Levelling up your audience to level up your options, with Mike Morrison & Callie Willows

Welcome to Amplify the Personal Brand Entrepreneur Show. Today on the show, Bob is speaking with Mike Kelly. People in lockdown, as we all all know, they were looking for a greater variety of ways to fill their time, whether that's learning a new skill, whether it's pursuing your passions. And so the demand for memberships that provided the platform to do those things, provided training, provided support and community and connection. Turning to the online space for connection, that really just drove up demand for memberships as well. Hi there, and welcome back to Amplify the Personal Brand Entrepreneurship. My name is Bob Gentle, and every week I'm joined by amazing and inspiring people who share what makes their business work. If you're new to the show or if you just opened it on your device, whatever you're using, don't forget to hit the subscribe button while you're there. If you're on an iPhone, that's the plus or the follow icon. That way you won't miss a thing. But before I jump into introducing this week's guest, just a quick reminder that after nearly 200 of these interviews, I learned a thing or two about what makes business work online. And it turns out that success does indeed leave clues. And I want to offer you a map. So if you head over to my website, you can grab your copy of The Personal Brand Business Roadmap. It's everything you need to start scale or just fix your personal brand business. So this week, I heard something from Dan Kennedy, which really popped for me. He talks about businesses which depend on a constant stream of new businesses be more like income events as he describes them, rather than real businesses. An income event business is a hamster wheel lined with barbed wire and floored with crushed glass. It's what makes a lot of people dream about the idea of passive income. But honestly, passive income, as I'm sure today's guests will agree, is lazy thinking. And I like to think more about leveraged and retained revenue. This is a business that scales without necessarily taking more time. And in an ideal world, you can decouple the connection between your ability to generate money from the use of your time. And this week, my guests are Mike Morrison and Kelly Willows from the Membership Geeks. And we're going to deep dive whatever you call it into the life changing power of a membership style business. So, Mike and Carly, welcome to the show. Bob, thanks so much for having us. We're excited to dive into this topic with you. Yeah, it's going to be fun. And thank you very much for giving me a second chance. Mike and Kelly were all nicely queued up for me a few weeks ago, and I had a technical malfunction of biblical proportions. So thank you very much for your generosity and coming back again. It's our pleasure. Hopefully, we're not just bad luck charms. Hopefully we're not going to call some of the meltdowns on your side. Otherwise we might get a bit of a complex. So one of the things I wanted to talk about today was the membership business. It's a model that's growing in popularity for some people as the main event in their business and for others as a portfolio item within a diverse range of revenue streams. And you've been on the show before, and anyone who wants to find out the foundations of my membership business, you can go back and listen to Mike and Kelly's episode if you search on the website Mike and Kelly. Actually, it was just Mike last time, wasn't it? It was allowed back then. Generally, I was the one sent out to just to chat to everyone. But I'm always told that Kelly is actually the smart one. She is. She is the brains of the operation. Anyone who spent any time in our orbit or within our membership community, the facade that I'm the one who knows what they're talking about very quickly slips. So in terms of what you're talking about, why don't we start? For the listener who doesn't know what you do and who's too lazy to go back and listen to the last episode, who are the Membership Geeks? What is your reason for being? Well, we teach influencers and experts how to start and grow a successful membership website. We do that both via lots of free content and resources on our blog and podcast at Membership Geeks.com. And of course, we have our own membership site about membership sites. The Membership Academy as well. Yeah. In terms of kind of why we do it and why we love memberships so much. We originally ran a digital marketing agency for longer than we care to recall. And through that, obviously, we've worked with a lot of different kinds of projects. But our favourite was always membership sites. They were the types of jobs and the types of clients that we just fell in love with, the ones we got the best results from. And they were always the happiest clients as well, weren't they? And we just naturally gravitated towards that. So when the business was developing and we reached a point where we were enjoying a good deal of success, we were able to just Hone in more and more on memberships to a point where they kind of became our whole world. And now we get to eat, sleep and breathe membership websites and help other people like us to create their own successful membership and enjoy the benefits of that. I think what's often very curious about your business is it's very meta. It is a membership supporting people with memberships. But it's also the example that I often use when I'm talking to clients and people in general about how you can do business differently. But most importantly, to try and offer an antidote to the stigma of what a lot of the time you'll hear called the lifestyle business because as a membership site and business in your own right. You're doing extremely well. And to put that in context for the listener, how many members do you actually have? We're around about 3000 members at the moment. And I think in the entire time the Academy has been around, we've had seven and a half thousand. Yeah. So we've been able to work with just such a array of different members. And like I said, we do kind of see it like a lifestyle business. It's very much driven by the life that we want to live as entrepreneurs, as business people, as people who had experience of the other way of doing things, of the grind, of the 18 hours, days and all that sort of stuff. Both of us suffered from doing that. Both of us suffered with our physical health, suffered with mental health, from going down that touted road of just chasing more and more and measuring success on how much money you make as opposed to what it enables in your life. And I think by reprioritizing and by deciding to do things a different way, you still get the trappings. You still have a successful business. We're still more financially successful than we could have imagined. But it is all very much lifestyle first. Yeah. And in terms of that lifestyle, what does life sort of six, seven years ago look like contrasted with what life looks like now? Well, we sleep a lot more now. Yeah. That's probably the biggest measure. We get a lot more sleep, like barely any stress, of course. Everything, I suppose, expands to fill the space afforded it. So you still have the stresses of running a business. There are still decisions that you stress over and wring your hands at, but it's an enjoyable kind of stress. The small amount of stress that we do feel compared to back in the day, where that stress comes from the external, it comes from crazy clients with demanding deadlines. It comes from that 20 hours project that you spec out that suddenly is racking up to 80 hours, 60, which you can't build for because you've already agreed the price and all those kind of things that I'm sure anyone who's ever traded time for money is probably sitting, nodding their head out right now, all those kind of things. That was a whole other level of stress. So, yeah, we sleep a lot more. We enjoy what we do just right across the board, knowing that we're not compromising on who we work with and how we work and how our time is spent and all that sort of stuff, that our time is valued and that we're making a difference. Yeah. And we also have the flexibility and freedom to do what we want as well. So tomorrow morning I'm going to get up and I'm going to play Horizon Forbidden West for the first few hours of my day before I do work, because we do no work Friday. So you've got that flexibility if we want to take a day off, if we want to take an afternoon off, if actually we need to move something around in our schedule, there's absolutely nobody we held accountable to that for us, except for us, and these days our team as well. But you just have that flexibility and freedom to work when you want or where you want. Yeah, we talk about we've got our three F's, freedom, flexibility and fulfilment. They are our guiding lights to what we do. And it kind of informs, you said, about us being meta. And we are. And I love that membership about memberships that happens to include a course about courses. Just adding to that meta, we like to eat our own dog food because too many people in the online business space don't. They do not walk the walk, so we make sure that we do that. And so what we tell people to expect from memberships is very much modelled on our experience. When we talk about why people should start a membership and how it can impact their life, we're talking about the sorts of things we're chatting about here. We're not saying you can become this extremely rich seven figures overnight, all the usual nonsense that's often spouted when other people talk about memberships. We very much teach what we experience as well. And that's been driven by freedom, flexibility and fulfilment. Freedom from stress, the flexibility to set your own terms and work when you want how you want, and the fulfilment that comes from knowing that you're doing your best work. You're flexing all of your muscles, you're using all of the tools in your Arsenal and you're making a difference that you can make good money at the same time while doing those things without having to compromise. Without having to work all hours, without having to conform to somebody else's idea of what your business should look like. And I think that's one of the reasons so many of our members stay for years as well, because the feedback we get so consistently is that they love watching how we do things. We're a living case study for them on running a membership business. And so they get to see how we test things, how we change things, how we do things. And yeah, I think that's one of the amazing things about how we do what we do. Yeah. And don't get us wrong, financially. We're successful. We're more successful than we've ever been, than we thought we would be. Could be. We don't lead with that because that isn't the driving factor. It's almost a byproduct of it. We could make more money if we compromised certain things about what we want to do and how we want to market and how we want to show up in the world. We could definitely make more money if we work twice as hard, if we worked more than we play video games some days, if we didn't take Fridays off, if we didn't take holidays, if we didn't do a variety of things, we could. We absolutely could. But you've got a bigger bank balance, but you've also got a higher blood pressure and you're miserable and you're not doing your best and you're not showing up at your best for people. So what's the point of just having a bigger pile of gold if you do enjoy it? Right? That's absolutely right. I think that what I love about it is you do you there's lots of people that you could have modelled in the online world. You chose not to, and that's why you stand out. It's a pleasure to watch. I think somewhere I would like to go, because you have your finger on the pulse in the way not very many people that I speak to do in terms of both your free community size, but also the paid members that you have. Some of those business owners are big businesses in their own right, many of them. And I'm curious to know what differences you've seen in terms of the Pandemic, both in terms of new people coming into the space, people already in the space, what the Pandemic has meant to their businesses, who have been winners, who have been losers, and what trends have you seen around that? And for those people who have, Sean, during a time that for many has been challenging, what do you think it's been that's made them shine? Well, I would say the impact of the Pandemic on the online membership world, it's kind of been twofold. Right. So first of all, the situation meant that more people very quickly, we have to try to find new ways to earn money or ways to pivot their business and take it online almost overnight. Right. So we have seen a lot of new memberships starting up, and often these are people who maybe had plans to start a membership site in their back pocket and they just never got round to it. But the Pandemic gave them that little bit of a push. Yeah. Like Jim Puny from Amplified Artists, whose industry, performing artists, was absolutely, completely decimated shut down with the Pandemic, but he had already wanted to set up a membership, so he utilised that time at home to actually do that. And that enabled him to not only have income throughout the Pandemic, which he wouldn't otherwise have had, but it also meant his members had much needed support during that really difficult time as well. So it had a huge impact on him, but also on those people he was able to help with the membership. And then you've got people like Lucy Walker from Metalsmith Academy as well, who ran inperson jewellery making classes out in Malaysia and had to pivot her entire offline business into an online membership instead, including her team. And that paid off as she attracted over 3000 members at her launch, and now she's not going back to an offline business. So it's great to see that memberships have been able to support people during a very difficult time. Yeah. And it's really sort of giving that extra urgency. Right. And this isn't kind of saying, oh, hey, isn't the pandemic grid because of what it's forced people to do, what it has pushed people to do. But people have had to be resourceful and memberships have proven to be a good option for a lot of those people. The other side of that, of course, is that a lot of people were locked down for a long time, so they were bored. Right. There's only so many Netflix true crime series that you can binge. So people in lockdown, as we all know, they were looking for a greater variety of ways to fill their time, whether that's learning a new skill, whether it's pursuing your passions. And so the demand for memberships that provided the platform to do those things provided training, provided support and community and connection. Turning to the online space for connection, that really just drove up demand for memberships as well. So that's kind of the two sides of the coin. More people coming into the space out of necessity, but also a higher demand, particularly for kind of B to C memberships, for ones that help you learn a new skill, learn a new hobby, learn a language, learn to play guitar, all that sort of stuff. The demand for those went right up as well. So something I'm curious to hear from you because, again, you have a large pool of case studies to draw from is some people are successful, and you can tell it's obvious that we're going to be successful. So number one, what does a winner look like before they've even come out of the gates? Do you have an opinion on that? I think the two things that will define what makes a membership really take off are having an existing audience and knowing what that audience actually want. So the main stumbling blocks we find are people who might have a great idea for a membership, but they either don't have an audience for it yet, so they're kind of launching into a void or they have a great idea. But actually it's a great idea to them, but it's not what their audience are looking for. It's not kind of hitting the spot for them. So I think when you put those two things together, an audience and something that they're actually looking for that they want, then that really is it sounds really simple, but that's what makes you successful. It is all of us in business, whether it's through a membership, whether it's through a podcast, whether it's in person training, whether it's services, whatever it is. Essentially all this boils down to is problem solving. Each and every one of us. We are a problem solver regardless of what it says on our business cards. Right. We're just all in the business of providing solutions to problems. You can only understand how to develop a good solution if you know that problem. And the only way you can understand that problem is if you have built a following who you can go to and speak to and kind of say, okay, what's keeping you up at night? What do you want to achieve? What interests do you have that you want to pursue and why haven't you been able to do it? I'm really getting to the heart of, as Carly said, what does your audience need? What do they want? And what does that look like in terms of a solution when it comes to a product or a service like a membership that you could provide to facilitate them getting to where they want to go? Yeah. And the other thing I would say is that you have to actually want to run a membership. Like you have to get into it for the right reasons, not just be chasing money and you have to be willing to actually show up and serve and do the work. Because so many people kind of might get into a membership just chasing the passive income or the recurring revenue or because their coach told them. Well, the thing your business need is a membership. Or they heard someone with a strange Jodie accent on a podcast talked about memberships are great. And they're like, okay. I've got to get me one of those. Yes. But you have to go into it knowing that it's work. You have to go into it wanting to serve your members on an ongoing basis. The days of just being able to stick content behind a paywall and keep collecting money month after month are kind of over. Yeah. Memberships are a business. And this is the thing that we kind of try and counterbalance to. A lot of the stuff that you see online said about memberships. So much of what you see about memberships, particularly going back years, like around the time we came into the space and started talking nonsense, I mean, not nonsense. Words of wisdom. Yes. This is why she's the brain of the operation. A lot of the stuff it was around memberships as continuity programmes, a way of making loads of money for very little work. Passive income, which you touched on and rightly debunked in the intro to today's episode, this whole myth of passive income, of sitting back on a beach sipping cocktails as all of this money just magically appears in your bank account for zero effort. It's nonsense. But unfortunately, that was kind of the pervasive messaging around things like an online membership in particular. And we've strived from day one to really just totally balance that, not even balance it out. Just try and demolish that idea. Because a membership, it's just a business model, just a kind of way of doing business. It's just a way of serving people. It's still work. Yes, it's leveraged work. You're not trading time for money. The scalability is disproportionate to the time you put in. It doesn't have the ceilings and the limits that working one on one with clients does have. It's more predictable, it's more scalable, it's more reliable, it's compounding. It's all these great things, but it's still work. It's still a business. You still need to show up and serve, create, interact, answer, connect. You have to work in it like a business. We refer to our lifestyle as the snug life. Right, Berry? Tongue in cheek. We're geeks it's in the name now. So it's all about the snow life. We have a very comfortable lifestyle business, but we still go to our desks in our office and work like everyone else does. We might start a little later, we might finish a little earlier. Some days, we start a little earlier, finish a little later. We might take days off. We might go travelling. But we're still working. We're still running a business. And that gets lost a lot, particularly in the online space, particularly from old school Internet marketers who haven't realised that we've ticked over from 1999 to 2000 and whatever. You still have remnants of that nonsense. But the most important thing is recognising it as a business. And I think that mindset mentality, coupled with everything we said about making sure you've got an audience, making sure you know what they want before you create this product, it's just absolutely crucial. You need to know that you're starting a business. So I think to recap that if you want recurring revenue from somebody, you have to be giving recurring value and there are no free lunches in this. And that makes perfect sense. But I think the key point is, again, you've decoupled your time from your ability to generate revenue because you can put the same time you might previously have put into one client, into an entire membership. The value exchange is completely disproportionate relative to what you might have been experiencing before. And that's why it's such an exciting business model. Now let's just pretend for a moment that you met Yoda in the woods one day. Yoda doesn't have an audience yet. How would you tell Yoda that he needs to get to this promised land of a membership business. So he has some incredible skills. He's charismatic. He's maybe not even that charismatic, to be honest. Maybe he's not even very well known at what he does, but he sees these role models and he thinks, you know what? I know what I do better. I'm smarter. I've been in the business longer than those people. So how can I get to the point where I can viably launch a membership business? What do I need to do now? Do you want me to give this answer in your to speak where everything's backwards? Because this might get challenging for me. Let's just pretend people have the translating API system. Okay. The first thing I would say is actually don't start down the path of starting a membership or thinking I'm going to start a membership. Because if you have no following, you might discover that once you build a following that a membership is actually the worst possible thing you could create to serve them. You're not going to know. You will not know what the solution should be until you've identified the problem. So that would probably be my first note. If your order was membership creating, I will be it's great to have an idea or a sense that that may be the direction you go in, but just bring your focus in a little bit tighter and focus on building that audience first before you start thinking about all the ways you're going to make money from them. Right. Yeah. And I would also say when we talk about having an audience, it doesn't need to be thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. Obviously, the more people in your audience, the more successful your membership can be more quickly. Potentially, if they're the right people. Yeah. But at the same time, you essentially just need hungry people who want what you're offering. We've had members launch with 100 people on their list and get 70 of them to join their membership because they were a perfect targeted audience for them. Yeah. And if there's 70 people join and you're charging $50 a month, that's $3,500 per month, which for a lot of people might be more than they're actually earning now for I think probably most people that might be more than certainly more than enough to give them a launchpad to move forward from. Yeah. And we tend to recommend having 300 to 500 people on your email list to give you the best chances of a good start. But it's really all about going into it with an awareness that your audience size will impact the number of members that you can get initially. And as long as you're okay with that, then yeah. It doesn't need to be a huge audience to get started. It just needs to be an audience and it needs to be the right audience as well. It's not building your email list at any cost. A small, perfectly formed audience will give you that solid foundation. We're big, big fans of Kevin Kelly's thousand true Fans concept, which is you only need 1000, which is a small number when you think about the kind of audience sizes some of these big guys have or the kind of audience sizes that get talked about when people are trying to sell your email marketing courses and stuff. 1000, relatively speaking, isn't astronomical. And it's not even about the number. It's about the concept. You just need that small pocket of people who are raving fans, who are your people. They've connected with you above anybody else. They vibe with you, they love everything you do. They gobble up every word, download every podcast, read every sentence in your blog post, and they will buy from you. 1000 people paying you $50 a month. That's a pretty nice living. That's a living, right? Yeah. And even with us, we had less than 500 people on our email list when we launched the Academy because we've been so focused on client work up till then that growing an online audience wasn't something that we were doing until we decided to start the Academy. No. And we got to that point after three months of podcasting. So in terms of I'm sure your next thing will be okay, how audience build do I but just thank the stars that I'm not attempting the voice. Jordy Yoda. So getting to that point for us, content marketing is our favourite way of building that following. Because you get to demonstrate your expertise, you get to make your voice heard. Whether it's a big, loud, noisy voice that's really bombastic and really enthusiastic, or whether it's a more contained, measured, level voice. You will speak to different people. You'll attract your people by enabling them to hear your voice. That's why we love podcasting in particular. But putting out content, great content that addresses stuff people need help with, that answers questions in particular. It's feeding Google. It's giving you stuff to share on social media. It's bringing people into your world where they get to connect with you a little bit more, and then they'll want more from you. They'll subscribe to your emails to make sure they don't miss any advice or any tips, any resources you have. And then that's a good basis for potentially going even further by creating a membership site to serve them even more. So the audience building. There's kind of three ways to do it we like to talk about. You can either build it, borrow it, or buy it so you can build it organically through content marketing. I feel everyone who's going to start a membership site should be doing regular content marketing. It's proven for us and for countless of our successful members and past clients to be the most consistently effective strategy for audience building, for driving continuous sales. So you can build it. It takes a little longer, but it's really the marketing, like a farmer approach. You can borrow it by pairing up with influencers, by coming on to podcasts and being interviewed by doing affiliate partnerships. Or you can buy it. If you've got a shed load of money and not enough time to podcast, to write lots of blog posts or whatever, then you can always just give a big old chunk of that money to Mark Zuckerberg and his friends and build your audience that way. That's bottom of our list for a reason, because Zuckerberg doesn't need any more money, and also because it's probably the least sustainable approach. But yeah, that's how you get to that point of having enough of a dedicated following a passionate following who you can really engage with and understand their needs, develop the product that is going to best serve those needs and take it all from there. I guess in an ideal world, you would have a blend of all three once you were sort of up and rolling. Yeah, yeah, definitely. In my view. And I'm sure there'll be people who well, there are people who know a lot more about paid advertising than me. By no means I'm a paid media specialist or anything like that. But things like Facebook ads, things like Google ads, paid ads should amplify and accelerate things that are already working organically. Yes, they are the accelerant. They're the fuel you add to a fire that's already crackling away. They are not the fire itself. I'm sure someone will tweet someone saying that we don't know what we're talking about. But yeah, that foundation. I think if you start with the content marketing, that then makes you more credible when you try to borrow the audience, when you try to approach potential podcast interview opportunities or potential joint ventures and affiliates, the body of work, the current marketing is your proof that you are someone worth partnering with. Right. And then the paid ads that just pause the accelerant. Once you got that core engine working, that organic content working, the funnel that comes off, it working, that's when you pour a bit of money into it to go faster, go further. I think there was something you spoke about a moment ago, and I'm going to come back to Yoda. And Yoda is thinking to himself, you know what? I had an idea for a membership site, but Luke has been making videos for months. Everybody knows who he is. He's talking about the same stuff. I'm just not going to stand out. Everybody is already talking about him. So how do I move forward with that in terms of there being other established players? I mean, Yora would strike Luke down like straight. Accurate there, I suppose. Yeah. Let's switch that around. And it's coming into things now. Yours all successful. Yeah. We've all got our own individual voice. Right. Again, I think this is where you maybe think a bit more about going with podcasting or going with video versus blogging, because your personality, your voice in and of itself and your particular take and the nuances and how you express that they're going to be differentiators anyway, putting your blinkers on and making sure that you're not getting distracted by what Luke or Yoda. I can't remember which one I'm meant to be now. Not getting distracted by them is probably a good way of making sure you don't mimic them. But there's enough room in the market for everyone. I think a big mistake people make is when they're looking at an opportunity to serve a particular audience is thinking that they have to get the whole audience and you don't. This is where the 1000 true fans comes in. You have unknown, unheard of bands, music acts who do very well on gigs where 1000 people turn up. But those thousand people are buying everything and they're coming to every show. But, you know, that doesn't mean that another band can't come along. It doesn't mean that their whole business or whatever is hampered by the fact that Metallica exists or the Beatles once existed. Do you know what I mean? Like other people in the space doesn't mean that you shouldn't do something. It's actually a bigger sign that you should do something because it shows that there is potential. But you just need a little bit of that pie. You don't need the whole thing and you don't want it, because can you imagine if you've got a drumming membership? Can you imagine if every single person that was ever going to be interested in drumming all joined your membership? That would actually be a nightmare. That's too many people. It's far too many people. I think you're right. When you look at when most people are used to thinking about competition, they used to thinking about their own geographic footprint, their local catchment area before they go online. And actually, when you go online, your audience is in millions and not in a hundred thousand people who might know you locally, if you're lucky. So the whole dynamic changes when you think in terms of a global audience, even when you're niche. Yeah. And I think with memberships in particular. Memberships are a business where people connect with the membership owner, I think more so than any other product, because there is that ongoing relationship. This is where you as a person can stand out. People connect with your personality, your style, not just what you're teaching. And as a great example, we've got two members in the Academy, John and John, who both have Blues guitar membership sites. They're both very successful and they're both very successful. And they both help each other out. Technically, their competitors, they've got exactly the same market. They look similar as well. They sound similar. They're both Southern, but they both have slightly different ways of doing things and they both attract different people as a result of that. And they're both hugely successful. Yeah. The Nor should be afraid that competition exists. I do think you're right. The mindset for someone who's coming from, perhaps running an agency where all their clients are local, thinking about the ways that you try and reach your market in a local area, it can be a bit of a dogfight. If you go along to breakfast networking meetings, you're paying a little extra so you can be the only accountant in the room. There's that scarcity mentality that I think gets ingrained when it comes to local marketing, which simply is a known factor when you go online, because your competitors don't have every person who will ever possibly be interested in this topic. And even if they do. People leave memberships. People stop following certain people because they're kind of like, maybe they've been watching one guy's video from the day they first started publishing videos because they were the only person talking about this topic. But actually now you come along and provide the alternative. A lot of people in that camp might only be there because it's the only camp. Right. Like, you coming along and being an alternative voice and challenging some of the norms and giving your take on things actually adds to the market and adds to the opportunity. And it is definitely a mindset shift. If someone hasn't really had an online business as the core focus of what they do before, it can be a bit of a transition. I think it's certainly something that I've noticed. And I know this is just a basic phenomenon of psychology, but as soon as you start being interested in something, your brain will start showing it to you everywhere. And you notice cars. When you buy a new car, you think it's unique. And suddenly that is called BARDA Minehoff. The bottom minehof effect, I believe, is what it is called. I actually looked this up. The BARDA Minehof effect. Typically called Red Car syndrome. Red Car syndrome. It's the hyper awareness of something that you've been exposed to for either the first time or for a higher degree. Recently. Recently bias, as well as another thing for you. Yeah. And the danger with that is when you start getting interested in something like opening a membership in a particular niche, you are going to see them everywhere. And that can throw you. So it's important to understand your own value to your audience and lean into that and not get distracted by the fact that there are others. Yeah. How boring would it be if there was only one TV show, one brand of cereal, like one clothing brand? Yeah. That would be tough, but it would make life super simple. It would actually. Yeah. Callie's looking at me like, you know what? I have the same thing for breakfast every day. For that very reason, I have good time to think about it. So membership, guys, is now the membership geeks. And we've come through a pandemic, and it's been horrible for lots of people, but the sun is starting to shine. We're coming out the other side. We haven't had a retain conference for a very long time, which you don't really get that many opportunities to run it. So is that something that you're looking at again? It depends on the day of the week. I can delete the question. Yeah. It's not something we have plans for at the moment. I'm sure we will end up doing some kind of events in the future, but at the moment, with things still the way they are, things still up in the air. It's not something where we could say, yes, we're doing one in 2023 or anything like that. Yeah. Because the thing is what a lot of people don't realise, certainly don't realise when they ask us what we do in return. And by the way, you're like the 998th person to ask us if we're doing this again, which is extremely flattering. It truly is retained 2019. It was something we are phenomenally proud of. I still watch the highlight video at least once a month and just looking at what we did because we just knocked it out the park on every level to a degree. And this isn't just me being egotistical. I don't know how we did it, but we did. But there is a little part of me that is kind of like go out on a high. Exactly. We hit a home run on our first time at bat. Like how about we just retire with that perfect record. Right. So there's a little degree of that. But also a lot of people don't realise if we were going to do this in 2023, we would probably have already had to have booked everything. Now in terms of the venue, in terms of the AV company, we would want to work with the same AV company. They were phenomenal. And they're so phenomenal that they get booked up well in advance. We need to start making arrangements for speakers now. All of that is a lot harder to do because yes, the sun is shining. Yes, we're coming out tentatively on the other side of this thing, but our eyes are still adjusting to the light, let's just say. And so things are still difficult to coordinate. It's difficult for people to commit to anything twelve months away from now. So as Kelly kind of said, some of it depends on the day of the week. There's some days where we would do the same level of things in terms of just things like the staging design and the lighting and all the little extras and all that sort of stuff, like the larger scale fancy side of it and the big lineup of speakers. And then other days were kind of like we could do something that is more intimate, something that's maybe higher ticket, that's a bit more like a retreat kind of thing. So it depends. So really the answer is right now we are not actively working on it. We have not forgotten about it. We're not completely put it to bed. But if we had to make a call today, are we going to do another one? If it was kind of you have to commit now or it will never happen, then it will never happen. But fortunately, we're not in the event business and that is a big factor. We didn't do the event to make money. Anytime we look like we were going to make a profit on it, we found more things to spend the money on because a lot of people who run events, they do it as their business. They do it because that is the way they're generating revenue. We did it because we thought it would just be cool to get a few hundred membership site owners from around the world all in one space, because this is a relatively cottage industry, relatively small in terms of how many people are doing it compared to other types of businesses. So you don't often get a lot of membership owners in the same space. We just thought it would be awesome to do that and that as leaders in space, we should do it and that's great. But obviously it does give us the luxury of not having to ever do this again. Talk to us honestly, we've got a trip to the US coming up next month. I think once that's out the way and we've kind of seen that the world is still there and we've been to a large event ourselves. I've been to one conference since this whole thing happened. I went to Tomicon in Newcastle, but it was in my hometown. I didn't have to experience travel. It wasn't a massive event. So I think once we've experienced attending an event as an attendee in that way, then maybe that'll change our perspective on running an event as well. Yeah. I think I've spent a lot of time talking about all the wonderful things in your business, but I'm curious to hear from each of you because life is never plain sailing. What is it about your business right now that you may find more difficult or where you may have some ambitions to do things differently? I think for me, the thing that I found challenging over the last year or so is becoming a manager of a team. So just over a year ago, we took on three full time employees. I've never been somebody who wanted to have the kind of business where you have employees. So for me, that's been quite an adjustment. Learning to be a leader of a team, learning to manage people, learning to kind of actually not do everything myself and what should I pass on and teaching people how to do things. And I think Mike came into that with more management experience than me. I'd never had kind of a team or anything like that. So for me, it's definitely been the biggest challenge for me lately, has been stepping into that role of team leader and kind of things like that and learning how to work that way. Yeah, that's probably on my list of adjustments, the biggest adjustment. And while I got a wealth of management experience, there was always someone higher up. Right. So it's a very different kettle of fish. It's a fantastic one. It is an amazing thing to actually have people who are better at a lot of things, then you are just doing the work. Hold on. We wanted this thing. We said, we told someone we want this thing and now the thing is done and we didn't have to do anything like, is this magic? So it's wonderful. And particularly being able to actually recruit people during a pandemic and to have some fantastically talented people on the team and plans to expand further as well in the future. It's definitely been an adjustment, but overall a net positive. I wouldn't say it's a negative thing. But no, it's not a negative. It's just been a challenge. Yes, different. So I guess my last question, second last question is if people want to connect with you and they're thinking, you know what, I build a bit of an audience, or at least I'm on the journey there and I want to start working towards a membership, how should they do that? Where can they find you? Well, I'd recommend they start off by checking out our podcast and blog over@membershipgeeks.com we're not going to go straight for the sales picture. Come and join the membership, because as we said before, you need to hear our voice. You need to see for yourself whether you enjoy our style of teaching, whether you vibe with us. Because if you don't, then you're probably going to get quite annoyed if you join our membership. But if you do just want to jump straight into the membership, then you'll find that@membershipacademy.com as well. Yes. And my last question for both of you is what's one thing you do now that you wish you'd started five years ago, it doesn't have to be business. I'm not sure I'm going to take slightly poetic licence because it's not quite every day, but exercising every day. So these days we're fortunate enough. We bought a house last year, we've got a swimming pool. So we try and swim every day. And that's made such a difference to physical health, mental health, and just putting me in the right frame of work. So, yeah, I wish I'd got into that habit earlier. Yeah, I enjoy the exercise, but problem is, I haven't quite figured out my schedule around it. So I get up and also swim a lot later than Cali does. And sometimes that means I'm not at my desk till one till 01:00 p.m.. And I need to kind of figure out a way that that's not as disruptive the thing. I would probably start earlier again, it's not a business thing. Journaling. I think being able to empty the brain a little bit on an evening has proven extremely valuable for being able to just shut off and get better sleep. Obviously, that has a knock on effect to the business. So journaling and blackout curtains as well. You can tell we're fans of sleep. I have no problem sleeping at all anytime. One of my gifts is I could literally sleep anywhere, even in bright Sunshine. But I do empathise with diet. No, not diet. Next, just physical health. Mental health. You nailed both. So well done, Mike. And Carly from the membership keeps. Thank you so much for your time. I look forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks in San Diego. Yes, man. Yes, for now. Thank you so much for your time. Our pleasure. Thanks for having us. This has been a lot of fun. We've had an opportunity to talk about our business and the industry in a way that we often don't. Yeah. Because what membership plugins should we use? How do you make all of the money? How do you get every member joined? So it's nice being able to just talk more about the life and more about the business side, the human side and the industry as a whole. So it's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for having us, Bob. My pleasure. I'm glad we didn't go to the same places. Bye bye. Before I go, just a quick reminder to subscribe and join our Facebook group. You'll find a link in the show notes or visit amplifyme fminsiders also connect with me wherever you hang out. You'll find me on all the social platforms at Bob Gentle. If you enjoyed the show. Then I would love a five star review on Apple podcast. It would make my day and if you shared the show with a friend, you would literally make my golden list. My name is Bob Gentle. Thanks to you for the listening and I'll see you next week.