How Accounting Firm Owners Can Generate Passive Income with Skool

Let's get started. And today's session is all about building passive income for our business, our accounting firms. And what we're going to cover in this session is we're going to cover why recurring revenue is powerful. We're going to look at why community is so important. We're going to look at how you can monetize your knowledge in some interesting ways. We're going to look particularly at one platform that you could use. There are others, but I'm going to focus on one in particular. There's a reason for it. I'll explain later. It's called school with a K, not ch. And what I will also do is do a quick demo of how if you go down that particular route to build recurring revenue, a quick step by step of how you would set it up, how you can add value to your clients, to your members, how to keep them engaged and how to grow a community, how to scale, how to make money, essentially. So we've got a lot to cover in this session. And let's start off though with just a bit of, a bit of background and I don't know, one of my good friends in my AI academy, Randall, just literally this morning sent me a link to something really interesting called Head the World's First AI Marketer. And I checked this out and I was fascinating. It made me suddenly realize, wow, marketers as a profession are soon going to be replaced. And I was also watching a session last night, I follow Peter Diamandis, and they were talking about the number of jobs that are going to disappear. And of course, accountants and bookkeepers are right near the top of the list. I've been saying this for 18 months, that AI is going so fast now that a lot of the compliance work, like bookkeeping, data entry, filling in, tax terms, that will disappear because the AI is advancing so quick. It's rules based. I've seen, for example, just recently on some Facebook groups of accountants and bookkeepers. There's been a few threads around people not happy with Intuit's qbo, with Intuit of saying.

They'Re going to be replacing us. Well, yes, they absolutely will be. I'm sorry about this. They have no loyalty to accountants and bookkeepers. They are a software company and so they are building AI into qbo. And we know that the other software firms, the fintech companies, are doing exactly the same. I think that Sage just recently launched their copilot, which, yes, that's to help accountants using Sage, but there's no doubt they are very much into AI as well. And so at some point, and I think this will be much sooner than we realize, we will find in the profession that things like bank reconciling, bank accounts, doing bookkeeping, data entry, it's going to disappear. And certainly by 2030, I think long before that. These tools are just getting so advanced right now. So that all means, what does that mean for us in the profession? Should we be scared, should be worried? Yes, possibly. But I also see this as being a world of huge opportunities for those people that want to grasp them and live in this new AI world. Yes, there will be many people in the profession that get left behind. And that happens in. Well, that'll happen with every industry. There's opportunities, but some people won't grasp them. So yes, AI is coming, it's going to be replacing our jobs. And so what we have to do is we have to adapt, we have to change, we have to look at the opportunities of how we can protect ourselves. And one of the things we have to do is we have to continually think about how we're going to create value for our customers. How are we going to create value for business owners? And I see there being two ways of doing that. Essentially one of those is that we could take each individual, individual client that we have and deliver more value. And as my friend Ron Baker talks about, what we should be doing is moving up the value curve. That means that what we should be doing is moving away from data entry and bookkeeping and moving towards advisory work, advanced tax planning and so on. And that's not a new message. We've been talking about that for decades now, and some have done that and some haven't. So we certainly should be looking at creating value for our clients by moving up the value curve. But the other way that we can do things if we want to generate more revenue and generate more value for people is we can also create the same amount of value but for more people by scaling, by scaling. And that's what we're going to focus on in today's session.

How do we scale? Because the problem is we're in a business where even if you value pricing, essentially we work one to one with clients, traditionally where you spend an hour. And so our limit, our limit is always number of hours that we've got. And really we scale normally by hiring people. But I know from a recent session in Portugal with some of my best value pricing academy members is they all said their number one challenge in business was people related issues. So sometimes that's not the best thing to do in Fact, I was watching a podcast just last night. I think it was, it was Stephen Bartlett, the Diary of a CEO. And he was talking about how that some of the major companies now have issued memos to their team to say, we're not hiring more people. Now if you feel we need more people, we are going to be looking for AI to do the work, not people. So that's interesting. This world is changing fast. So how do we scale other than with people, how can we scale? And one of the things I talked about for years is that we could build a business club. So rather than working one to one with clients, which is not scalable unless we hire people, then what we can do instead is run a business club. We could work one to many. And I've talked over the years about different models of doing that. I ran a business club in my accounting firm many, many years ago, which I started in, I think it was the year 2000.

And that's essentially what we're going to talk about today. But also because another thing that's been talked about a lot over the last couple of years now is, is that as the world moves more digital, as the world moves into AI, and also because we had a few years down lockdowns with COVID people are increasingly, increasingly wanting connection with other humans and they're wanting a more of a sense of community. People want a sense of community, a sense of belonging. And so what we should be thinking about if we want to take our firms to another level is how can we create more of a community rather than just working with clients one to one doing compliance work, how do we create this sense of community? So it's a different way of thinking, it's a different business model, but it's one that becomes scalable. And there's now technology, platforms and things that make it much easier than ever before to do this. I've been running this type of business model now for, let me think, 22 years. So back in 2003, I joined Steve Pipe. I ran a community of accounting firms in the UK called avn and we were helping accounting firms become more profitable. And then in 2014, I started the Value Pricing Academy, which is a community of forward thinking, amazing accounting firms where we get together, we help each other. And so I've been doing communities for a while now. And what I found is that the technology today is so much better than it ever was before. And so what I want to talk about as part of this opportunity is the tech that you could use. And I'm going to Talk about school. There are lots of different platforms that we could use to create this sense of community. You could even do it through social media. You could have a Facebook group. And I know there's some amazing accountants building huge Facebook groups and that's great in as much as it's free. But the problem with Facebook groups is we're in. We're at the mercy of Mark Zuckerberg's algorithms and we find that you post something in your Facebook group, only a very tiny proportion of people in the group will see it. It's very hard to get engagement in Facebook groups. And so, yes, they have a place, but much better to be in control of your own community. So I've been researching for a while now different communities. There are many out there and I decide there's one that I liked in particular because a, it was one of the least expensive but it was also one of the best ones, the easiest to use from both sides of the fence, from the person who's a customer in the community and the person who creates the community. And that's school. And so let's talk about some opportunities because I've set up a school community. I know some people here know that and I'll talk about that later. I'll show you mine. What I've done, we started just two months ago, but you might be thinking to yourself, yeah, but I'm a bookkeeper, I'm an accountant, I'm an enrolled agent. How could I possibly create a business club, a community on a platform like school? Well, let me share with you just some people that have done exactly this. So, and I don't know these people. I just went and searched around school to look for people who are linked to or in the accounting profession and what they're building. So this particular person.

Has built a community for teaching people how they can save taxes through bookkeeping. He has 17 members. Perhaps he hasn't been doing it for long. He's charging $499 a year. That's an extra income of $8483 if you do the math. Here's another one. Here's somebody who teaches business owners how to use QuickBooks. And so I know many people watching this. They are QBO Pro advisors or perhaps you are skilled in Xero or Sage and there are people out there that could benefit from your knowledge. This person's built up a community of 75 people so far and their price tag is 395. So they're making $29,000 in recurring revenue, because this is a membership, a subscription, that's recurring revenue and it'll likely go up as they promote their community. Now, you don't have to charge because the other thing with, with school platforms is you could create a free group just like a Facebook group. The advantage of free is you can build a bigger community faster. Let me give you an example of somebody. Now, this lady is a bookkeeper. Hers is actually four bookkeepers, I believe. But look at this. She's got 47.3 thousand members in her community, which I think is an extraordinary number. Now this is a free community, but let's not miss the point here. That doesn't mean she's not making revenue from this. And I'll talk more about this later. Because when you have a platform like school, you can still make money from a free community. If it's a Facebook group that's free, you have to drive people away from the Facebook group. But with a school community inside that, you can create resources and you can create courses where people then inside the community can choose to buy those additional courses. And I'm guessing that the lady that's built this particular community with 47,000 members probably has some stuff people can pay for. And I would have thought out of 47,000 people, there's probably a lot of people buying her stuff. Or in your case, it might be not. It might not be courses. It might be that you are inviting some of those people to have a meeting with you to just become normal, conventional clients. Okay, that's a few thoughts around bookkeeping. What about taxes? What if your expertise is taxes? Well, there's lots of people on this platform that doing exactly that. So this person's got a free community helping people who are struggling with IRS debt join our CPA expert led community. She has a thousand members in the group, yet it's a free one. But you can almost guarantee some of those members will become clients. Or there may be ways she's monetizing in a different way. What about this one, the tax strategy accelerator? This has got a thousand members. What about the American Society of tax problem solvers? 2.2 thousand to just over 2000 members of this community. Again, it's a free one, but probably monetizing in different ways. I thought this one was interesting. This one's the actual tax law community on school. It's a CPA called Jasmine and she has five and a half thousand members in her group that she's built up. Let's look at some more. There's one called Tax Leverage. Now, I think this might be aimed more at CPAs rather than the general public. I can't remember, but look at this. This is a paid 1, 150 bucks a month, 54 members. That's in a recurring revenue of $97,000 for teaching people some tax stuff. So if that was your expertise, why couldn't you do that? Another one is Bodnar and Clark have built Tax School and they've got 75 members. They're making almost quarter of a million in recurring revenue by sharing some of their knowledge around tax. Okay, what about General Business Advisory? This is the Numbers From Scratch, A supportive group of new businesses owners to master taxes, bookkeeping and finances, led by Marianne, a cpa. Okay, it's a small group, this one. Everyone has to start somewhere. But what about this next one? This one's amazing. She's probably not a cpa, but she's clearly got a lot of expertise in a niche area of helping people raise funding, grants and so on. Look at this. 2.4 thousand members, nearly two and a half thousand members. And this isn't a free one. She's charging 37 bucks a month, a tiny 37 bucks in something that she's found that people need help with raising finance in business. And she's making just over a million a year from that community, which, again, is extraordinary. And then another free one, if you just want to create a free group, is just a general business club. I've been teaching this for years in the profession I ran my own. And they got 16,000 members in their business club. Yes, it's free, but they are probably monetizing it in some really interesting ways. And the last one I'm going to share with you, because what they're doing is the same strategy as what I'm doing on school, which is to have two commuters. One's free, one is paid for, so you can use one as a feeder for the other. And they're making. This is a CPA. He has the Global Business Growth Club with 1.1, nearly 2,000 members. And then those members can join his Growth VIP group. He has 432 members making or charging just short of 100 bucks a year. He's doing just over half a million. And if you go to his about page to see what he's doing, he's a cpa, he's in the US and he's basically teaching business owners how they can start up a US company. He's teaching taxes, how to set things up properly, all stuff that I know you have that expertise, you have all this knowledge up there, but you're sharing it one to one with clients and working crazy long hours. I bet this guy making half a million is working a few days a week and he's probably running a CPA firm as well. And this is just some extra pocket money, half a million. So this is. I share these with you because I know sometimes accountants think and bookkeepers think, I'm just an accountant, I'm just a bookkeeper, I can't possibly do this sort of stuff. And yet there are peers of yours, other CPAs and bookkeepers who have grasped this opportunity to build a community of people and have found a way to monetize it. You can do it too. So with that said, let's talk a little bit more then about how might you do this. And as I said, I love school. I looked at lots of different communities. There's lots of different software platforms that you can use. There's things like Circle, there's. I'm trying to think what the names of them all are now. I did a research of them all six months ago and I decided that the one that I like most was school because I was actually in a few school communities. I do a lot of learning. I'm in some communities as a customer, as a paying customer. And I love the simplicity of, from a customer's point of view of being able to navigate my way around. I love the fact that I'm in multiple school communities and I only have to have one login detail. And once I'm into school I can move around across different communities.

And so I chose that as the community that I would set up and I'll show you that later because you'll probably want to join it. I have a free community if you're not in it already.

So you can explore it and see exactly from the inside out. And what I love about school as well is the fact that for me as a creator of a community, it's really simple to set up. It's really simple and there's some really interesting ways that you can monetize it. So you can have a free community. We've seen some examples of that. And a free community, you can build fast. You can have a paid for community and if you charge for that, it could be a monthly figure, it could be an annual membership, it could be a one off if it was just a single course. I personally recommend recurring income even within a free community or within a community even if it's free. You can add courses very easily and you can monetize them. So you can choose whether if you put something valuable inside a community, you can choose whether the members get it as part of their community or they have to buy extra. And of course you might decide that you want to use that community to drive people to a meeting with you where you then turn them into conventional clients doing one to one work. So there are many different ways of monetizing. It's very flexible. So let me show you now what this all looks like and I'll show you a bit about how we set it up. So I have two communities. We set it up just two months ago and the first one, the one that is the paid for community I know there's some people listening here today are in it already is the AI Academy and this is where I teach people how to master AI, in particular ChatGPT, how we can save hours of time. With ChatGPT we only started two months ago and we're already up to 82 members and it's going up pretty much every day. We so far started off with a low, a low initial founder member price. It's only $47 a month to be part of it. And I'm going to ask Sarah to put the link to to it in the comments. It'll be underneath the video and so on. If you want to join it. We will be putting the price up fairly soon in July. We will put it up, we will be putting up quite significantly. But one of the things I like about school, which I've done for year, always done in the value Pricing academy and some people know this, is that although we're going to put the price up, we do it in the academy. When a member joins the community.

They lock in the price. So the best time to join certainly the AI Academy is now because it's the founder member price. The price will be going up fairly soon for new members going forward. So that's the AI Academy that we've got. And what we have got in the AI Academy, what we've built is firstly you get this community. So a bit like Facebook groups, people can ask questions, you as the owner can post things. So I post in the community just the other day a post about you getting a brand new piece of software. So a gift for members of the AI Academy coming very soon is some new software and we can see all the comments from people. Some people I know are listening right now, like Randall, So we can post off, members can ask questions. In fact, I mentioned head earlier and I have to give Randall the credit, because Randall was the person who shared this inside the community, this new amazing AI tool. So we can have a community a little bit like Facebook, but much more powerful because you are in control. And here's one of the really interesting things as you build a big community up. When you make a brand new post, you can also choose if you want to aim to email all of your members. And what the founders of school have said is that, oh, and Michael's just joined the community. So thank you, Michael, for that. I really appreciate it. One of the things the founders have said is that the open rates when you send out an email through school is average at 75%. Kay Kay Westmoreland, thank you for joining the community. Oh, wow, who is that? Connie Evans has joined. Thank you, Connie. Hopefully you're now seeing the opportunity here for you of having a school community that people keep joining and when you don't have to do much for it, they just join because there's so much value in it. Yeah. So what they said is that 75% open rates, whereas the industry average for open rates from email campaigns is 25%. In other words, three times as many people open up emails sent out of school. There's a reason behind that, which I don't want to go into now. But just imagine if you built a free community of 16,000 people, I showed you earlier and you then had a really interesting post to send out where you were offering something, something free or something, and you want them to book a meeting and you 75% opened the email up. That would be quite extraordinary. So I'm digressing. So you can set up a community where you just simply post some stuff, other people can ask questions. You create this sense of community where people can learn from each other. There's also a section where you can create a classroom and you can create courses. I've got several courses that we've built over the last two months. I'm just about to upload in the next few days a complete A to Z guide on how you can use projects properly. Inside ChatGPT, we've done courses on prompt engineering, privacy and security, which is critically important for our profession, AI, image generation. And if we dive into a course, people can work through the videos step by step. Sometimes I put resources below there. It's really easy if you want to create a course for your clients, for your customers, your members. To build it inside school, you just simply open up a post, you add a video. If you want it to be a video, you don't have to. Your posts, your chapters, if you like, could just be you upload a workbook or you upload a checklist. It could be as simple as you want. It's really easy to create a classroom. Thank you, Neil. Very easy to create a classroom. And what I'm committed to doing is in the AI Academy is I love doing training courses. And Debbie, thank you. And so I'm going to keep building these courses out for people because I want to help the accounting profession master AI and ChatGPT. Now you can also have a calendar. This is if you decide to do live streams like this. If you decide to do webinars for your community, then you can have a calendar in the top so that people in the community know about all the live sessions. I think if I go back to community you will see at the top it says live school community equals passive income. That's where we are today. It is actually running live. People in the community will see if you are running a live session at the time, you can also drill in. Anyone can go and see all the other members in the community and they have some gamification built in. They have leaderboards. And I think I'm right in saying that this week Randall is the most engaged member of the community. I think Randall's listening. Sarah's usually here as well. So I love the really engaged people. What happens is engaging. It's got gamification built in. In other words, when people post stuff, you great comments or great posts and other people like them, you get points. And what do points mean? Well, whatever you want it to be. So one of the things that you can do is as people go up the levels, you can create certain courses which is still free, but they have to achieve certain levels. I think I've done that with one of my courses. I think AI image generation, you have to be level two or level three. So you can encourage people to be more engaged in your community and then you can reward them by giving them access to more stuff. So that's the AI Academy. I also created at the same time In March of 2025, the end of March, we created Chat GPT for accountants. And this one is completely free. This is our free version. We're up to 711 members. I actually have two more people to let in. I know Patty. I will let Patty in and I will let George in. And so if you want to join the free community again, I'll ask Sarah to put the link into the chat and you can join that if you want. So what's in the free community? Well, essentially it's the same platform. You've got a community, you can, people can engage in that. I think the most engaged person here is Neil, who I know is listening, Neil Kriddle and Mart is here who's listening as well. So thank you for engaging so much. Again, you can create a classroom. We have less content in the free one, but nevertheless, we do have some really powerful training in the free community. We give lots of training in the free community. Thank you, Tom, for joining the academy. We have free training in the community and sometimes we use that as a teaser. We give people a taste, we give them the first chapter or two, the first video for free, and if they want the rest, they can get everything else, the workbooks, the resources, if they upgrade. So it's very easy if you have the two communities to use one as a funnel. Give loads of value to your customers, to your clients, and then encourage them if they want more stuff, they can do exactly that. Okay, that's the front end. That's what people see in school. It's very simple for people to navigate to get access to the community, comments, the classroom. The other thing that I love about school is that I said to you that when you are on school you can be in multiple communities and you don't have to keep logging into other people's sites. Once you're in with one set of login details, you can jump about to different communities that you are in really quickly and really easily. Also, in the top right, you can set up things like, I know some people just get inundated with email and they don't want too many emails. So what school does it has, you are in control for each of your communities that you are in. So those of you that have just joined the AI Academy or ChatGPT for accountants, you're in control to choose whether you get emails on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a monthly basis. I certainly would not recommend turning them off completely. At least get a monthly email. But what I do when I join other people's communities, I just get a week. I just set it for the defaulted daily email just so I can see what's going on within the community. And then when I feel I've kind of got a handle of it, I will switch it to weekly. So I just get once a week a update on the latest announcements, the posts and so on. I love the fact that you are in control of, as a customer, you're in control of how many emails you receive. But assuming that if the announcements and things are valuable, as I said earlier, the great thing is you put a post in there and people get an email. If you put a post in your Facebook group, they don't get an email to that effect.

They're not just going to see it. And so a lot of stuff in Facebook groups just gets. Disappears. Okay, let's go behind the scenes in terms of setting it up. And I've looked at lots of platforms you do not have to use school. There are others, like Circle. I found that too complicated. There are some that are cheaper. In fact, my good friend John Johnson recommended one just earlier today that he came across that was on AppSumo that you could get on a special deal. The reason I like school, though, is because it's still inexpensive when you compare it to the potential upside. Also, the great thing about school is I know that I know of the people behind it. The founder is Sam Ovens.

And he's continually building great features into it. School's been around for a while now. And here's the other really interesting thing about school is that they have thousands or perhaps millions of people on the platform now. There are thousands of communities out there. And what happens is when you go into school, you can discover new communities. And so you could look for communities that you might want to join if you're interested in, I don't know, the calligraphy school, for example, there's a community for that. But what it means is that as you build your own community, people might find it. So rather than you having to drive traffic to your community and growing it, it can grow organically because of people who are in the community who. People who just love school can find your course. If someone's looking for bookkeeping or taxes or finance, they can search and your community will come up. I think I typed in ChatGPT the other day and my community was on the first page, which is awesome. And I know there are people joining my community that I don't know. They've not come from my link. They've come because of the school platform. Okay, so how do you set one up? It's really easy. And you can join school very easily. You can create a community very, very easily. It takes seconds. When you are in school, you can. I'll talk about the affiliate arrangement in a second because that's really powerful for making even more money from school. And I do have an offer that I have an affiliate link. If you want to set up a school community, then if you use my affiliate link, I will send you all my videos and resources I've created, showing you step by step exactly how to set up your community. I did it through a series of prompts on ChatGPT. It created all the words for me. It set up my community through ChatGPT. It was really, really easy. But let me take you on the behind the scenes. Let me show you some of the things that you would do. So when you go into the background of a community on school, essentially you would work through the left hand side and just fill in the boxes. Okay, you set up a community and the first thing you might do under general is choose a name. You can upload an icon, a cover image. That's kind of the basics of it. And then you can choose whether it's a public group or a private group. That's entirely up to you. So you would. It's that easy to set it up. And then some other things that you might want to set up is the pricing. And again, they make it really easy. This one, ChatGPT for Accountants, is free, but if I wanted to, I could change the price. I could give people a seven day free trial and so much more. So many options around the pricing. I'll come back to affiliates. There are a section of plug plugins where you can do things like if you want, you can integrate with tools like Zapier. You can also get it so that if people want to join, they have to ask some questions. So if you want to make sure you're only getting the right people in your group, you can set it so they have to answer some questions first before you let them in. Or if you want, you can not have that and just let anybody in. They can just click and get straight in. You're in control. It's your group. If we go to the tabs at the top, you can choose whether you have a classroom or not. I think the classroom tab is valuable. It's where you give value to your members. We talked about the calendar. The other thing you might want to do is you can turn on a map. I've turned it off. But the map feature means that anybody in the community can see where all the other members are in the world. And you might want to do that if you want to turn into more of a networking group. Particularly if you want to build a community just for your town of business owners in your town, your city, then you might want to turn on the map so that you allow people to network not just through the community, but they can hook up with each other. Connect, connect, meet up. That can be very valuable to people. And anything else I want to show you? Oh, yes. And then you also can see where you rank in terms of discovery. In other words, the more you build your community, it'll go up the ranks. What that means is that when people are looking for some help with taxes, with finance, with finding funding, and they go to school and they type it into the search, it's more likely that your community will appear higher up the ranking. So they show you where you appear on the list and then they give you guidance on how you can, what you can do to get seen by more people.

So setting it up is quite straightforward. You have to spend a bit of time thinking about some of the wording that you would use. You'll create an about page, for example, and what's the best thing to put into there? What I did was I just created a whole series of ChatGPT prompts which wrote all the wording for me and that made life really easy to set the whole thing up. It was very, very quick. It took me about half a day to set it up. Yes, I did watch a few videos because I had to work out where I can put links and things. You can do some cool things, like for example, on the right hand side of every page, you can have a link to somewhere. I choose to have mine as a link through to the AI Academy, but you might want to have a link to your calendar, for example, if you wanted people in the community to book a meeting with you, let's say, then you could put the link on the right hand side and that would appear on every single page. So all sorts of functionality that we can do that you can play around with. But the basics of setting up is really easy. Now, once you've set up a community, this is whether it's school or any other community, a Facebook group. One of the things you do have to do though is yes, it's easy to set up. Half a day you set up, but you do have to add value. We talked about at the outset, you, you need to add value and you need to keep people engaged. So that's why I strongly recommend that you do have the classroom tab in your community and you create some courses. That doesn't mean please don't be scared and think, oh, you've got to do video courses. No, a course could be something as simple as three or four posts where each one is a chapter, each one is basically some guidance with a link to a checklist, a resource. It doesn't have to be video. If you don't want to, but I do recommend you have some classes in there. So if you were creating a community of taxes, for example, then you might have a course on how to set up your corporate, your S Corp or whatever. And they go into there, there's a series of posts and each one has a few guidance with a little checklist if they want to do it themselves. So creating courses could be simple. It doesn't have to be a big job, but you want to create some value. And the other way to create value for members is you do want to create value through the engagement. One of the things that I do is I spend a bit of time every morning, it's probably only.

15 minutes, but you can see at the top right of my screen there is a notification. You get a notification when people comment or post something. And so what I would do is I would go through and make sure I just answer and acknowledge everybody's comment. And wherever possible, if it's a question for me, I will do my best to give as good an answer as I possibly can because that's a great way of adding value to people and keeping people engaged. And for those of you that have joined my communities already, the ChatGPT for accountants or the AI Academy, if you ever have a question, just ask in the community. I am reviewing it every day and answering questions as best as I possibly can. And if I don't know the answer, I'll go away and find the answer. Okay, Next thing to think about is setting up a commute is easy. Yes, you need to do a bit of work ongoing by adding value, either by creating some courses and or engaging with members, answering their questions and so on.

But you also have to grow your community. How are you going to grow it? How are you going to get people into your community? And what you want to do is have a number of different strategies. So yes, you can get organic growth because eventually over time, people might find it from school itself. But don't rely on that. You want to have a campaign for driving traffic there. So I would certainly consider inviting all your existing clients first because they know like and trust you. You get your clients in the community. They are the best people to have in the community because they love you already, they will say nice things about you. I look at my community and over the last few days I've had some amazing comments from people in there that I know very well saying, oh, this is great. The new software coming soon is really powerful. I've had some lovely comments. So you want your clients in the community, because they are your advocates, get them in there first and then what you want to do is make sure that you put a link to it in your email footer every time you send an email out, perhaps every time as part of your system. Whenever you meet brand new potential clients, your sales meeting have on the agenda to tell them about your community. And so whether they sign up as a client or not, at least you can get them in the community and give them more value because they're more likely at some point if they don't sign up today to they might still in three months time, six months time. So build that into an automatic process. When you meet clients, make sure that through all of your social media channels you are continually promoting your community. It may be that like me, you decide to have a go at doing some live streams or some webinars in which case whenever you do a live stream or webinar, tell people about the benefits of being in your community.

There are so many ways of driving traffic to your community. You just have to make sure you do it systematically. Just create a plan and put it in place. We have for example, set up a whole series of social media posts that my daughter is posting out regularly telling people about all the benefits of our free community. For firms that want to master ChatGPT and we're growing by, we're only two months in, eight weeks in and eight weeks in and we have 713 members in the free community and that's growing daily. There's four more members, just people just wanting to join right now. I'll let them in in a short while.

So that's how you grow your community. And then the last thing I'll say is linked to that, they have a really cool affiliate process built into it. So one of the things that you can do if you have a paid, if you decide to have a paid for community, you can tell your existing, your existing customers, your existing members, if they recommend somebody else, they earn affiliate commission. And it's really simple to set up. You just go into your settings behind the scenes and one of the items on the left hand side is affiliates and all you do is default is off. You choose how much you want to pay people who introduce people to your paid community. Now it's off in ChatGPT for accountants because it's a free community anyway. There's no, there's no need to turn that on. But I have turned it on with the AI Academy and, and so if you join the academy, many people have today already Then if you know of other people, perhaps through Facebook groups, social medias, perhaps you're in a group of other accountants, bookkeepers, people interested in AI. If you recommend the AI Academy with your link, then you, you will receive 30% of what they pay for as long as they're a member. You refer three people and you've effectively got free access. It's covering your membership. So how do you do that? It's really simple. They make it so simple. You can either go to the members tab and there's a big invite tab, or if you go into the top right and I think it's profile, no, you can see it's affiliates, you can't miss it. You go into the top right once you're in school and what happens there is you will see there all the different communities that you are in that have an affiliate process. So for example, the school platform, if you were to use my link, which we're going to share with you, then I earn 40% commission from school for doing that. And what I'll do in return if you use that is I will give you all my resources and step by step training on how to set up your community. But if you go to the AI Academy tab, you will see there it confirms that you will earn 30% commission. All you have to do is grab that link, share it and it'll all be automated that you will get affiliate commission. So that's a really powerful way, another way for you to grow your community, if you have a paid for one where people pay, you can then tell them that if they recommend other people.

They will earn an affiliate commission. And that's a powerful way to grow your community, to grow your revenue without really doing anything. Other people, your advocates, your best members are telling other people. Okay, so if you want to join, let me just finally wrap up. If you want to join the my free community, I certainly recommend you join at least the free community because then you can have a play around with, have a look at how I've done it. You can see it from the customer side of things. You can see how easy it is to get value from the community and steal some of the things that I've set up, some of the ideas. If you decide that you want to set up your own community and you see things about mine that you like, then please do exactly that, copy what I'm doing. You might decide, yes, you want a free community and you might want to have a paid for one. You might like the idea that when people join my community, the first Thing they are told is why not go and do the start here course. And the start here course tells people I give some value straight away around how to use ChatGPT. And I also tell people how to get around and get the best out of the community. So if you like that idea, you could copy it and build it into yours. Okay, so quick recap is the world's changing fast. AI is coming fast. We are going to find that we are under increasing pressure with traditional compliance work. The AI will replace that. We have to add more value. And we can add more value by either going up the value curve and delivering more value on our old one to one model by doing a business advisory tax, or we can create value by scaling our firms by building a business club and building a sense of community. It doesn't have to be a platform like school, but what I'm finding is, is that it just makes it so easy, it's so, so easy to build up a community. And as we showed you earlier, there are some accounting firms now doing sizable recurring revenue. One of them, one lady, if you remember, was just over a million dollars with her course, her community, helping people with funding, finding grants and so on. So you can do the opportunity is there. You have all this knowledge. This is all about you scaling. That knowledge is in your head. Whether that's tax knowledge, whether it's bookkeeping knowledge about tech stacks, finance tech stacks, whatever it might well be. You have knowledge. This is a great way for you to scale it and monetize it.

Okay, we have 13 minutes left and I'm going to answer as many questions as I possibly can. I can see that there are a lot of comments come in. And I'm just going back through the chat, bear with me to see where we got to. And also I'm looking for questions from the qqs. I also know that there's quite a few people listening on LinkedIn as well. If you're on LinkedIn, I know that we have Teresa Peters on LinkedIn. Anton's on LinkedIn, Leslie is on LinkedIn. I don't get to see the posts, unfortunately, it doesn't feed them through. So Sarah's told me. Hi there, Leslie. Hope the mountain biking is going well. Hope the weather's okay in your part of the world. In Canada, another fellow cyclist. So.

Let's see.

Okay, yes, I did see, I did see you here, Randall. I did see you here, Randall. And you are a great contributor as you used to be in or still are in the Facebook group, but also in, in My school community. So good to see you. I'm looking for questions, I'm looking for questions. Lots of people commenting, Neil, what does Neil say? Do you find that communities tend to be more American orientated than the uk?

That's a great question.

I'm going to say no. When I was looking at the communities which I shared earlier, when I was looking for ones that were accounting related, then, yes, they did seem to be more US based. And I'm going to guess the reason for that is simply that the US is a huge marketplace, Neil, compared to the uk. And so if you were to look at the number of people building a, the number of accountants building a community around tax, for example, it's always going to be more in the US than the UK because there's more people. I didn't see any big UK companies, but I didn't perhaps research deep enough. But I don't think in terms of the opportunity, Neil, I don't think it makes a difference. I think you can still build a big community in just the UK.

Terry's on LinkedIn. Hi there. Good to see you.

Oh, and thank you, Randall, for saying the AI Academy is definitely worth $47 a month. I appreciate that. I think I'm too late with this one. But yes, if you did, if you do have to leave, then the recording will be on YouTube.

Right. What else? One of the questions we got, if you didn't put QQ in front, I might miss your question. I apologize.

Randall said this sounds like a better place to build a community than Facebook or LinkedIn. I think it is. I have big. Some of you know, I have a number of Facebook groups, I have ChatGPT for accountants and bookkeepers. It's over 10,000. I have over 10,000 in our value Pricing Academy.

Group. And what I found is, despite the size of it, it's not as powerful as the school community because the way the algorithms work. Clive says, what does school cost? That's a great question. It's.

$99 a month. Thank you, Claude, for joining. It's $99 a month. So yes, there is a cost to it, but it's cheaper than many of the others like Circle. Also, we run the Value Pricing Academy on Kajabi, which is way more expensive than the $99 a month. So personally.

If you're building a community where members are paying you, let's say 50 bucks a month, 100 bucks a month, you only need one or two people and that's covering your costs. There are some cheaper platforms. I know that As I said earlier, John's here. He shared one early with me that people can access. It looked pretty good. Personally, I think it's worth paying the 99 bucks because I know that school is here to stay. It's got a very good reputation and one of the things I love about it is every week they do School News, where Sam Ovens tells you about the latest developments. There's some fantastic school stuff coming with school. They are about to launch Native Video this month where you can upload videos direct into school. At the moment, you have to load them on Loom or Vimeo and put a link there. But even more exciting for me is they're about to launch later in the summer. They build a live stream direct from within school. I love the idea of that. They are always building new things. There's been, in the two months I've been on school, there's been lots of new features come out. And what they do as well is they give you a lot of support through, for example, the School News and the community of school on how to build successful groups because it's in their interest. The more of their members who build successful and monetize their school communities, the more people stay with school and keep paying them the 99 bucks. So I've been very impressed with the level of support, the things that I've learned about building a great community. So, Clive, that's the cost of school. And I think they've said that their goal, in fact was in the last School News, Sam Oven said that his goal is to make sure that they deliver a commute experience for people who want commuters. That's better than anybody else and that's at a lower price than other people. So we talked about the fact that there are other communities mentioned where they've now allowed you to.

Put videos up there as well, but you have to pay for those things extra. I know with Kajabi they introduced communities as a feature and I had to pay extra for that, so I didn't bother. They're not charging for the extra features. When they bring in new features, they said, look, members are just going to get those things. Which is the same attitude I've had with the Value Pricing Academy and now with AI Academy, the existing members, they keep the same price, but they're going to get more and more stuff all the time. And so I love Sam's mindset there because he knows if he builds the best platform for the best price, people will stay. That's how he'll scale. Tom says when we use your affiliate link. Do we have to set up a group at that time?

Yes you will Tom. So when you use the affiliate link it's going to invite you to.

When I say set it up. Yes, you'll need to start paying school. I think they give you a seven day free trial. I seem to remember when I set up both my communities I did get a free trial. I'm sure it's seven days, might have been 14. But yes, you'll make a commitment at that point in time you don't have to set the full thing up and go live. You can, you can, then you can build up slowly at whatever pace that you want. Tom, I hope that answered your question.

Ray says is the AI part of my effective pricing subscription? No Ray, if you mean the effective price, that's our pricing software and that's separate to what we're doing on school with AI. They're two different things Tom. Question from Tom does each group you have cost or can you have multiple groups in the same subscription? Interesting question Tom. So at the moment you have to pay the 99 bucks for every community you set up. So in my case I wanted to have a free one to act as a funnel. So I've paid for two separate communities with school which to me is a no brainer because.

Just within two months now I think our monthly recurring revenue is nearly 4,000. So it's paid for easily just in two months. But what they said in their most recent school update, their school news is they said they are building in, they're going to build in a new feature in the next few months whereby you can mix free and paid for inside one community. And the reason they said that is they said that the thinking behind that is that you have people engaging in the, in the free community and those people's comments the people in the other community aren't seeing. And so why not let people have be all in the same community, both the free people and the not so free ones because that way the your best customers who are paying are going to say great things in the chat and so on which other people will then see. And also you have a bigger community. If you combine the two into one one you get a bigger community and therefore more engagement. The more engagement in the community the more value everybody gets from it and therefore they stay longer. So Tom, to answer your question at the moment today you would need to set up two communities on school. Pay them twice if you wanted to, a free one and a paid for one. But I believe that might Change sometime soon.

I use an outside online software to build business value. Can I integrate in school? I don't know Tom, because I don't know what your outside online software is.

But Tom, you remember the vpa, so just reach out to me, perhaps through the VPA Facebook group, tag me, tell me a bit more and I'll do mine. Or you can, once you're in school you can. Tom, you know me, you can reach out to me. Email Sarah if you want with the full details. I'll try and answer that question better. If I knew a bit better what you mean by your outside online software and what you're looking to do.

Let's move on to Linda. Do you have to use USD for your subscriptions? Yes. So this may be a good thing or bad thing. For me it's a very good thing. Let me explain why. With school what happens is that when a customer pays, they have stripe at the back end and the customer has to pay in dollars. And what happens to me as the community owner is once a month I get a payout. I get a payout from school. My customer is not you, my customer is school. And what that means is that school are the ones that invoice the customer. So I don't have to raise any invoices, I don't have to worry about, I don't have to worry about.

Sales tax. So one of the issues that I have with Kajabi is that I do have to set up different.

Payment, different sales pages if you like. Because anybody who we're a UK company, if we have a UK member paying us, we have to charge VAT and that's really becomes really difficult. Whereas a US customer of us, it's exempt for vat. That's UK sales tax. So sales tax is a nightmare when you have, when you have people from different parts of the world. But school just keep it really, really simple. Yes, the downside is US dollars, but it does mean that for me at least it's really, the bookkeeping is really, really simple. They pay me once a month that month that payment is exempt. So my bookkeeping is really crazy simple. Right. It's two minutes left.

And John says you get what you pay for and it's value we need. Tom says, oh, I mean an account name versus a group name.

If I understand your question right, Tom, when you are setting up your community.

Let me just find the right part on my screen where I showed you earlier. Behind the scenes, settings, general. So all right, so yes, you will need to choose a group name.

You can change your group name. Let me just think this one through. I can't remember exactly. I think that once you've set it up, you either can't change it during the free trial period. Thank you, Ray. You can't change it during the free trial period or you can change it once. I forget. But going forward you can change anytime you like. So I've got ChatGPT for accountants, but as you can see, I can change this group name whenever I want. I can change it. The more important thing though, a piece of advice is that the URL for your community that you will share will be look like you can see down here, the URL have school in it. Your URL will. The name will include your initial group name. So my URL I share will say ChatGPT for Accountants 3466.

If I remember right, you can change your URL but only once. You can change the URL at some point. And so the advice is think carefully about your group name. And I heard some great advice that was don't make it necessarily too specific. So I came across as a day too late. But let's say I decided in the future that I want to actually open up Chat GPT to be more about ChatGPT for business owners rather than accountants. Then I might want to change the group name for gp the group name to Chat GPT for business owners.

And I can do that once and change the URL. But if I. Unless I, unless I'd already changed that and I now want to run chatgpt for business owners, well, the URL is stuck as chatgpt for accountants. So the general advice is think about a group name that's broader, knowing that you can then kind of get more niche and narrow later. Yes, you can change the group name later, but you can only change the URL once. Okay, so do think about the group name. I hope that helps. Tomorrow I have officially run out of time. I normally finish hard finish at five in the uk, which is what is your UK time? But let me see if I can answer a couple more quickly. Highlander says, have you used the community in Kajabi and how does it compare? No, I haven't. I've used Kajabi since almost the start of Kajabi. I've used it for years. We pay the premium top level of Kajabi, albeit about half price because I got in as a founder member deal. I love Kajabi for so many things. It's a great tool. When they brought out communities a I didn't think it was as good as other things. And secondly they asked me to pay more money and I objected to that because we paid them a lot of money already. So no, I have not used the Kajabi.

Community feature and I think I might be right in saying but I could be wrong. I think it's now something they can they give away for free, you don't have to pay for extra. I might be wrong but I do know that Kajabi are having to react to what school are doing because school are building. I think all the other job has been around a long time now and I think their position as being number one is largely under threat by some of these newer ones coming along. But sorry I can't answer that one because I don't use it. Okay, I'll do Just because I like him. I'll go over time and answer one more question. Hi there Randall. For the paid group the AI Academy, do you set it to private? I started off private. I switched it to public because I wanted to test to see if more people join it. Not through any links.

And I haven't decided yet which is the right route to go. I'm still testing that but yes, I have it as a public group at the moment. I might switch back to private, I don't know.

Okay, I think that's all the questions. So as usual I'm going to play with some music. Please tell me in the chat what's the best thing that you've learned today? If you have learned something valuable, please give it a thumbs up as well. And those of you that have joined one or both of my communities please if you have any questions whatsoever I'm here to help you. Please just ask. Okay, I will see you. I think my next live stream's in a couple of weeks time. Hopefully I will see you there. I will post it into the communities so if you're in there you'll see when my next live stream is. Thank you so much for coming. I will see you soon. Bye for now.