181. STOP Building an Audience – Build a COMMUNITY Instead – with Bri Leever
You’ve built a solid business with content, consulting, or coaching. But what if the next big leap isn’t just about scaling your offers—it’s about scaling your impact through community?
In this episode, we’re diving into what it really takes to transform your business model into a thriving, community-driven ecosystem. Joining me is online community-building expert Bri Leever, who’s sharing:
✅ The key shifts needed to move from a product-based or digital course business to a community-centric model
✅ How to create a space where your audience isn’t just consuming content but actively engaging, collaborating, and contributing
✅ Why a well-designed community can become your most valuable asset—fueling content, deepening connections, and driving recurring revenue
If you’ve been thinking about launching an online community (or want to make sure yours is built for long-term success), this is the episode you can’t afford to miss.
🎧 Hit play now and start building your community-powered business the right way!
Resources
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Transcript:
Bri Leever:
We are connected everywhere and we simultaneously belong nowhere. That is our online experience today, and while the internet and social media in particular, promised new connections, they failed to create an adequate container where those connections lead to belonging, and I think social media platforms had an amazing opportunity to create community online, and instead they chose to get people to build audiences. You might have communal experiences being facilitated on social media, but really all it’s done is trained us to create and consume content.
Brad Powell:
Welcome to the Standout Business Show, where it’s all about making a bigger difference by doing business differently. I’m Brad Powell, your standout business coach, and on our show today we’re asking the question are you ready to build a community-powered business? Let’s say you’re doing pretty well. You’ve been running your business on content and consulting and coaching, but is now the time to power your business with community and what does it really take to convert your product-based, digital, course-based business model into a community-centric business model? To help us explore all this today on the show we’ve got online community building expert, bree Lever, who’s going to share how creating community can become a vibrant hub for ideas, for your content, connections and recurring income for your business. So if you’ve been thinking about developing an online community and want to make sure your community is done right the first time, stay tuned. And with that let’s start the show.
Brad Powell:
You, as somebody who is a consultant or a coach or have some form of expert business, you are already doing lots of things in your normal day-to-day, where you are sharing your expertise and you are in your zone of genius and you are communicating, whether you’re a guest on a podcast or you’re doing a presentation or you’re simply having a meeting with a client or a prospect. During those moments, you can be documenting exactly what you’re doing, and all of that makes for great content. So I encourage you all to join me on February 26 at 12 pm Eastern Time on the Make Coaching your Marketing Masterclass. You can develop a very simple system for not creating content but actually documenting the moments where you are absolutely at your best and turning that into an archive that people can go and explore and binge. So join me.
Brad Powell:
This is a free masterclass. It is February 26, 12 pm Eastern Time. Just go to awesomevideomakerscom, forward, slash blueprint or you can find a link in the show notes and I’ll see you there. And now back to the show. All right, bree, welcome to the show.
Bri Leever:
Yeah, thank you for having me, Brad. That intro was spotless. I’m going to steal that copy in the transcript from my own website I couldn’t have put it better myself.
Brad Powell:
Go for it. Go for it. That’s a yeah right, that’s high praise, thank you. Well, we aim to please here, and so we’re talking about community, and I know, especially now you know in the world that we call the new normal. It seems like the sad part about the Internet was that, even though the big promise was we’re all going to get connected, the actual result is that we’ve actually become way more disconnected because of the amount of time everyone seems to be spending online and everybody seems to be sending.
Brad Powell:
Just staring into these little devices, these phones that we have, and, aside from, like, the promise of social media and all the stuff that you can do on the various platforms there, it still feels like a very lonely experience, and so I think, more than ever I mean and there’s, you know, lots of scientific study talking about loneliness as an epidemic like it’s a big deal. I know for myself, like the older you get, the harder it is to maintain meaningful friendships with people, just simply because of the way our lives have been organized and the way society functions and so on, like a lot of the things that we used to do in terms of going bowling, a bowling league or going to church on Sunday. I mean all these things are declining and so people, just on a general human level, are kind of starving for community. And then I’m going to take all that and say, well, yeah, and by the way, when you’re running a business and you’re a small business, solo entrepreneur kind of individual, that too is a super lonely proposition and a super lonely way to be in the world, like even for myself, like as a podcaster.
Brad Powell:
You know podcast. This is one of the reasons that I do this, that I get to connect with people. I mean you’re calling in all the way from Hawaii so we get to meet and interact like this and it’s and people can join us live and it’s community building. It’s all part of that. So I want you to speak big picture around how you see and why you see community building for businesses like yours and mine can be so critical and also just so valuable right now.
Bri Leever:
And also just so valuable right now. So good. I have a couple different thoughts. One I love the value proposition of I needed more meaningful friendships, so I started a podcast. I think probably every podcaster would relate to that on a very deep level. Yeah, it can be. It can be like one of the most isolating roles and experiences is starting your own business, and the good news is it doesn’t have to be. Another thing they failed to create an adequate container where those connections lead to belonging, and I think social media platforms had an amazing opportunity to create community online and instead they chose to get people to build audiences. That’s what we’ve done. You might have communal experiences being facilitated on social media, but really all it’s done is trained us to create and consume content, which is not community building. It’s not the same. There’s elements that overlap, but it’s not the same thing.
Brad Powell:
I just agree, like the idea that if only I grow this big audience, then everything good will happen. And yet, you know, you see individuals, you know, quote unquote, influencers out there who have large followings and not only do they not have genuine community, they don’t actually have a business that functions very well, because all those followers aren’t really paying that much attention and or they’re certainly not even buying things from them, you know, and they have a lot of trouble selling even the most basic product.
Bri Leever:
Yes, yes, because, yeah, having a big audience doesn’t equate to the value that you’re providing in a communal environment especially. I stand as kind of the anti-example of this. Like, I have a very small audience because I have I’m a community builder. I’m getting better at the audience thing. I’m getting better at I wouldn’t say I’m getting better at the audience thing. I’m getting better at. I wouldn’t say I’m getting better at the audience thing. I’m getting better at becoming more visible, at using my voice, at attracting people who resonate with my message and my work. Um, and sometimes that comes in the form of audience building.
Bri Leever:
But I launched my own podcast last year. It’s called Dear Bree and Brad. I launched it to an email list of 600 people, like that’s like and I’ve been running a business for five years, like it’s it’s like kind of embarrassing and the and. But I had a very robust community strategy and I was I’m very tapped in to probably a dozen different communities for community professionals and people who would be interested in the work that I do. And this podcast made it into the top 5% globally and, according to Listen Notes, you can look it up if you want to verify. But I was just, I was shocked by that. It was like kind of my own personal case study and example to see, like can I kind of take my own medicine here and how impactful can this community be? Supports my business, which we’re going to get to in a second, but actually like leveraging my presence in niche communities over my presence on these social media stages.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, well, it’s really interesting.
Brad Powell:
I think where this really applies and I’d love to get your take on this is that and this comes from a previous guest of mine, a woman by the name of Michelle Warner she talks a lot about relationship marketing and she outlines this thing called the marketing spectrum, and so that on one end which is what most people are pitching that we should be doing it’s all traffic-based, high-volume-based marketing efforts, and that’s what most people are doing.
Brad Powell:
When content marketing and social media marketing, it’s all meant to reach the highest number of people. But on the other end of the spectrum and this works really well for anyone who’s doing any kind of high value, high ticket service what you need before people come in the door and say, okay, I want to hire you, is you need to build relationship with them so that there’s a level of trust where they’re able to say, yes, you seem like a good fit for me. And if you’re doing high traffic, high volume stuff, that just doesn’t achieve that goal. It doesn’t solve that problem, and so a lot of the activity that people are so busily doing online right now isn’t in alignment with the service that they offer, and so what you just described like launching a podcast to a small group 600 people on your email list. Well, maybe that’s exactly the right thing to do 100%.
Bri Leever:
Yeah, and it’s. It doesn’t feel as good, right, like I’m like oh, I only have six, I don’t have like the thousands and thousands of likes in the big audience and I think, if we can, but that we’ve I have to pause and notice that I have been trained to value that. That that has. I have been trained to view that as success. And there’s other metrics of success that are more indicative of the actual value I’m creating for people than just my follower count.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, yeah right, exactly. Well, it’s probably really not a very good metric of how you evaluate your self-esteem. I am my follow-up account, and if I don’t have a follow-up account, I’m not really worth very much.
Bri Leever:
Recommended to no one one, right, okay.
Brad Powell:
So anyway, I want to dive in kind of more deeply into the whole community building thing. I know you have a thing for the four types of communities which is probably really good information, because when people think about community building, each person probably has their own idea of what that looks like, and a lot of times what they think what it looks like is probably not what will serve them the best. So let’s take a look at that.
Bri Leever:
Yeah, I’d love to. So in a little bit here I’ll show a visual that will help create some context for people. But to start I just want to start with the kind of two differences that I look at. And one is free versus paid Super simple. So free communities versus a paid community, and in a free community the community is designed to support some sort of end product or service. Paid communities, on the other hand, are the product you’re you’re paying to either be in the experience with others or to have access to the other people who are in that community.
Bri Leever:
Now, free communities work really well for brands, organizations that have like um, like sass companies are like, especially for the free education centric communities which we’re going to get to in a second. Free communities work really well and support business goals in a myriad of different ways. So I have a series called community dissection where I dissected something like 40 different communities and you’ll see, if you even like just take a glimpse. There’s so many different ways that a community can be structured to support a business, whether it’s product, customer service, customer support. They’re not my favorite communities, they feel more like a help forum than anything else, but we’ll throw them in there. So there’s a lot of different ways that a free community can support your business. Now for the creator, consultant, coach, coaching business. They saw these free communities and they thought, hey, what if a free community could support my paid services? And so this is really where we saw a lot of people create their like free Facebook group. This is like the age of free Facebook groups.
Brad Powell:
Right.
Bri Leever:
And slowly they will. Slowly and not so slowly, they realized like man, okay, community is like actually a lot of work to do it well. Man, okay, community is like actually a lot of work to do it well. And we have to figure out how to monetize this in order for it to be sustainable for our business. Because the nature of community, if it’s doing well, is that it’s very full and it requires a lot of guidance.
Bri Leever:
And that’s where we got into this big conundrum of the freemium model for these consulting and coaching and creator communities, where they have a free layer and then a paid layer. And I’m happy to talk about what actually happens in the freemium model. Um, but the tldr is it doesn’t work like you think it’s going to. So then we have our paid communities, and this is really where I love to put our coaches, our consultants, these communities where you have somebody who is either guiding you through an educational experience or creating the container where the connections can happen. So that’s free versus paid. But I want to pause there in case you have any reflections.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, well, it seems to me I mean you’re pointing to, I think one of the common pitfalls of people who are doing any kind of community building wasn’t yet where, in fact, what they do is they open a Facebook group, which is probably the simplest, one of the simplest forms, or wherever they put it. You know, maybe they they go in, they subscribe to one of these platforms and they put it there and it’s still free, even though you have to pay the subscription to have it be there. And then what they find is this new treadmill that they’re on, because, first of all, they feel obligated, just like they do for social media, that now I have to create a bunch of content which is free content, and I need to populate my group platform with all this content. Plus, I also have to prod people, prompt them to say stuff like to say it’s Monday, you tell me what you’re doing this week, and it’s Tuesday, let’s find out what you did on Tuesday, and things like that.
Brad Powell:
And this becomes more of an endless wheel of labor than the normal content marketing.
Brad Powell:
That is just sort of the standard basic part of content marketing. And and, of course, if your your volume, like if you’re the typical person who has the 600 person email list and a small little podcast, and you’ve been posting on LinkedIn and Facebook regularly and and now you’ve got this, this content platform of your own that you’re also trying to work. It’s, it’s overwhelming, and if there’s only a few dozen people in there probably not my adventure is going to go on. People come in there and look around and say, well, there’s nothing going on here, so I’m not going to bother, and they leave, and so their profile on your platform becomes ghostly, you know, and anyway. So there’s the observations that I’ve seen on there, and so the idea, especially for, as you say, like coaches and consultants or people who have a business of that kind, like sort of the expert business person having a platform where their work, their actual product, is what the platform is about, and people are there to pay for and take part in that type of program Am I getting that right?
Bri Leever:
Yes, yep, that’s exactly it. So it’s really the paid communities are. It’s just a better positioning for those types of communities, and I’m really happy to say that it’s one of the like biggest areas of relief. When my clients come to me and they’re like they want to build a community, they see this as like integral to what they’re doing. And even if it’s a paid community, they’re like Brie, I can’t feed another content engine Like I can’t. I’m already like feeding so many like content engines and now I’m going to have like another place where I somehow have to feed people like better content and and like more con more. How can I can’t even. How can I do more? And so my my like um word words of advice to my clients when they come to me in that position is we are going to move you from content feeder to facilitator. So this is not about creating more. People don’t want more. They’re not going to pay for more, but they are going to pay for better, clearer and more structure to your content. That’s for the education-centric communities, which is my next distinction Education-centric communities versus connection-centric communities and really all it means is education-centric communities have an intended, guided educational journey for their members.
Bri Leever:
So a lot of like accelerators or cohort-based courses would fall into this category and the paid ones. I call these transformative communities, because we’re going from point A to point B. There’s a very clear transformation that’s happening and the community manager is, and the person leading it is the guide. Now, these communities are also the most apt and open to new technology, because it’s like you’re going on a big road trip and you’re saying, hey, listen, we’re going to go from New York to LA and this is the vehicle we are riding in. If you want to go to LA, you’re going to get in this vehicle, metaphorically for community building. So people are much more apt to trust and experiment with new technology.
Bri Leever:
On the other hand, we have connection centric communities and these are where the interactions between your members are what is valuable and what people are paying for inside of your community. So they tend to be a lot more fluid. They tend to be membership based and this is really where we can leverage, frankly, a zero content strategy. So I actually have a great case study of a client recently who has been running like a. She runs a December program every year for the last year and her members were begging her for an annual membership, like they just wanted to continue this work. And she was like, brie, I can’t do it, like they’re they’re begging me and I I can’t do content, I just I can’t do it. And I was like, okay, that’s fine. This is a we’re designing a connection centric space.
Bri Leever:
You infusing this space with content is actually going to cannibalize any energy that your members have to contribute to this space. So, instead of a content strategy, let’s create a structure and a framework that prompts, supports and rewards your members for introducing challenges and experiments inside of the community. And we launched it and she made over a hundred K in one month from and she just had everybody in there for one year. It was like they could only join in January. And then they did it for a year and zero content strategy. Like, can you imagine streaming?
Brad Powell:
It does sound good.
Brad Powell:
That sounds. That does sound that great. I mean I I really hit the idea. I mean it seems like it’s almost more of a mastermind kind of environment where the value comes from who you’re with and the content if that’s what you’re going to refer to it it’s also coming from the people who are in the group and the more people and the kinds of people who are in there are really bringing the value to the effort. When you’re looking at this from like this thing of learning versus connection, those two polarities, you know like I’ve been in many, many different kinds of communities.
Brad Powell:
One of the very best cohort based things was when I started this podcast. I took Seth Godin’s podcast fellowship and I loved it because for two reasons. One is it was only eight weeks and within eight weeks it was like we’re all launching our podcast and so it just made me do it. I’ve been thinking I should get a podcast going. I’ve been doing live streaming I you know why don’t I turn into a real show and but I hadn’t actually done it yet and so I dove into this program and by the eight weeks, within the time, probably by the sixth week I had launched this show. That was how it how it came to be.
Brad Powell:
But the other thing that happened was while we were in there every day, there was a little like they’d all pre-recorded this, but there were like a five minute lesson exercise to do. So we had an assignment every single day for the eight weeks, some one thing to do, and but then part of the assignment was put your work into the cohort and then go visit at least five other people and give them feedback on what they’ve been doing. So it turned into this huge exchange from all the people in the program and I was kind of blown away by like there was a ton of really creative folks and I would say practically everyone finished and probably two thirds did it Like they actually all launched their show within that time. It was like hugely successful compared to, I think, what happens with a lot of online courses, where most people don’t ever actually get it done.
Bri Leever:
Yeah, yes, you can count on like five hands how many courses you’ve paid for and not finished, right? So, brad, you just gave a perfect example and one of my favorite examples of the transformative community. So this is a paid education centric community experience. Seth Godin’s and Akimbo’s. So Seth Godin kind of started these programs. He’s like the original. I know he’s like the marketing guy, but he is the original community guy in my book. He’s like the original. I know he’s like the marketing guy, but he is the original community guy in my book. And um, I’ve done alt MBA with Seth Godin, I’ve done the marketing seminar, so you’ve done the pot. So this is great. We have like a good, we have such a good testimonial. They can swipe it from this episode. But the transformative communities, um are, are, can be such a powerful experience. And oh, could you mind actually pulling up the matrix real quick and I’ll just walk through.
Brad Powell:
Sure, why not? Here we go?
Bri Leever:
So just to give people. So if you’re listening in audio I’ll describe what we’re looking at. It’s just a graphic and you can get my like full, full talk where I have like a full, free masterclass on this that dives into all of the strengths, all of the challenges with each type of community. But up at the top right we’re looking at education-centric paid community experiences. These are transformative communities where the communal learning is the product. At the top left we have education-centric free communities I call these nurturing communities where the communal learning supports the end product or service. Some great examples of these are the HubSpot community and the Etsy community. On the lower left we have free, connection centric communities. This is really where all the Facebook groups lived, and while they genuinely struggle to figure their shit out, there’s actually some really really good ones happening and I call these collaborative communities. So this is where the connections between your members supports the product. And one of my favorite ones that I think everybody should check out is called Lego Ideas. It’s the Lego community that supports their product department.
Bri Leever:
Finally, we have, on the bottom right, paid connection-centric communities. These are what I call them networking communities, because the connections between your members is the product. So this really kind of will help you get a sense for where, if you’re thinking about building a community, you can ask yourself am I, more naturally, a teacher or a connector? Is my business? Am I introducing a paid one-to-many option, or is this a space that needs to support an end product or service? And when you start there, you can really start to get a glimpse for where your community will start. In this diagram and then, as your community matures, a lot of communities actually will check off multiple of these boxes with different programs inside, but for starting out, I highly recommend picking the one that resonates the most with you and supports your business.
Brad Powell:
When people are thinking like, well, where should I fit into this matrix? I actually think that most businesses, when they’re approaching how they’re running and their marketing and all that kind of effort they put way too much attention on I need to go out and find new people, I need to go, look for somebody who’s never met me and bring them in. If only I can do that enough then everything will be fine. But they’re neglecting the other work, which is that when people have found you, there are really valuable things to do to have them stay with you for the duration, and if you can succeed with that, then all the rest becomes much easier.
Brad Powell:
I mean, talk about Seth Godin.
Brad Powell:
He’s always talking about how, when you meet 10 people and they’re absolutely raving about what you do, you’re done because they’re going to tell and bring all their friends, and so if you’re able to in this case what we’re talking about is build a community and you have a group of people there who are delighted with the process then that community is going to grow quite naturally, because they’re going to talk about it and they’re going to bring their friends and invite them, and that community is a very organically going to start to thrive.
Brad Powell:
And so this is the kind of thing that, when I think about it, how I think about it, and and then for me, if all you’re doing is doing all of that and it’s free, you’re not, that doesn’t pay your rent and it doesn’t, and it doesn’t even if you’re just the guide like it’s not valuing the time that you’re there to be the host and the facilitator of all this high value activity.
Brad Powell:
So clearly, in my mind it’s like well, you want to have some kind of model where there’s revenue involved, and, of course, the dream of community is that if it’s recurring revenue, then you’re building a sustainable, resilient process. So I guess the frame that I want you to look at is like as people come to you, how do you guide them in that direction? To give them like, when people go well, I don’t know if I’m ready for this or I might, you know, it seems a little more difficult than I can handle to make the choices so that they can in fact get a place where they’ve got this thing that’s organically growing and it’s thriving in terms of producing revenue for their, for their company.
Bri Leever:
Yeah, so, um, I actually have a great resource on community discovery that I can pass along. Uh, because I think one of the biggest things that you need to do before preparing to launch a community is to interview the people around you and see, like is there genuine interest? Do you understand the narrative well enough to be able to create the container that’s valuable for people? So that’s a really big question that you need to do some investigation of the people around you. I also prompt people in that tool to do some like mindset and self-discovery work, because I’ve found that we usually end up building the community that we feel like a gaping hole in our souls for, and so it becomes really personal, like if you think launching a business is hard, like a community is like even more. Like a business is so personal and a community is like even more so. So we do a lot of. I have a lot of promptings around like why are you creating this community? Cause I’ve found when you launch it like it’s not, it’s not necessarily bad to to derive your motivation for your community from the gap that you see in the world, like that’s a very natural and normal thing. Your community is never going to be able to hold all of that for you. So there’s a lot of like mindset, mind, body, work that needs to happen as well to really be aligned before you launch, and I know my video is struggling to keep up, but we’ll just keep going.
Bri Leever:
Um so so yeah, those are some of the questions, and I had another thought on what you were sharing with the paid versus free, and I just wanted to share. It’s a very sad reality of the especially American capitalistic society that we live in that we value things when we pay for them, when we pay for them. I wish we could value things more when they’re free. But I found that in a lot of ways a free community can tend to be a disservice to your members because it doesn’t posture them in a way that they are going to show up in a way that’s meaningful for them and their other members which in other environments, like in a course, right.
Bri Leever:
If somebody pays for your course and then doesn’t show up, that’s just a bummer for them, like they didn’t get the information, they didn’t put it into action. It’s like it doesn’t affect anybody else’s experience. But in your community, when people don’t show up, not only does it impact their experience. It’s now impacting everyone’s experience. So posturing our members so that they have the best chance of showing up and participating in the community, so that it’s a valuable experience for everyone, is really important to consider. And when you just default to a free community, you’re not always. It doesn’t mean just because you get them to pay they’re gonna show up and engage. Well, that’s not what I’m trying to say, but it does help us and them take it more seriously.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, I agree with that. I think an issue that people have is they’re just thinking well, if I’m just getting started and there’s really nothing in there, how can I charge money? Yes and how will I get anybody in the door if there’s a fee and they’re looking at it going? I don’t know. There’s not much going on here, so why should I do that? Like, how do I create, how do they create the impression of value for something that is in a fairly beta stage?
Bri Leever:
Yes, this is a great question. I get this all the time. I want to do a follow-up podcast episode to this question, exactly. So maybe I’ll have you write a Dear Bree anonymous letter for me, brad. I’ll have you write a Dear Bree anonymous letter for me, brad, but so I actually have a great podcast episode about this on Dear Bree, lily. Thank you, sorry, my dog’s just being a little guard dog, and in this episode I’m talking to Mortaza Bambot, the founder of Heartbeat, and there’s a couple like just creative tricks that you can do in your launch that make it, uh, so much more.
Bri Leever:
You can be so much more confident in your launch. And the quickest, easiest one that I’ll share is, when you’re going to launch, you um pre-sell tickets to your community so you can pick a date with a reasonable runway for you to get the word out, and this allows you to start collecting interest, but not in the form of a free email wait list. We’re getting people’s payments secured in the form of a pre-sale ticket and then they’ll join the community on said date when it opens. And it’s usually great to also combine that launch with, like, a big kickoff event, so you’re bringing everybody in at the same time right, because if you have, like, your launch month and people are trickling in one at a time, it’s kind of like the first person who shows up to the party like an hour early and they’re like, oh God, no one’s here. This was a terrible mistake. Like that’s the moment we want to avoid. So the really easy way to do that is just like saying we’re all going to open the door and walk through the door at the same time.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, I like that. It’s a have a big party where everybody’s invited and they all show up at the same moment. That sounds really good.
Bri Leever:
Much better than arriving an hour early accidentally.
Brad Powell:
Well, as we’ve been talking about this actually, I have more questions now than I had 20 minutes ago, and we could talk about this for quite a long time I just think that this is a great topic and a great thing for a lot of people to be considering as a means by which that they can really, you know, create a meaningful gathering place for the people that they’re serving, because, especially, you know, like, if you’re involved with working with people one on one, that’s cool. I love working with people one-on-one, that’s cool. I love working with people one-on-one.
Bri Leever:
I have. My favorite clients are my one-on-one clients. They are the very best. That’s only because you don’t have a community yet, brad.
Brad Powell:
I’m just kidding, I’m just saying that anyone who’s listening who’s my favorite you know who you are. You’re absolute best and yet it’s you know they don’t. They don’t actually know each other Like they don’t, and they don’t they don’t know what would be so cool if they did know each other.
Brad Powell:
And especially in the work that I do, like people are making video and the video is very visual and it gets out there, and so you can easily imagine a community of people who are all producing video where they’re cheering one another on and or, in a very positive way, giving people helpful information around. This was great, and we’d love to hear you do that kind of thing. You know, because we know that you know more about that and than anybody else, and that’s what we’d love to hear you do. That kind of thing, you know, because we know that you know more about that and than anybody else, and that’s what we’d love to see more of. And when people get that kind of feedback, it’s just super helpful. It helps open them up and so, anyway, that kind of thing and this is my business just one example of that kind of thing- yeah, no, you hit on so many good points.
Bri Leever:
Teaching people how to give good feedback is an art, and it’s something that the Akimbo organization and Seth Godin nailed, and I think it’s like probably one of the main reasons that they have been so successful is because they actually, in the onboarding process, took a very long time and very deliberate approach to teaching people how to interact and give good feedback to each other. And the other thing I’ll add Brad, I kind of look at it two ways. So, way back when I first started my business, I was describing my value proposition to a friend, actually from Alt MBA, and she said oh, so there’s three ways that you can make money in a business. You can find new customers, you can engage your repeat customers or you can increase your prices. And she was like and you do the first two, you help you engage repeat customers so that they find new customers for you. I was like, oh my God, that’s brilliant, so that’s like for you. I was like, oh my God, that’s brilliant, so that’s like, that’s how the community thing works, right.
Bri Leever:
Secondly, for people offering one-on-one services, you hit a point, usually after two or three years, where, if you want to keep growing and some people don’t, but a lot of us do. We got lifestyles to maintain and if that’s you, you reach a point where you’re like, okay, well, to grow. I either have to, because I’m usually for a solopreneur like scaling. If they don’t want to scale their business and become like an agency, they can either increase their prices and bring on more high ticket clients prices and bring on more high ticket clients, or they can introduce a one to many offer and the community model is it’s it’s an all the rage like one to many offer right now. For good reason, for very good reason. It’s an incredibly powerful um like container for your business and income stream for your business and if we don’t really understand what it is we’re getting ourselves into, you can very quickly overcommit yourself. So that’s where I like to provide some guidance, and I’m glad I’ve left you with more questions than answers. I think I’m doing my job right.
Brad Powell:
All right, well, bree, this has been a really cool conversation. Thanks so much for coming on. If people want to connect with you and learn more, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Bri Leever:
Yeah, the only social media you’ll find me on is LinkedIn, so that’s a good place to connect. I enjoy posting there. My newsletter has like the monthly roundup twice a month. Sometimes we’ll go into once a week when we’re doing a Dear Bree podcast season release and the best way if you’re like if you’re intrigued, you’re community curious, but you’re kind of hesitant or have if you’re in the place with more questions than answers at this point you’ve got to go binge. Dear Bree season one it’s 12 episodes. It’ll speak to exactly where you’re at and it’s an advice column for community conundrums, fiascos and drama. So it’s like wildly entertaining too, because the craziest shit happens in communities.
Brad Powell:
All right, all right? Well, that’s great. I’ll make sure that links to all your stuff are in the show notes and thanks again. So much for coming on today.
Bri Leever:
Yeah, thanks, brad. Thanks for having me.
