies, like you were saying, it's kind of the loud. The people who have lots of opinions, they feel very comfortable in whatever, I'm. Going to talk about that in a minute. Okay. And then like, to your point, there's there's also like the quieter people that they're there. And as the person managing the community. You don't always know. I have some basic metrics to see. Like yeah, they've logged in and they were here however many days ago. Right? Like Circle will tell me that, but if there's no activity, I don't know what they're doing. And I would say the best way and depending on which platform you use and if you use we use a system called Burb and it just gives us deeper insights into member behaviour. It allows us to put people into groups. Do I don't know if you were here when I'd set up a new member automated message and it went to everyone and the nice thing about that was people writing back to say, I've been here since the beginning. And then I'm like, I know, sorry, it was a mistake, but how are you? And then had all these wonderful conversations that wasn't all terrible, but it really is just you have to spend time reaching out to people and just checking in and it can get very overwhelming with a very big group like Pro. Honestly, I wish I did it a little more. I just get caught up in the other things. But it's amazing how many times you'll reach out to someone and be like, hey, I notice you aren't active. Are you okay? What are you looking for? And they reply and they're like, oh, great, yeah, love it, love Pro. All right, because that's just how they interact. But I wouldn't know that unless I asked. And other times you ask and then that is the floodgates where they're like, well actually, but that's great too, because they've been holding on to that and I want to know, so tell me, you can't hurt my feelings. So even just like creating that opportunity for people to unload if they need to. So let's talk about the other avatar, the person who is visibility at all costs. Is this a complaint about Pro? Well, no, not at all. There's actually very few of these people, but you see them everywhere you go. The person who's paid his money, he wants to get the value out of it. He might even become a Belligerent salesperson. I have not observed anybody directly doing this, but they must exist. They absolutely do. I would say in Pro, I think we've done a really good job of creating a process of education so people understand what it is and what it is not during their application process and then it is reinforced during onboarding. So we are very clear like this is not a place you can sell. We do have a space in our community, the showcase and win space. And that is the place. If you have something that you think would be a good fit for Pro members, whatever, you can post it there and we'll leave it. And so when you join, you're essentially agreeing like, I will not solicit, I will not do sales here. We have had very few, but we have had a few times where people tried to get around that and usually it's by DMI, so sending private messages to members directly with, like, a pitch. And fortunately, because we have in place those expectations from the beginning, I would say our members understand what Pro is and is not. And part of why people join is that they don't want to be pitched and so they come and let me know. I get screenshots. I'll have five people saying, like, this person is doing this, and so then I can jump in and go to that person and remind them of the community guidelines. Usually we give people a, hey, you probably didn't realise this, but these are the policies, let me know if you have questions. And then usually you do that and it's over. They either leave because they're like, oh, I thought I'd just get sales here, or they're like, oh, I didn't realise that was considered soliciting. So then we have a conversation about it and our guidelines, we've changed as we have those conversations with people to make sure they're very clear. So guidelines are a living document. Update them as things come up, just to make sure people understand what you're trying to say. But, yeah, for the most part, I think we've had one situation where it got a little like someone was pretty miffed about what this other person was doing and talked to that person and I think they were kind of offended that they got called out and they stayed in the membership for a while. I think they ultimately left because that was their motivation. And so that's our intention. We don't want that. And if that's why you joined, I will give you a refund, go away, because that's just not what it's for and you won't get value joining and trying to do that. And I want to say, too, in our application process, which also we update all the time, I think we've done a pretty good job of being able to catch people. There's been a few people that join where it's like some of their answers and like, oh, they work for a huge company, why do they want to join Pro? And then you look and it's like, oh, their job is to get affiliates, so, no, thank you, so we just don't even let them in. Yeah, I'd imagine anybody that's spending a few minutes even looking at affiliates is going to be drawn to SBI. Pat is the original Mr Affiliate Marketing, so that's quite obviously going to be a problem. So you must be plugged in to lots of other people who do rules similar to yours in other places. And I'm curious to know what's normal in terms of what I'm going to call lurkers versus active members, because I think it's very easy to look at your own community, it doesn't really matter who you are, and think, I'm failing because everybody isn't engaged. So what does success actually look like? That's such a good question. So I'm trying to call Lurkers Observers, because Lurker sounds like you're in the Corner, like, breathing heavily. My Language is from the 1990s. I'm sorry. Oh, no, I have to correct myself. I think I said it earlier. It's in my head. I'm like, I want to like, I think observers sound better because I don't. Because there are a lot of really lovely People who Are, quote, unquote Lurkers. Right. And it just sounds like some sort of creepy. That's creepy. Sorry. Yeah, exactly. It's like hiding in the bushes watching. So this is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, actually. So this is a great question, I will say so I've worked in Community for well over a decade. This is what I do. There will always be the different Member Avatars, and You Have your sort of generalised Ones, right? Like the social butterflies. I know everything. The Lurker Observer, the Person was just perpetually lost and confused. There's many a type of community member. It is perfectly normal to have a good chunk of Those Observers. And I think you have to think about a few Things, which is the type of Community you have. Whether Facebook Group, I would say, is kind of like forum me. Same with circle. It's very forumy. Although they do have, like, a chat thing. We tried it and we're like, no, and turned it off. But Discord is like a whole different animal with how people can engage audio rooms and things. And so it's not always like, the typing in a place. Some things move fast, some Things move slow. So that plays into it because you're matching people's comfort level both with technology, but Also just not everybody wants to go and read It and just start arguing about, is the dress blue or Gold? Some people like to just read things, maybe like Things the liker, but they don't feel obligated to add their two cent or they don't feel obligated to start a conversation. And it very much reminds me of if you're at, Say, like a cocktail party or some sort of event where you're put in a room with a bunch of different people. Different people enjoy engaging with each Other in different ways. There's People who just kind of listen and laugh and follow the conversation but Aren't adding to It, but they're having fun. Right. And Then there's the People who will not stop talking, and you're like, okay, there's everybody. And so you have to think about Community that Way. And I think it's really important To I wouldn't focus so much on if they're an observer or Lurker or not. I would focus on is the type of Engagement you're trying to either provide or Create? Is it hitting with people? Are they interested? Because I think a lot of Times we think, oh, I'll just do the same thing. I saw in this other community. But the reality is your members aren't there for the same reason as whatever you're trying to emulate. And so it just isn't really hitting with them. And so that can often be the reason why no one's engaging. Right. And the best way to kind of determine if that's what's happening is to talk to your community members and say, like, hey, I've been posting these things, no one's really responding. I'm curious what your perspective is. And someone might be like, oh, well, I didn't realise you wanted me to do something. Even if you literally say it in the thing, right, where you're like, do this thing. And people like, oh, I didn't realise. Because sometimes people just aren't really sure. And I'm very comfortable going into I do not argue on reddit about if the dress is blue or green, but just working in community, part of my Achilles heel is I forget that not everybody wants to do that. And so really, just talking to people about like, well, what is it you want? Can give you ideas. And really the idea of community collaboration is so huge. Like, instead of sitting there trying to think like, okay, what can I do? What should I be doing? I need to create whole new programming. Instead, talk to your community. What do you want? What should we do together? What's your goal? Why are you here? And together collaborate on what it is this community should be. It's like a town council. Like you're all together trying to build something. It's a lot easier to go that way. Yeah, that's something that's really stood out for me in SPI Pro is most people, they've grown an online community from a very small beginning. And at that point it made sense for them to be very involved. And it grew and it grew and it grew. And as it grew, they've probably added more and more things that they've committed to providing in this community. And they get to the point where it's no longer appropriate for them to be active in that community in the way that it was at the beginning, but they can't escape. So there's that happening on the one hand. On the other hand is this habit of always having to be the leader. And one of the things I like about SBI Pro is community leadership seems to be celebrated amongst the membership. Not necessarily in an overt way, but it is facilitated. If somebody wants to come in, provide value, it isn't seen as competition, it's seen as value. And alongside that, Pat Flynn himself is a very light touch participant. And you would think that people would question that. They would say, well, where's path? I joined SBI, but not for a moment have I felt that as a big gap that can't happen by accident. So I guess what advice would you have for anybody who's maybe facing some of those challenges? And how to approach them. That's very astute because that's the route a lot of people take and then they get caught in this like oh my gosh, this community takes all my time. And you can't scale it because you're already overloaded. So it's a great thing to think about as you're growing a community. And I do want to just touch on this idea. If people are joining because of you and more so because of you and less so because of a greater collective cause, you do have to be careful about setting expectations in the beginning. And it can be very difficult when you're first starting a community, regardless of what type it is to want to just promise the world, right, and say, oh, we're going to do this and we're going to do that. And you really have to cool it. Start small and you can add things as they come up and as they make sense. Don't over commit. Don't promise that you'll do one on ones with everybody once a month because that can work with five people. But even like 15 people now, you're doing them like every other day. So I would say cool the jets. You don't have to promise and over deliver everything, just what you do promise, do really well and think about how does this scale. Always think about that. Because if you set especially early members up, your founding members up, if you set them up with an expectation, there's such a loyalty there, if you take it away, it does not go well. So I would say always design your roadmap to build on itself and not start really heavy, start small. Because there are things too that you might say, oh, we'll do this and then nobody wants it. And that now you're stuck. Actually, we had someone in Pro talking about this where they committed when people bought a course they committed to weekly, I think office hours. And no one was showing up, nobody cared. And so they still had that on there and a very busy schedule. So they're like, do we need to keep doing this? But we said we would. And so that's a situation you can prevent. And I would recommend ask your community like, hey, we do this thing, no one's coming. Do you want this or should we end it? Because people might be like, yeah, I don't care. And then you can be like oh, saved, saved by the bell. So I think it's important when you're creating a community, when you're thinking about doing this, to really think about the motivation. Because if it's a very much what I call audience project, which is that one to many sort of thing. So if Pro was set up, so you joined because you liked Pat Flynn and the expectation was you got more access to Pat Flynn, and Pat would post in there and post things in there that he only posts in there. And it was kind of this exclusivity that's not really community, that's just a different way of delivering audience content. Community is very much the intention is people join for a reason. That isn't just access to some person, and it's to work together, to collaborate. That literally is what community is. It's like a neighbourhood, right? Well, maybe some people do, but I wouldn't move into a neighbourhood because this one celebrity lives there and I'm hoping to become friends with them. I move into a neighbourhood because people seem cool. The houses align with what I'm into, everybody's into trail running. Awesome. This is going to be so much fun. And if there happens to be a celebrity on the block that's also into, that cool. I would think about it that way with Pro. Yeah, it is not competition. I mean, we have community builders in there that have amazing communities and we might lose members. People might be like, I'm going to cancel Pro and I'm going to go into this person's community because it's better for me. Excellent. Like, good, you should I want people to get what they want. And we do still have people who join thinking, oh, I'll become best friends with Pet Flynn, and they usually leave after their membership is over because we try to make it very clear that's not what it is, but people will still try. And part of that is just like, you can do your best to manage expectations, like I was talking about before, with even just like the applications onboarding, what not of what this is and what this isn't. But sometimes people just need to see it for themselves because they don't believe you or they have something in their head that's overriding common sense. And we all do it because you want to believe that something will happen and it's kind of part of the game, but at the end of the day, those people will try it and be like, Nah, but ultimately it's okay because we have a core group of people that are amazing and that's not going to stop. So what we haven't spoken about yet is courses. And SBI is known for SBI Pro, the community, but also you have an incredible library of courses. I mean, Power Up podcasting is legendary for anybody wanting to start a podcast, and there are many other courses of all kinds of things. And one of the problems that I always have with course creators is they create courses knowing the statistics are that nobody's going to complete these courses. It's very frustrating and it's a bit disingenuous. Alongside that, I think an issue that I have with courses is people don't tend to learn very well in a purely course driven style. There's a reason education is delivered in classrooms a lot of the time is because people learn best together. It's not just about the content, it's about the conversations, it's about the discussion. You at SPI have done something amazing with the way that you deliver courses recently, which I'm not going to attempt to articulate, but I do want you to share. So what are you changing about the way SPI makes courses available now? This is just like the perfect what's it called? Like a softball or a lowball? I don't do segue well. I feel like you're throwing the baseball at me in such a way that I can just knock it out of the park. That's the intention, yeah. Sorry. You're spoiling the magic here, Jillian. Well, I got to feel right. I'll pay you that fee. I told you I'd pay you after the show. Yeah, well, so something I've been working on the whole year and I'm so excited about and frankly just so proud of and just how our team all came together to get this going. It's just been really amazing. It's been a lot. I'm excited for it to now be launched. And I think I mentioned this earlier, but just this week we launched a totally new kind of community. It is a community powered course. Community? And this is kind of like the new honestly, it's like marketing jargon, but you may start hearing it more if you're familiar with cohort based courses or CPCs. This is community powered courses. CPCs. Let's add more acronyms to the mix. You can have too many acronyms. Never. I live the MRR of the CPC. So what this is it's not a new concept and I think a lot of even the platforms where you can host courses are realising that Community is a valuable part. The teachables, the podium, the thinkific, they are kind of scrambling to add community features to their platforms. So what we've done is we have about a dozen courses in our course catalogue currently and we have put them so we use Circle as a platform for community, and then Circle launched an LMS component to that. And we knew that was coming, so we decided to take all our courses that we normally have on Teachable and they're still there. But we added all our courses to our academy, which is this. So we have SBI Pro, which is one community over here, completely separate, not a tier, but like a completely separate community is our academy. In the academy is where our course communities that I talked about, but we moved off of Facebook. That's how the academy started was if you were a course student of any of our self paced courses, you had access to a couple of spaces in this academy, our Office Hour Replays and then the relevant space for your course. So say you took Power Up Podcasting, which you mentioned you would have access to the Power Up Podcasting space and like Office Hours Replays and a few other things. We've since kind of changed it around. So we launched All Access in the same place. It's separate from like All Access gets access to everything in the existing course things. But we added all our course curriculum as well. So all of our courses are there. And then what's I think the coolest part is we created programming that is designed around accountability, support along the way and ultimately mastery of skills. So not even completion, but just mastery. And we have a community manager there, Ashley, who's just amazing. And she actually is a teacher and has a master's degree in curriculum design. And so she was hired very intentionally because I knew someone like that, I wanted to hire someone who had that expertise of curriculum design. Because I think that's what's missing in a lot of these online courses is the actual psychology behind how to get people to learn. And a lot of it is more just kind of like ego based and like, oh, I have a cooler learn from me, and not actually good content. So Ashley is running, she's running the show over there and it's fantastic. So we have all these different programming to help people solve that problem, to your point of you buy all these courses and then you never finish them or they're just not that interesting and it's hard to get through or it's lonely and we're not as humans, we're designed to be around other people. And even though I'm like a Bahambug, like crabbit, sort of like leave me alone, I'm the same way. The accountability piece of doing something with a group, of having that your reputation as part of it. So we're taking a chance on this. And so when you join All Access Pass, you get access to all of our courses. But what I think the real value is, is the access to the programming. And it's all just designed. I could go on and on, but I'll just leave it at it. It's all designed to help people succeed. And again, it's that mastery piece. So yes, we want you to go through our existing curriculum, but we're also providing supplemental resources and help and trying to get people we have this little buddy up space where people can kind of find someone else in a similar place and have an accountability partner. And it's freaking adorable, for lack of a better term. Just the connections people are having. It's just so fun to watch. It's very clearly a needed thing. I think the way you've built it as a community is really, really smart. But I think alongside that, I don't want to underplay the commercial decision as well because SPI courses are not they're premium courses and the price of the All Access Pass is very similar to the price of one course. But you have all the courses now. The thing that's different is you have access to all the courses for one year with the All Access Pass and the community as opposed to paying for the course and having it forever. Right? But the statistics are telling everybody that cares to pay attention. Once somebody's bought the course, they might have it forever, but they're never going to look at it again. No. So the way you're approaching it is commercially courageous, but provides a tremendous amount more value and increases the odds of you getting value back, which is the most important thing. Yeah, it's kind of a long game play, right? So we know, and I love that you're aware of this, too. I think more people need to accept this. I think it's kind of been like the dirty little secret, but it's five to 15%, and I would say it's more 5% to 10%. Like 15 is so generous of people who actually complete an online course. And I think it's more like two to 8% personally. And we experience that too. We have the same thing. And I think a lot of people like Pat, and so they'll just buy anything he puts out and they never look at it. And if that's what you want to do, I mean, that's your money, but I don't want to do that. I want to make sure we're actually helping people. And sometimes you have to help people help themselves. Like, people buy courses with all the best intentions, myself included. I have my own shelf of courses. We all have it, right? And so it was very intentional to take that risk because there are going to be the people that roll in with the intention of just flying through all the content and then go, I don't think they're going to get any value out of that. They'll be like, Ha ha, look what I did, I got a deal. But they're not going to take any of that information that's been put together and do anything special with it. So if they really want to do that, okay, and that's the risk we're willing to take. But that's also why we decided to have no refunds, which is very different from the Pat Flynn of yesteryear. Like, Pat's a very generous person, I would say, to his detriment from a business standpoint, and I understand it and I respect it because he really is that guy. But with this, there's a firm like, there are no refunds. Do not sign up if you're not sure, because it's our entire course catalogue. But, yeah, it's that difference of, like, there's always been this perceived value of lifetime access that's special and also getting just like a tonne of curriculum, right? Like 90 hours of podcasting and people think, oh, well, that's a really good value. It's not. Nobody wants to spend two weeks on videos of someone talking at them. No. Even master class. The fundamentals of most things are actually quite simple. Yeah, you don't need that much time. What you need is the right information. Right? And I think, too, it's like Masterclass, which is amazing, they have their model of kind of more celebrities talking. It's the one to many, it's not engaging, you're just watching someone talk about something. And honestly, I think Masterclass makes sense for what it is. Like, if you want a high level about how Margaret Atwood goes about character development, that's interesting, right? But it's not the same thing as saying, I want to write a fictional tale. It's not the same thing, but it's still inspiring in its own way. And of course they've tried to add community to their stuff, but it's just not the right thing. So getting away from the idea of, oh, I'll create an online course where it's just me talking to a camera, and then you consume it on your own. And then now you have all the information we're really looking at like, okay, we have that, we have these courses, how can we add more checkpoints? How can we add worksheets that are like, all right, we just talked about this, so now this is what you need to do. Here's how you take action. And so I think we are trying to focus more on that action piece, because I can sit here and watch all of Pat's courses, right? If I don't do anything with that information, if I don't set the thing up, if I don't create the content calendar, I'm really just watching TV. I think as well, a lot of the things Pat's courses are about are not just Pat's courses, SBI's courses, they are about doing hard things, they're not about doing easy things. So a lot of the time you're going to have it's not just an information problem, you also have a personal development problem. How am I going to become the person that's comfortable doing these things? And that's where companionship and mentoring and group support and peer support comes in. It's extremely important. You want to start a podcast and you're a slightly insecure person. Information is not going to make that easier. Encouragement support will make that easier. I know from experience, my journey on this road only started when I surrounded myself with fellow travellers. That was extremely important. So you have a podcast yourself. Tell me a little bit about that, because I haven't honestly listened to it. I'm so embarrassed. Well, because I found out about it this morning. Sorry. Which tells me I should probably talk about it more in Pro. But it feels weird to be like, hi. Promoting your own stuff is always weird. It is. I don't like it. I'm not good at it. So, yes, I have a podcast. It's under SPI. So it's an SPI podcast. It's called the Community Experience Podcast. And as you can imagine, it's all things community. So I'm bringing people on with various sometimes it's someone from Pro, even, I think most recently Geraldine and Pro, who is a fashion futurist, which I still am wrapping my head around what that means. It's so fascinating. She was on and we have experts come on in different niches of community or even adjacent things. I recently interviewed Casey Hill. I almost called Hall, Casey Hill from Bonjouro. And we just kind of talked about how a platform like Bonjouro, how you can through for anyone not familiar, it's a platform that you can send a customised or semicomized like quick little video hello to people so you can use it for customer acquisition. We've been trying it out in Pro. When people are approved for Pro, the application is approved. Pat sends them a bunch of just to be like hey Bob, it's how you plug and we'd love you to join. Next step is coming. It's just this little thing and it's just a personal touch in a digital world that makes such a difference. So anyways, Casey came on and we were talking about different just a couple of really funny stories, but also just how people are using that and specifically in community to help with the bigger picture. So I'm talking all sorts of people just about and it's great because I can just be super nosy and ask like well, how do you do this? Well, what about that? That's the best thing about a podcast, drilling people. It is a licence to be nosy. And if anybody wants to see Bonjouro in action, just go and download the personal brand business roadmap and that's exactly what will happen. You will get a Bonjouro welcome from me. It's a great platform, isn't it? It's really good fun. And the thing is, a lot of people assume everything in the online space is automated. There's no intimacy at all and that can be true. But using a tool like Bonjouro, it does give you the opportunity, if you choose to take it, to make somebody's day, to really surprise somebody. And surprise is what drives attention. It's really so few people bother to do that kind of thing, that if you do it, you just immediately stand out. Because so many people are like nah, they don't see the value. But if you are the kind of person that understands personal, like those experienced touch points and how much that creates goodwill, it's so worth it. So I am looking at the clock. I've taken way too much of your time. No, I mean, gosh, we could just keep going. We probably have to do this again sometime. Yeah. And all day. No, just kidding. But if people want to connect with you, they want to discover more about Jillian SPI Pro, how can they do that? Yeah, so the easiest way to learn about just SPI, if you want to see we actually have more community stuff going on than what we even talked about here. So you can go to SmartPassiveIncome. comCOMMUNITY and that will give you an overview of our three main community pillars. Believe it or not, we even have more. But those are the three we talk about. And you can kind of get an idea of how we've structured these three different price points for three different experiences. And so if you were listening about all access, you can also go to SmartPassiveIncome.com AllAccess and just see specifically about that programme. But I think a lot of people lately I've been talking to are just curious how we're doing this. So you can get kind of a highlight and if you want to join, we'd love to have you. But if you don't, just go, lurk, go see what we do. I will put links in the show notes and everywhere. And if you're watching on YouTube in the description below no. That does bring us to the end of another episode. Gillian, thank you so much for your time. It's been a real pleasure to meet you properly as a fully rounded human being, not just a face on SBI. Pro, not just on a zoom call with a bunch of people. Yeah. And to you, the listener, at home or the viewer. Now. It's YouTube. Thank you so much for listening, or watching, whichever it is you're doing. If you are listening to the show, then I would encourage you to leave a five star review wherever you listen to your podcast. It's five. Like the fingers on your hand. Not one or two or three. None of those. Thank you. If you're watching on YouTube, don't forget to subscribe. It would really make my day because I don't have that many subscribers. Gillian, it's like 500. That's pretty good. Well, I know, but it's not 5000. You know, celebrate where you are. You're a good, you know, keep moving up. So if you're watching, listening, share the show with just one person. It wouldn't make my day. And if you did enjoy the show, then you will also love the personal brand business Roadmap. It's everything you need to start, scale or just fix your expert business. It's 100% free as a gift from me. Nearly 50 pages now of everything you're going to need. You will find it at Amplifyme Agency Roadmap. 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