What Can Happen In a Community a Year From Now? | People Magic Summit with Roger Whitney

Welcome, welcome, welcome, everyone. Hello. Hello. For session number two, how's everyone doing in the chat? Awesome. Wow. I'm. I'm so absolutely impressed seeing everyone from around the world for people joining at like close to midnight where they are. So thank you so much for everyone being here for session number two. Wasn't session number one so good when there's so much information that was given away? Gina and Martinez, like, they crush it all the time. But. But I'm so glad that we're here for our next speaker session, which is going to give you just as much information and insight that all of you need for your communities and growing until January 2025. Awesome. Shout out to everyone in the chat. Hello, hello, hello. That's right. Love to see it. Awesome. Well, let's get things started. Right. Our next guest. All right, this is a good one. I want everyone here to make noise in the chat. However you want to choose your favorite emoji, choose the clapping hands, whatever you want to do. But our next guest here is known as the Retirement Answer man, which is also the name of his award winning podcast. He's a certified financial planner professional with over 25 years of experience, and he helps people live well today without sacrificing tomorrow. His podcast also boasts about 8 million downloads and almost 500 episodes, which hopefully the People Magic profit podcast is going to get there. Everyone subscribe. And he's also won three Plutus awards for the best retirement blog and podcast. He's also the author of Rock A simple guide to help you take control and be more optimistic about the future, and was ranked as one of the top 100 most influential advisors by Investopedia on Mighty He. He's the host of the Rock Retirement Club, an online community for retirees seeking education and support. So again, everyone in the chat, watching everyone at home, pick your favorite emoji and give a big warm welcome to Roger Whitney.

Okay, I have one request. Dj, please send me a recording of that introduction so when I'm in my insecure stage that I can play that as a meditation.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Everyone clip that and we'll get. We'll send it to Roger. How are you doing, Roger?

I am awesome. How are you doing?

I'm doing great.

We're number two. We're number two.

Exactly, exactly. I always feel that in some, it's like, you know, one is to open the day, two is to get as much tangible, tactical information as you can walk away with. So really, really appreciate you being here and I know that you have so much insight to Share from Rock Retirement Club so thanks again for, for joining and thank you. We definitely will. Yeah, you know, we can jump right in. You know, I, I tell people to set the, set the baseline, I guess where it is. Can you tell us about the Rock Retirement Club? Who it is, who do you serve and how did the idea even come about?

I will, but first I want to say one thing, is I'm like Gina in the sense that I'm the ringleader, but Tracy Austin, Nicole Mills, our coaching staff, I get to be on here when they're the ones that are making everything happen and actually making it better without me even realizing it. So I am just a, a spokesman for a lot of people. So I, I got to make sure I say that. I love that. So what was your question?

Tell us about. Yeah, shout out to the team. But yeah, tell us about Rock Retirement Club. Who do you serve and how idea for it?

Yeah. So the Rock Retirement Club, Present State, is a community of about 1200 people. It's a paid community where we empower people to rock retirement. And what Rock Retirement means to us is creating an amazing life today with confidence that you'll still be okay tomorrow. Because we're all living on a teeter totter. And absent confidence, it's easy to sacrifice now for safety later, which has a real cost when you get older because your life isn't so symmetrical. Right. You're only going to be as healthy as you're going to be as we age. So it is a community of people that are focused on creating a great life and are. And they have a particular demographic and psychographic that makes it a really special place.

Love that. Love that. How did you think about creating a community for people in that transitionary phase of their life?

I don't know. It's just an idea. It was about six years ago. We have a podcast, and that's really the key of everything for us is about a podcast that's been running for about 11 years. And, and we just had an idea because from a, you know, we have our, you know, traditional retirement planning practice. And I'm not trying to scale that, but we wanted to figure out how do we serve people if we can't work with them? And we have a lot of really smart people. What if we built a club so we could build a community and teach people how to do this rather than advise them? And so we just asked, we did a survey, and we had you say, hey, we're thinking of, maybe we would do a community. Would you be interested in that what would you like? What would you. The normal kind of poll questions you would have. And had about 800 responses that were generally very positive. And we decided that, well, that's great, but we need to talk to some of these people. So I remember chatting with Nicole and say, let's talk to some of these people. So we did an online calendar and it quickly filled up. I had about 80 conversations in two days. And I. They're like five, five minute conversations. I just went conversation to conversation and I had like two or three questions and I don't even remember what the questions were, but I was logging the answers as I went through these five or so minute conversations. And at the end of it the answers were logged. But really what I came away with was, wow, all of these people are really, really nice. They're really, really intentional and they would really get along with each other. It was more that feeling of these are just awesome piece of people. They would love each other.

Wow.

And so that was the impetus of it. We had no real vision about what the club would be initially. Initially we had people using handles and not their names. We were worried about talking about finances. And so we used an agile project methodology in everything we do. So we just kept iterating and listening. So it's taken on a life of its own that we never would have imagined. So there was no grand plan from that perspective. It was an experiment.

Got it, Got it. What I'm hearing is that you started with the knowledge that you already had being with the 25 years of experience in financial planning, and then you started with the people you knew and then grew it out to where it is today. Am I correct in that?

Correct. And I think the podcast is the natural filter because we don't market the club anywhere other than the podcast.

Okay.

And we have a particular process we use, we have a particular philosophy and spirit. And so bluntly, the people that think I'm idiots or don't agree with me stop listening. So you self select into a certain spirit, not just simply planning process.

Got it, Got it. I love that. And then you chose people in this transitionary period of their life going into retirement. And that's what building community is all about. People in transition can come together and go through this Best year ever on Mighty. So that's. I love that. That's phenomenal. Yeah. You know, I really wanted to try to get some like these tangible tactics and wanted to talk about transformation on your community, within your community. You know, your entire community is looking towards the future, planning for Retirement. And that's what this entire summit is about. Looking towards 2025, January. There's a lot of people in the chat right now that are thinking about starting their community retirement, revamping their community. So I wanted to ask you over the past year, what were some of the key factors that contributed to the growth of the Rock Retirement club over a 12 month period?

I think number one is that we are hyper focused on who we serve and the core issues that they're dealing with. When you run a community, I liken it to like when I work with a client one on one, it's like taking my son or my daughter to the museum.

Hmm.

It's very bespoke experience. When you run a community, it's like taking the elementary school to the museum. You have lot, you're just, everybody wants something, everybody's having issues, everybody's running around. They all have lots of great ideas. But it becomes a little bit noisy and it's easy to get distracted on the individual things that are, that are important to a particular person, that are distract from the main things that you're trying to help people transform in terms of their life. So in retirement planning parlance, there are four pillars to having a solid plan. You have to have a vision of where you want to go. That vision has to be feasible given the resources that you have. And it has to be resilient. The fourth pillar is optimize. And so in planning parlance, optimize is like the bling, right? The, you know, the, you know, all the fancy stuff and that's the cool stuff, that's the sexy stuff, that's what we want to talk about. But the bling can get in the way of what do I want, can I do it, how do I make sure I don't get knocked off course? So when we run a, for us and running a community, it's really important to what are those key things? And keep going back to those things and add some bling now and then. But don't get too distracted because you'll get off message.

Yeah, yeah, No, I love that. Being clear about what your offer is, who you're serving, and why does it even matter? I love that. That's, that's phenomenal. Great. Yeah. You know, focusing on who you serve is huge. And we want people to not be broad, to kind of like bring it down into a very specific, fine tuned aspect. Because when you know the people that you're serving, you know the transition they're going in, that's how you know what you can offer them. That's a phenomenal.

And keeping them on course. Right in. And you know, go back to the, you know, if you're looking at the Tyrannosaurus rex at the museum and Johnny's running off to the next. No, Johnny, come over here. This is what we're doing first. We have to go here. Before we go, there is corralling to help. If you really want them to have transformation. It's getting some. Them to do the very unsexy basics.

Yeah.

Before they get to the fun stuff.

That's exactly my next question. Let's get specific. How do you keep people on course in a community when there is so many bling, there's so much things that they can do because you offer a lot within your community. How do you keep people on course?

It's a constant battle, Right. For us, it's a constant battle. That is my main role is every time we talk like we have meetups on a weekly basis and we have topics and we divide them between those pillars. So if someone's posting a question, it's going to be categorized. This is a feasible. Is this about feasible planning or is this about optimize? You know, so what we use, we use. I don't even know the parlance. Tracy's out here somewhere. She might know tags or. Or spaces to tag specific questions. So we don't want to talk about optimize if we haven't done feasible. So it's always bringing. What are we talking about here? Yeah, that's one way. And that ends up being my, my I'm the Metrodome to keeping that normal bringing back pace. And early on I would dive down the rabbit holes of planning and, and because I like to geek out with the, you know, with the rest of them. But I had to realize that that was not my role. My role was to be the Metrodome and keep bringing people back to a normal rhythm so they didn't get off course. But it's hard. Creep is hard.

Yeah. No, that's so true. I think when you're specific as you are, there's so many aspects to financial planning for your retirement. And then we utilize monthly themes, we utilize weekly activities. There's certain things that you can use to make sure that people are staying on track. So I love that we're getting a lot of tangible things and I hope everybody in the chat is taking notes as we go along. So can you break down like what your day to day looks like within your community?

So day to day in the community is Just asynchronous conversations going on within the chat feature. And we chose Mighty Networks very specifically because I am a believer, especially with AI, is that there are very few safe places in the world online. Meaning that the Internet has devolved into one huge sales funnel where every, all content is written to get you to do something else. Right? To get on the email list, to buy a course, to buy a product, whatever it is. And that's not bad. I mean, I do that to an extent, I guess. But we view Mighty Networks and the reason we use them is it's not indexed by Google. It's our safe place where we have rules of conduct, where we can have adult conversations, in this case about retirement planning with no politics, no sales, nothing that is leading you to go do something else. And that's, that's a. And so all of the conversations are related to that. So a typical day to day we'll have people asking technical questions or they're dealing with an issue and they're trying to get perspective on this issue that they're dealing with. Hey, someone just recommended this. Anybody have an experience with that? And what we found, and this is like, we have a number of retirement coaches within the club and our protocol is we are never the first ones to answer the question. Because if Roger comes in there and answers the question, well, I'm supposedly the retirement answer man, then that sort of, you know that, that, that's the final word in a sense. Right. So we want members to answer questions and then coaches or myself will come in and give context, flesh out the answer if it's incomplete, and then also celebrate the person for asking the question because everybody is afraid to ask a question because I think it's dumb a lot of times. And also celebrate the people that are sharing their perspective. And I think that's a really important thing because we're so excited. We want to get in there and help people. And it's important that we're not the initial ones doing it because by celebrating the question and celebrating someone answering the question, you start to build. We are doing this together rather than top down.

Oh, that's, that's so good. I, I saw some people asking the, in the prior session, how do you get engagement? And that philosophy is phenomenal. Don't be the first one to answer. Let other people answer. And then you have people of authority come in to kind of set the context. That's phenomenal. And again, something that I'm going to write down in my notes because I want to use that for my Community also. That is so, so good. That's great. So it's obviously super important for everyone to be able to talk to each other and, and have this space for people to congregate in, would you say?

Oh, for sure, for sure. It's a, it's a, it's our club. It really. We call it the clubhouse. It is a clubhouse. And, and it spurs. We haven't had a marriage yet, but I'm waiting at some point. But it spurs relationships that happen in group chats. We've had little side meetups that people have that have found their own little study group together.

Yeah.

And then we do have weekly meetups. So we have a very active live meetup schedule. I think it's active. And we have those four pillars on the financial side of retirement, but we also have four pillars on the non financial side. We have energy, mindset, passions and relationships. And so when we have a meetup we were in. Tracy is the, the leader of this coordinates a rhythm of we'll have a meeting on relationships and it's to learn something and it will be tagged that way or it's a meeting on relationships but it's going to be about connection. So people know what pillar the meetup is going to be and what experience they're going to get. And we've worked with the community activators at Mighty Networks which has been a big help since we switched to pro of just having that normal ideation on. Well, how can we organize this better? How can we make better experiences?

Oh, wow. Okay. So the transformation that's happening in your community is not simply the main offer financial planning. It's personal transformation. Also it's thinking about the future in other ways outside of just the finance part. It's how do you fix your mindset? How do you have the four pillars that you said that were off of, off of financial planning? That's, that's phenomenal. That's another little thing that I'm going to add in there. It was vision.

So in retirement. And this is really the point of the financial stuff, right? Yeah, the financial stuff we tend in my industry. But individuals, that's like the acute problem people come into a doctor with if they want to retire is can I do it financially? Right, right. But it. So we tend to treat financial as the hub when really it's a spoke. And the hub is your life. Right. Okay. And. But you come in with an acute issue on the financial end which you need to deal with. But if you just treat the symptom and just Think about finances, you sort of miss the point of a healthy body.

Right.

And so in the non financial realm, you have to have energy because we're all getting older in the cohort. So that's eating, moving, sleeping. And then you have to have a healthy mindset because it's very easy to have a constrained mindset and not a growth mindset as you get older. The, the current is pushing against you a little bit on that. Right. Passions are replacing for work. How are you going to use your skills in the world? And we divide passions between, you know, curiosity, hobbies, pursuits and contribution. And then relationships, which is really the place we need to focus is, you know, building, you know, your quality of your happiness and fulfillment is going to be based off of relationships, if anything else.

Absolutely, absolutely. So yeah, so then your transformations in your community is like twofold. Do you offer specifically courses? You said live events. What is your specific offers look like and the features that you use on mighty.

So currently we offer courses, so we bring people in, in cohorts and we can maybe talk about that a little bit. So three times a year we open up enrollment and when we bring them in, we have a 30 days to a feasible plan because most everybody's coming in for the acute. I need a plan or I need confidence. Right, you need a plan to get the confidence. It's a means to an end. And so we have a retirement masterclass that walks them through building a feasible plan of record and then they go on to how do they iterate on that and go down? So we bring people in cohorts and specifically get everybody to a feasible plan of record. And so they're at a baseline with everybody else to be able to iterate on all these other stuff. First things first.

Got it. Is it easier to do a cohort base that way?

It's a lot easier because if you. It's because, you know, right. The size of our community now of 1200, if you just bring people in, the biggest issue they have, if they come in asynchronous one on one is they're entering a party that's been going on for a while. So they don't know what they don't know, they're confused, they don't know who to talk to. They don't have any. They didn't walk in with a friend necessarily. So if you think of it going into a party. So this way we can bring people in, help them build some connections, but also help them navigate the biggest barrier to building a community. When you're Bringing new people in, which is overwhelm. It's just, that's why the number one reason people leave is I don't have the time or I'm just overwhelmed. So this helps them integrate and learn how we speak, learn how we talk, so when they get into the bigger community, they can have a better experience and feel more at home.

Got it, Got it. No, that's, that's a great, great points. And I see some people saying they're thinking about going to cohorts for their community. That's a, that's a great, easy, easily manageable, giving them a better onboarding experience so they know what's going on.

And then practically workflow wise from, you know, onboarding and process based, it's a lot easier to manage. Tracy can attest to that. I think she was on here earlier. It's a lot easier to manage the workflow than just random people coming in at all different times.

Right, right. Yeah. Managing the workflow. I love this. These are things that I feel like a lot of people in the chat are walking away with that they can say, oh, maybe I'll try that for.

My one last little thing on that, if I may, dj, please. Is that we are as anti sales as they come. But constraint is a motivator and knowing you can only get in at certain times and helps people make decisions.

Right. Okay, let's break that down. Constraint is a motivator and it's the scarcity play. It's the, this is exclusive. You can only get in at a certain time, make the choice and jump in. That's, that's phenomenal. That's a great, great point. So then I guess what you're saying is that your community leaders, Tracy in the chats and I saw Nicole Mills is the other. I see Nicole there. So you're saying that they have to set goals to ensure a successful transformation that happens with each of these cohorts. Can you like go deep and specific about what goals they are like? We talked about the financial side, we talked about the personal side. Do you have weekly activities? Do you utilize monthly themes? Do you use any of the people magic that we've talked about in, in the podcast or our framework that we use?

I'm waiting for Tracy to type something. Well, we have a schedule. We do some themes. We're working on pathways for different individuals. That's one thing that we are working on that we got from the mighty team of. Some people come in and they're more concerned about what my identity is and what I'm going to do. They're not so much worried about the money and some people were just worried about the plan. So we're working on building pathways. We currently don't do themes, I think, in the way that it's been preached. In terms of this week, we're going to talk about, there's Tracy, she's talking about cohorts, but we don't normally, I don't think we have any themes on a monthly basis where we're just talking about this topic this month.

Got it, got it. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah.

I will say one thing that we do have that is, I guess theme based is once you have a plan of record, which is your version one or whatever version of this is what I want and this is how I'm going to do it the next day. Just like a business plan, everything changes. So what we do do on a quarterly basis is we have what we call guided Agile Retirement management, where I essentially host a retirement meeting like exactly like I would with a client, but I do it to the club and I give them checklists like, okay, this, it's quarter one. Here are the things where you're going to cover. You have your worksheet, here's how we're going to cover them. And I'll do it with a fictitious example to try to guide people to do their own meeting during that quarter. So try to mass deliver a planning meeting where I'm not actually their advisor.

Okay. Do you ever get people asking for like specific advice that it only pertains to them and it's like all the time. All the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But that's where we have, we practice boundaries that we can't, you know, we can't. And plus, in my other business, I'm a regulated individual, so I have higher bars in turn and, and consequences for violating those boundaries. So we're pretty, we're pretty tight on those.

Got it. Does, does that stop? Well, the, the boundaries that you have on platform, you take people through these cohorts, you make sure that they're going through every step of your offer, making sure that they're going through everything and not skipping anything. Do you have people that try, that derail and, and how do you, if, if you do, do you have people that you know or ways to kind of get them back onto course?

Well, I'll challenge one thing, dj, is we don't make anybody do anything.

Okay.

You walk them through it. It's their choice whether they do it or not.

Right.

And we think of what can we control, we can, you know, we can set it up, we can teach them how, but it they have to do the work, we can't do the work for them. And that's, and that's hard because we want to do the work for them. We want, you know, it's easy to overdo what you should be doing because you want to help them. But if they don't do the work, they're not going to get the results. The process is structured about how to think about things. So we keep using that framework. One thing I learned from Dave Ramsey and Dr. Laura, you can love them, hate them in terms of what they talk about, but what they do very well is we have our four pillars. We think you need to go through things in an orderly way in that order. And what Dave Ramsey and Dr. Laura back in the day were very good at. You never, you never hear Dave Ramsey have an exception for his baby step. Right or wrong, he never has an exception. Doesn't matter how crazy the situation is. And obviously in an individual person's life there are nuances and exceptions. But when you're teaching, you can't teach those. That's judgment calls that has have to happen on the individual level, not on the process level. The process can still be sound and the individual is responsible for taking those nuances and incorporating them into it.

Yeah, yeah, that's true. We like to say that people pay attention to what they pay for. So people getting into this exclusive time based cohort at Rock Retirement Club, you assume that they're probably going to be doing all the work that they need to do. But just, yeah, just some people were asking, you know, how do you keep people on track? So I thought that's phenomenal. You don't hold hold hands, but you give the structure on the platform and let them know that, hey, everything's here for you. Reach out. If you have questions, people can talk to you, the community can rally again around you and they can help you through this.

Like a really good example is like the bling of the day in retirement planning is Roth conversions.

Right, right.

So someone in the community asked about Roth conversions. One of the first questions needs to be, well, do you have a feasible and resilient plan? Because if you don't, you shouldn't even be talking about this. Right, right. So we try to self correct. It's like, well, you got to do that first to get to here.

Got it.

Okay. Otherwise you're building something on sand. You're making a decision on sand.

It all goes back to the pillars that you've established. Everyone should know those things. And then if they have a question, wrap it back around. Is it feasible? Yeah, that makes, that makes a ton of sense.

You don't put on the bling of jewelry before you have your clothes on.

Yes, there we go.

Put your clothes on first.

Right, that's, that's right. In the museum we go to Exhibit 1 first and not Exhibit 10.

Exactly.

I love that. That's great. Okay. Yeah. We had some questions that people were throwing in the chat and I wanted to pull them up. Oh, we, we tried to talk about this, but people did ask what you do when you have troublesome people that, who like to derail. That typically doesn't happen with your, the way that you have your cohort set up.

It doesn't online. What we have found, and it's a great question. We've, we have a rule, a code of conduct that we do enforce, but we've rarely had to, especially around politics and, and, and so forth. We have no pol. Political discussion.

Yeah.

Generally the things that we've had to enforce, but it's been more nuanced, are going to be in meetings where people are being too directive. And this is how you do it. You know, telling someone else this is how you do it when. Exactly when they don't really know the person or their situation. And there's an art to naturally doing it in a kind way and then helping. Correct. And we have some people a little bit more opinionated than others and a lot of that goes around to. I imagine if we advertised Google Ads or everywhere and we didn't bring in our people, we probably would have a lot bigger issue with that. But because everybody comes through the podcast, they tend to self select where that's not really been an issue.

Got it.

I would be very worried if we just mass market it because I think we would get a lot of people that were not our people. They're Dave Ramsey people or they're somebody else's people.

Right.

They're bogleheads or whatever. And so I think that's, that's really helped us a lot. I'd rather not grow than bring people like that in.

Right. Yeah. And the podcast helps with that. It helps with the self vetting. There are people asking how our cohorts vetted. If they are. Do they have, do you have maybe some questions that they have to answer when they come on?

No, no, we don't.

Okay.

No, we don't. But they have a 30 day free look.

Okay.

To be part of the cohort. But no, we don't have any vetting questions. I have no doubt that we have financial planners in there. We've thought about trying to vet for planners coming in. I know, I know that we do have some in there, but they've been respectful in terms of not soliciting and not talking. I think they're more lurking and trying to learn from me than they are trying to solicit business.

Right, right. There's so much info that you can get. There's so much that you. The value that you have behind the paywall that people tend to stay on topic. That makes sense. But I think it's great that I saw some people calling out that it's good to state your guidelines, state your rules in your community so that people know if you ever need to point them directly back to that. We had some questions around, you know, the cohort. How do you organize them? Is it just whoever comes in from that three months, Is it just. Do you put people for specific. Yeah, ask.

Yeah. So we have somebody. We have a. We have a open enrollment coming up in November, and it. It's going to last about 12 days. So we'll have an open period where people can join and we'll drive from the podcast to an online meetup or a webinar, whatever you want to call it. In this case, we're going to teach about Roth conversions, and then we'll have an open house on the club. And so during that period of 12 days, people can join and they'll go right into a private cohort group. And then once the cohort enrollment closes, will have three kickoff meetings, and then those will go right into what we call a sprint, which any member of the club can go. It's like, okay, let's get you jump started here. In 30 days, we're going to get you to a feasible plan. You're going to know what your goals are and whether it's feasible or not. And then that is how we initiate them. So over about a 30, 40 day period. And then, then they are just in the natural cycle of things. Things. They've caught up a little bit to everybody else. They've gotten a quick win by building a feasible plan, and then they can start to explore from there. Okay, does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The cohorts. Yeah. Making sure that they go through the entire process. Now, I'm really interested in this meetup that you also run. Also. Do you have. What are the guidelines around that? How do you even. How do you have, like, people Go from online to being in person. And how do. How does that, you know, get organized?

Oh, you mean the in person meetups, correct?

Yeah.

Okay. So we started those as I used to travel a lot more than I do now. So when I traveled, I would just raise the flag and say, we're going to have an hour meetup. And it would be social and we would have anywhere from 10 to 30 people come. You know, I'd be in Tennessee or something like that. And then we morph that to now we do. Right now it's four hour meetups. So we did. We've done three. We did one in the villages and we have 35 people come and we spent four hours in a room chatting with. Just facilitated conversation around topics, not a presentation or any sort. And that is very powerful because I'm a big believer in. I'm very cautious of people I let into my life and I think everybody else is too. Right. So building relational currency just deepens the online. When they go back online, they're much more comfortable with each other and with the community having been across the table from. And then. And so we do those periodically throughout. Throughout the year, depending on travel schedule and then early on. And this was a member idea of, well, what if we had a super meetup. So we did one in Fort Worth, Texas, and we had about 38 people. This is the first year I think we maybe had 100 members and we had about 20, some 20, 30 people come to Fort Worth, Texas for two days. And it was just. It just blew you. It blew me away. And I know it blew Tracy away. And so we just kept doing that. Now it's called the RRC Roundup. And we just had ours the fifth one two weeks ago, and we had almost 300 people come to Grapevine, Texas for two and a half days. We had. First day we had 80 people at Pickleball. Then we had a event at night. And then we literally had our own retirement conference over two days with speakers and breakout sessions. And this is the first year that we charged for it and it was a nominal fee. So our. And this is. There are different strategies of doing this, but we don't do any upselling in the club. So up until this year, someone could come to the conference for free, they said to get themselves and pay for their food. As it's gotten bigger, I think we charged $90 this year. So we, we are more of a. You pay, you pay an annual fee, you get everything. We're not going to try to get you. We don't have things behind a paywall within the community. And there are different ways of doing that, but that's how we do it.

Got it. Got it. There was a question about the 30 days free when people get the ability to join. Do they join for free? Is.

No, they pay up front and then they get refund. Yeah.

Okay. And then they get refunded. Okay. And then there's the expectation of like an upsell once they see all the value that you have within the community, that they end up staying.

Yeah, that's the goal. Yeah, they end up staying.

That's a great, great strategy. So you're really, you're really building culture. It's. It's the idea around retirement. It's the idea around forward thinking, reframing retirement from how we've been taught from our parents and their generation beforehand. So you're kind of building this entire culture within the community, online and offline. Am I correct?

Yes. And it wasn't our intent at all. We just thought people wanted to learn geeky financial things.

Yeah, yeah.

And then the other part of this, I think, dj, is we license a number of tools. So in addition to the, in addition to the pillars, we license tools that allow them to be able to execute on those. And we have retirement planning software, we have other software. And the problem with tools, like, everybody has their favorite tool, but there's a value to everybody using the same tools because every tool is going to be very defective in some way. But you start to get a community where they're sharing how they use it, you build this collective wisdom on how to use it, which means you extract a ton of value from the tool or the process. When everybody's using the same things and using the same language, It's a force multiplier in terms of connectiveness and impact in people actually doing things. I'll hit on that in a moment, too. I think language is really important. We don't have meetings, we have huddles, we do sprints. I mean, even down to things that just came out naturally. It's like I forget how it happened on the show, but I don't think about things. I just naturally say, I'm going to noodle on that. And. But we have this vernacular that has sort of grown that this is how we talk and that is how culture works.

Right.

This. If you want to be a part of a tribe, a tribe acts a certain way. They don't talk about politics, they don't troll, they're always nice and they use certain words. And I Think that's the secret for whatever the hell is happening in it. Whatever we're doing. I love figuring it out.

Yes. Language, learn, behavior. That's part of the culture that you can build on your mighty network. That's such a, such a great call out. And then I know we talked about your ideal members, but do you have like different tiers or different flavors of your ideal members? Like there's people that are further along in their financial planning path journey.

That's where we're working on these pathways where we're I think, a little deficient because we have. And it's a little bit hard. DJ if you think about it. So you have people that are five years before retirement and very constrained on their finances. But then you have people that are five years before retirement but very overfunded.

Yeah.

And then you have people that are five years after retirement that are constrained or overfunded. We want to make sure we're hitting different those people. And so we're working on how do we build pathways. And then we have people that. I'm not worried about the financial stuff, but I need this non financial stuff. How do we help them self select pathways so they can get what they need without taking away the opportunity for them to speak into somebody else's. Right. Because the people that have the finances figured out and they're five years into retirement, we want to make sure that they're still hanging around the person that is on the other end because that's who's going to help them. We, you know, I want that. I'm very much like that person. I need to talk to that person. So we don't want to lose that while still giving each member. And we haven't quite figured that out yet.

Right. Okay. Okay. Yeah. There's, there's people that you will open your community to that will be at different points in their journey of the best year ever that you're offering them. That's this transformational journey. Some might be further along, some might just be at the very zero point. And that's where you have to, you know, provide for, for all of them. That's a, that's a great, great call out.

And they need to help each other. They need to know each other.

There we go. Yeah, they need to know each other. They need to help each other and recognize where everybody else is. That everyone might not be in the same, same spot. I love that. Yeah, this is great. This is where we're trying to think of how people can prepare their community for January to start. It off. Right. People are naturally in this transitionary phase of going into a new year, but whatever transition that they are serving in your community, everyone in chat, think about that. Think about the specifics of where your people may be in this journey, how you can serve all of them. That's a phenomenal call out. So we've talked about the cohorts. You know, I have a lot of questions. Let me actually jump into the question for you again. Do you, do you entertain guest speakers? Tito had asked, whether paid or free, do you offer like other people of authority, like yourself, to your community?

Yeah, we bring in special guests on a regular basis and in 25, we're, we're moving towards. Tracy might not know that. I think I told you this, Tracy. We're moving to having a special guest. We're going to try to hit one every other month. They're never paid. And just like on my podcast, I don't have a lot of guests. They have to have, they have to be the real deal and have something important to share because there's plenty of people that want to be guests of everything. So we, we look at ourselves as the gatekeeper of safe. People that have the reps in and what they're talking about and they're coming in to serve and not sell the, you know, the. If they're trying, like a good friend of mine, Dan Crosby, just came out with a great book today, the Soul of Wealth. Give him a shout out. He's been on the podcast and he'll be in the club again. He's been in the club. He's the real deal. I'll bring him into the club and he's going to help people. But I think that's very important.

Yeah, yeah. Calling upon those people of authority within your own network to offer more value to your community. I love that. That's a, that's a great, great takeaway from this. And yes, Jane, in the chat, people always want to start with expert guests. Roger is a great example that you don't need to start there. You can start with what you know and then add more and more value. That's phenomenal. So, yeah, the structure that you have of your community, we have some people asking about that. And is it predominantly course based? Is it. We have the meetups we talked about. How would you, if you can give us like a high level breakdown of how do you structure the entire three holes?

Yeah, it'd be great if I could just show it, but it's primarily clubhouse based.

Okay.

Meetups and then there are courses as part of the clubhouse that you can go to. Okay, so it's primary community based. And then we have a, you know, the, the table stakes is getting your going through the not or the financial master class to get your plan of record. But it's primary community based.

Community based. Got it. So people can join into whichever space they want to talk about the basics of financial planning. Talk about those tools that we, we spoke about. I think you've mentioned like having like the master class as well. And then decision pods. There's a multitude of different ways that you can structure your left hand navigation for everyone that's thinking about how to structure theirs. So feel free to think about it in this way. Maybe have a space for every topic within your transition that you're taking people through. Or maybe you can make it to where there's a one watering hole and then everyone can talk.

There's a lot of creep that can come with those different topics. We've gone down that rabbit hole and we've settled on these eight pillars for financial for none of. And they're not perfect by any means, but they're an organizing principle that helps us avoid creep.

Okay.

And one thing I want to point out dj, in terms of, you know, we used to really focus on engagement as a metrics to track and we still pay attention to it. But what we have found is, let's face it, I don't know what percentage is. 90% of the people are never going to comment and are never going to have their face up on Zoom. And we want to make sure it's engaged. But almost the vast majority are going to be lurkers. They're going to do the course, they're going to listen. So every meetup we have, with a few exceptions, are video replays and the audio is taken. And we have our own private podcast that that's probably the primary way that everybody consumes content is just listening to the private podcast or watching the video replays.

Right. Okay. So for those that are lurking, for those that aren't comfortable enough to engage, you make sure that all of the content that you have is replayable. It's within the community. They can consume it on their own end. And then do you do any encouragement to try to help people kind of come out of their shell and ask the questions that they need to ask.

Oh, of course, of course. But you know, on the meetup. But that's people we've had like really special moments. I can think of Willie in our community who, I mean, brought you to tears. But those are going to be things that aren't planned. Right. If you just are naturally asking question. Now, our podcast is actually a private podcast that goes to an Apple Feed or. Or anywhere you get podcasts. So it's not within the club. So it's like they subscribe to a special podcast since they already listened to podcasts.

Got it. Okay. So extra exclusive value past the the wall. Once you're set, the community, you get exclusive content. Do you go in depth? Do you take a different approach than you would the retirement Answer man podcast or.

Yeah, because it's just whatever, you know, I. I host one meetup a month, but we have coaches hosting different meetups. So there's, you know, there's a weekly podcast of different coaches, some teaching, some community discussion. So it's all over the board.

Got it, Got it. People are loving the private podcast idea. Yeah.

Do you.

Do you call, like, people's names out and, like, answer questions specifically? Yeah, always.

And those are those moments where. Can I tell one, like a one story?

Yeah.

I have a lot of favorite stories, but this is one we. We had a lady who I'm going to actually interview for the show. She's coming out of her shell, but. So she was 60, retired. It was very clear she had enough money, so money wasn't a worry. She always wanted to travel, but never has. And she was talking about traveling and going to Europe, but I'll do it three or four years from now. So that's the setup of her first part of her conversation that I had with her. And then immediately after that, she said, oh, yeah, my family has this degenerative disease. My mom's blind. My sister, who's younger than I, starting to go blind. And, you know, so she just sort of threw that in. And I'm like, in my mind, I'm like, well, what the heck are you doing? You don't know if you have it or not, why you're not traveling. And she was like, oh, yeah, that's not a bad idea. Like, yeah, it's a good idea. And so what we did was we had a community. I anonymized her, and I hosted a meetup to build a travel guide to Europe. And so we had members discussing how to plan the trip, where to stay, things to do, and we just had an open discussion after I framed it the way I did. And then we took that and created a PDF resource, our Guide to Traveling to Europe, and gave it to her and gave it to everybody else. And literally three months later, she Sent me a photo from like Munich and she's been traveling non stop. And so taking these little individual stories and holding someone up, even if it's anonymous, to try to love on them and empower them, that's community building.

Oh, I love that. That goes back to Martinez in our first session was talking about never miss a handshake. You're never missing a story. You're trying to help people share who they are and then give them the umph, the like, I don't know, encouragement to, to take the risk they never had. So that's a.

And the one thing I would share is where it doesn't really matter, I think what kind of community it is, is I used to have one on one office hours. We don't do that anymore. Every Friday you could schedule 20 minutes to have a conversation with me. And I would have nine or so every Friday. And so I had hundreds of those over a few years. And the one third everybody came with, presenting with an issue. You know, I'm thinking about Roth conversions, I'm thinking about this. And we could easily answer those. But what I came away with, the one common theme I observed in those conversations, DJ were at the core of it in some way. Almost everybody was asking for permission to do what they already sort of wanted to do.

Yeah.

So in our community, if I were to say what's the number one issue? It's confidence. How do they, how do people give themselves confidence? Because all the information is out there to sort of get over themselves a little bit and think a little bit more broadly. And we've incorporated it in everything we do. It's about empowering people so they have confidence.

Yeah, I love that. That's such a great takeaway. Community building is all about empowering people to make them feel confident in the thing that they already want to do. That's a great, great takeaway. I know we're coming up on time. I wanted to answer some folks questions that they had. If everyone here is taking notes like I am, you have so much stuff that you can walk away with. There's so many things that you can implement into your own community. So this has been great. Roger, thank you so much for sharing all that you have. We had a question about your plans. Do you make your plans hidden during the closed time that the cohort isn't open?

When you meet our plans, what are we referring.

Sure. When people join, do you have it to where everything's closed, you have a wait list maybe that people are like, oh, I only heard about you but now it's closed. I can't join this cohort. I have to wait for the next one. How do you.

Yeah, we do have a. We do have a wait list that we nurture.

Okay.

With the email sequence. And then the podcast is a natural nurture because I'm there weekly with them. And then we, like, right now we're starting to talk about. We're going to do this online meetup where we'll talk about a topic and teach and then talk about the club. And that will start the open enrollment.

Got it. Okay. Perfect. For those who asked about the plans. Phenomenal. You want to make sure that you're taking the wait list of people that are trying to get into your community. Make sure you don't lose them so you can bring them right back in. Yeah. People asked how, on average, how long do your members stay within your community?

The data on that's a little difficult. It's. It's gotten better. I know my networks has worked a lot on that. The metrics on that is very elusive.

Yeah.

I don't know how to answer that. I think it's. I think the last time we looked, on average it's two to three years, but I don't know. I don't have a really good answer for that.

Sure, sure. No worries. I think Tracy Nicole are answering in the chat as well. But you can always utilize your mighty insights on your platform. For anyone that does have a mighty network, or if anyone's interested in starting their own, we have a ton of analytics that you can use to find out and see the health of your community and different levers that you can pull to then help grow and, and make that engagement scale the way that you want to. Great. Let me choose one more question as we're getting closer to time. Oh, Gina asked about their first experience joining the community. Can you take us through? They found the podcast. They hear about the Rock Retirement Club, obviously. I'm sure people probably start and asking you like, hey, can I join your actual financial planning business that you have? The Agile.

Yeah. Retirement man.

Agile Retirement. Yeah. But then they hear about the community. What is the process? They get in with the cohort. Do you have like an onboarding experience? And Tracy Nicole, feel free to jump in.

Yeah. We have a nurture, an email nurture experience to try to stop them from jumping into the deep end and get overwhelmed. And do this first, do this first, do this first. And then the first live interaction is a welcome hour with me. And then my objective there, obviously is just to love on people, but is to walk them through an exercise. Okay, you just joined. Let's say it's November 1st. By the end of the year, I want you to list out what are the things that you want to either have accomplished or clarity on between now and the end of the year. So I try to get them focused on what is your intent, because DJ's intent is going to be different than Sven's intent. And so what does DJ care about right now? And be specific, not general. Specific is important. I want to have a feasible plan. I want to make a connection and then I frame what is it you want and let that guide them through going through the process. Because if you don't define your intent very specifically, you can really get lost quickly.

So true. That's so well said. You have to make sure that they state what they want out of the community before jumping into the deep end. I love that. Hopefully someone wrote that down. That is phenomenal. I see Tracy answering so many questions. Thank you so much for being. Being in here. Yeah, she's crushing it. That's a. That's a really, really big key thing. I think that you just touched on Roger. And for everyone out there, you have to figure out like you're offering so much within your community, but you have to figure out what your members want. And that meetup with you and they can talk to you that one hour when they join. That's phenomenal. They get. They join for you, they found you, and then they get to meet you upon entering. Is such a great, magical.

Can I. Can I. I want. We have five minutes or so.

Yes.

Two things that I think are important. One is like we're looking at licensing a budgeting software right now. And the question I. And I already. I have it all teed up. It's just a matter of whether we do it or not. And one of. We talked about this yesterday and the question was, what should we survey? Surveys are great. We do lots of surveys.

Right.

My. My thought is, no, we don't. Because everybody has to budget. They're all going to have their opinions and their favorite tools. And sometimes if you ask people what they want, it's bluntly. It's a little bit of a lazy question. Right. It's. Everybody's going to be different. It's hard to ask what they want. I think in part of really knowing your. You have to have a little bit of confidence in what do they need. And I think surveying too much can really distort the picture on what is it they need. Like I think of this, this discussion, there's what do people want to hear? Or what do they need to hear? I rather focus on what they need to hear and live or die by it. So that's number one. The second thing, when it comes to community building, my philosophy is orchards. We build orchards. When you're building a community, and this is the same with the podcast, growth is really important, but this does not happen quickly most often. And when you're hunting and killing, trying to close people to join a community, you create a dynamic of just sales and not manipulation in a nefarious sense, but you create tactical stuff of get, get, get, get. Whereas if you're building an orchard, which means you may not eat as well early on because it's not mature, it sets a much solid, more solid foundation for something that's sustainable. So we tend to take an orchard building approach, which has served us well.

Love it. Love it. That's such a, such a great note to leave us on. People may not know what they need. They're coming to you as the expert, the authority figure to give them what they need. You can make sure that they get surveyed as much as possible so that you know what their wants are and what they're trying to get out of it, but they don't know what they need. And that's where you come in as the host of your community. And let's not fall into, like the salesperson trap that tends to happen with trying to get so many people into your community. You have to plant the seed, let it grow over time, and then you'll reap the fruits of your reward. That's such a phenomenal, phenomenal way to leave this on. So this is, this has been great. Thank you, thank you. Thank you so much, Roger, for all of this insight, for all of this information people are talking about that they. Yes, you can definitely spend. You need to prune orchards also.

He's got a real orchard. He said.

Yes, exactly. And exactly that. This is, this has been phenomenal in terms of insights, in terms of things that people can think about when building their community in January, January 2025, if you haven't started already or if you have, use a lot of the points that Roger had brought up, because that's how you make your community retentive. That's how you make people engaged. That's how you give them what they need, and that's how you plant the seeds to water now to then reap the rewards later on. But this is so many, so many good points. Hopefully everybody took notes. There will be replays of this also. Thank you so much Roger. And as always, for everyone in the chat, there will be a link that will be sent for the 1:45pm Eastern Standard Time session with Ryder Carroll. Make sure to check your email as well to join the link. They'll drop it in the chat, but feel free to grab a snack, get a coffee, whatever you want. Get a new fresh page in your notebook. There's so many notes that you can take. Thank you so much, Roger for being here. Thank you so much for giving us all of your insight for the Rock Retirement Club.

You bet. Thanks for hanging out too, Tracy. Great job.

Yes. Thank you team.

Be well. Be well.

Take care everyone.