Membership 101: Building a Successful Membership with 15 Hours a Week (Part 2)

As I went through that conversation with Lisa, I was making notes and thought these are some good behind the scenes from my experiences that may also be helpful to you to give some additional examples to what Lisa and I just talked about. Here we go. Welcome back for part two of our episode and a follow up to our conversation with Lisa from Scaling Deep, where we're going to dive into some behind the scenes of the notes I was making as we move through the conversation with Lisa a little behind the scenes on what's happening on my home front here. The kids are home from school. I'm not typically doing a podcast recording at this time, but I wanted to get it in before it's tomorrow and before I get busy and I forget all of the beautiful things that came out of that conversation in the prior episode with Lisa. So if you haven't listened to the part one of of this miniseries yet, the episode just before, this is a beautiful conversation with Lisa where we dive into how to think about your membership launch strategies, pricing strategies, different styles and designs of memberships. And as I went through that conversation with Liza, I was making notes and thought, hmm, these are some good behind the scenes from my experiences that may also be helpful to you to give some additional examples to what Lisa and I just talked about. So with that, this is absolutely continuation and I'm going to dive right in. So first up, quick Start. One of the things that Lisa and I talked about in that episode was the idea that you may have people in your program, in your membership, in your experience, working with you in a consulting relationship that are on different paths. Now if it's a one on one coaching relationship or consulting engagement with a team, an organization, an individual, it's much easier to personalize those paths in a one on one capacity. But you can still personalize paths in group experiences. This is how we start to get to scalable intimacy and it's how we help people have impact faster. One of the examples of this I have two examples I want to share. One is when the modern CEO was previously called CEO school. So the modern CEO was a blending of something called CEO School and freshly implemented two experiences I hosted and when it was previously called CEO school, we did something called a quick start. So the quick start was that you would do a quick start or a mini lesson that was like maybe five minutes. I tried to keep it under five minutes where you'd get high level insights on each of the modules or each of the paths that you may be going down. But business isn't one size fits All. And not everybody may need to focus on their numbers. Maybe some people are starting to hire first or they need to build out their KPIs, right. So you may be at different points in the journey than another CEO. So with that in mind, everybody got the same overview. So we all had the same foundation. And then we had a roadmap for you to guide you down where you should go in deeper. Next, we use one of those like decision making guides that you'd see in like a magazine, like should I cut my hair? Yes or no. But it'd have to be more of a decision tree than that. So that doesn't really work. What style should I put do for my hair next? Okay, do you do a lot of fitness? Do you like to spend time at the beach? Right, so. Oh yes, I like fitness. Okay. Then you go down this path for your new hairstyle to be revealed. That was a terrible example. Focus on the quick start. So with the quick start, everybody started at the same place. We all had the same foundation. And then we used a decision guide or decision framework to move and invite people down the path that was personalized and customized for them based on where they were and what they needed in their business at that time. So that may be one way to think about personalizing paths for your clients. Another way that we can personalize paths is through desired result. So now inside the modern CEO, we generally have three paths that we start from. For someone who's focused on CEO systems, for someone who is focused on sales systems, and for someone who's focused on client success systems. And we group them and we map out your path for you, what you should do first, second, third and fourth based on if you're and grow scale, ramp up or CEO up stages. And we define what those stages are, right? So you'll know you're at grow if xyz. And if you are at the grow stage in your business right now, then this is the path that you follow. And we tell you what modules and what lessons and what pieces of the experience to step into. First, second, third, fourth. So that may be another way to think about this. Something else that we have done is that we have personalized, we talked with Lisa about group calls and we have personalized some of our conversations based on what your area of focus is right now. Meaning inside the modern CEO. Periodically we run what we call a fast track. And the fast track has pace setters in it. And essentially this is to help you complete an element of the experience for your business to get a piece of your business in place like you want it to be operating in a short amount of time. So it's called the fast track. But if we just said go down this path, right, we could do that. But we've already established a recommended path for people. So what we do in the pace setter is we define what should be completed when based on the path that you are on. And we walk that path together. Then over a series of four to six weeks, we host calls at each of the milestones in the pacesetter. Now, I mentioned that there are three paths, CEO systems, sales systems, and client success systems that people may be working on at any given time. So what we did is I take a 90 minute block for the fast track. The first 30 minutes we focus on CEO systems. The second 30 minutes we focus on sales systems. The final 30 minutes we focus on client success systems. So if someone isn't focused on CEO systems, they might not join right away. They might pause and come in midway. If someone's focused on client success systems, they might skip the first hour and meet us at that 60 minute mark. What actually ended up happening is that most people joined for the entire call, but then really tuned in when we were speaking about what was most relevant to them at the time. So it really turned out to be a great space to come together in community, harness the momentum and get the energy and brainstorms from other business owners, but then focus on your path when that timeframe came up. So we call that our fast track with the pacesetter, which is inside the modern CEO. Actually, if you're hearing me talk about the modern CEO and you're interested in any of this, you can go to amber mchugh.com modernceo to simply sign up to be notified when we next open for enrollment. So we also talked about live launching versus Evergreen versus Always open. And we talked about how I love the energy that comes with live launching and how sometimes I'm a little impatient when it comes to always open and evergreen. And we talked about this idea of it's nice to get your feet wet with Evergreen because you can test at so many different points, which you heard in that episode. And so I wanted to talk about my approach to building my comfort levels with live launching because I really think I got my feet wet with live launching. Now why do I like this? When I was starting my business, I had other commitments. I had other things going on as well. I started my business as a side hustle. So I wanted to really be focused on one thing at a Time. Because how many things can we do at once? One thing, right. So I wanted to be able to focus on one thing at a time. So I would build the marketing plan, build the program experience, then I'd implement the marketing plan with a launch and then I was able to focus and deliver, not focus on marketing while I'm delivering, but then I was really able to pivot to deliver on the promise and the experience that people purchased as a part of the live launch that was included in my marketing plan. So my launches didn't start big though, they started really small with no ads, all organic. And then once I had proven the model right, okay, that messaging works. Yes, it's converting or no, that's not really converting how I want. Okay, we can do better. Tweak, adjust, always marketing, launch, deliver on promise, then circle back, make adjustments. Right, Implement, learn, adjust, plan, implement, adjust. Right. So the cycle continued. Started with organic, then I put in a little bit of ad spend based on revenue that came in. I pulled out some ad spend. Good, it worked. Then I dialed up my ad spend. Okay, cool, it worked. Then I dialed it up. So this was over time that I was placing bets, so to speak, and investing to the extent that I trusted that the offer was going to work. So I am a little bit risk averse as well. I will take some risks, but I want them to be calculated. I'm thinking through them, I'm doing the math, I'm running the numbers and if I haven't tested something before, I'm not going all in. So I would test with a micro launch and then scaled it up, scaled it up, scaled it up over time as I get data, as I learn, as we dial in the messaging and we dial in the model. Now as I mentioned, I started my business as a side hustle, so I was not doing this right. Every month I would really space out my enrollments and then as I grew I running two businesses so I would still stagger activities so that when I'm launching right, my other business isn't doing something big at the same time, when the other business is doing something big, then I'm not launching. So I'm staggering those things so I can really pour in and spend my time and attention. So just another lens and a way to think about launching, right? You may not go all in to start, but you may test and then refine based on data that comes back and keep stepping it up. Speaking of testing, we talked about testing hooks. One way that Lisa suggested testing hooks, which I really like, is by running Traffic ads. So getting some ads out there, getting some engagement, what works? You can also post and see what gets organic engagement. In addition, if you already have an email community, you can simply ask right in a group on your page or on your email community. Hey, I'm considering preparing a training on X, Y, Z. Which one are you most interested in? Which topic appeals to you most? Click below and simply in the email invite people to click and then their vote is placed and your email system can then track who clicked and went to the page and then you can start to see, okay, this is where people will make the decision to take the next step. This is a topic that they are engaged in, intrigued in and they're taking action on. There's an engagement there. So that can you an indicator that this may be the right direction. So that is one possible way to test. We also discussed the app Heartbeat, a community space. I recently moved with my team in one of my businesses, our team of 50 over to Heartbeat and I'm really liking it. So the owners, the community is really engaged and they're responding to feedback. There is still functionality that we are hoping for and watching for and asking for, but they're also very responsive when something's not working quite right. So I love the engaged ownership, love being a part of building something new with a small business owner and I'm liking the structure of it. So as Lisa mentioned, there are events spaces built in. You can schedule meetups with people, you can match people up and invite them to connect one on one. There's course elements built into it, there's community elements built into it. So I just wanted to share a little bit more on that in case you're like, wait, what's Heartbeat? It is absolutely a community space. It has threads that work much like Slack's channels, but it also has other elements built in. So if you're looking for a space to host a community, so that may be one to check out and look at one thing. There is not. It is gamification, as I think and compare what are things that I would like, you know, what would I want if I were engaging a community? That is one thing for clients that I'd love to have some gamification in. But if that's not something that you want built in might be something to check out. We are happy with it. We talked about paths for your clients to go down so you can personalize their journey and layer in scalable intimacy. I shared with you how we are running the fast track inside the modern CEO. We talked about my approach to building up my live launching mindset and how I dipped my toe into live launching. We talked about testing, testing hooks, testing messaging, and I shared with you a little bit about the online platform to host a community and courses and content inside Heartbeat. I hope this behind the scenes was interesting for you, that you got some good stuff out of it. And if you are thinking about the modern CEO, definitely going over to Amber McHugh.com forward/modern CEO so you can get all of the info when we next open for enrollment. Have a great day. And remember, wherever you are in this journey of building your business, growing your membership, if that is what you're growing right now, whatever it is, whatever you are focused on, right on time.