Building Online Communities - Simon Chappuzeau - Fractional C-Suite Retreat - Episode # 36

Growing a business is hard, but it does not have to be.

Once a week, we take a break from the hustle and bustle in business to talk about innovations and what's new in the C-suite. This is the Fractional C-Suite Retreat, and I'm Joseph Frost. Pull up a seat at the fire, grab a drink, smoke a cigar, and just join me as we relax, learn, and get inspired. This retreat is sponsored by YourCMO, helping organizations grow with better marketing strategy.

Welcome. I'm excited for our guest today. He is a community builder, first in the film industry, and now he's building communities in the blockchain and coaching of entrepreneurs industry. He focuses on bringing people together both personally and virtually through all sorts of tools and techniques. He's founder and managing director at StoryLux. Welcome Simon Chapuzeau. Chapuzeau. I'm not French, I have a hard time with your name, but Chapuzeau.

Yeah, Chapuzeau. That took me years to learn that, so no blame on others.

How old were you when you were finally able to pronounce your name?

Well, pronunciation came first and then spelling, I think, were like two different things at the age of like 10 or something.

Okay. Alright, so I got 10 years to catch up. And then we're— then you can blame me. Well, thanks for being here. I want to get, get started with the first question I like to ask our guests is, if there was something that you could share with the C-suite, other business leaders and business owners, what would you want to share? What's something interesting to you or something you're working on that you think more people should know about?

Be aware of? Well, I think one thing that sort of like fascinated me over the past months is like with marketing especially, it's a very unique bespoke thing for every company, for every product, for every service. And I see a lot of people trying to find the golden bullet for their marketing challenge and People say, yeah, I gotta do Facebook ads or LinkedIn or do-do-do-do. And I don't think there's this one thing. It's always unique to your company, to your service, to your product. And it helps to have an expert who understands your industry, who understands your unique challenge and has done something similar with somebody else and knows how it works. So I think a lot of people are reinventing the wheel when there is no need because there are people who've done it and marketing is It's a very challenging field because a lot of opportunities and possibilities.

Yes. You're speaking to the choir here for sure. Do you look at community building as a marketing effort?

Yeah, it's an interesting question because I think if you're trying to build a community to sell stuff, it doesn't feel nice. But I think if there's a genuine interest in bringing people together and leveraging their knowledge and insights, you are automatically building a community. You're automatically building— you're automatically doing market research. You're trying to— you're understanding the buyer, the seller. So it's a very organic process, and I wouldn't really think about it as a— some— as something that is done on purpose to sell something. I think just if we bring together buyers and sellers in a marketplace, that is community building, and everybody's benefiting from that. So what— it's yes and no.

Yeah, interesting. I've, I've, I believe in that because I've been involved in some different initiatives and both gone down the path of just building the community or the, the, the project with the intention of connecting people with similar interests. And then I've gone down similar projects where the purpose was to sell something or position ourselves or a client to be able to sell something. And the latter path is a little disingenuous or doesn't come off as authentic and doesn't seem to be as effective as the doing it just for the right reason and, or maybe right's the wrong way, but being for more of a pure authentic reason. What has your experience been if someone sets out to build communities because they do want to build a marketplace and sell something, how can they stay authentic and be effective at really building a true community?

Well, I think it always starts with having a genuine interest in what you do and the problem you solve. And the people you do that for. So if you really want to help people to get this thing done that they are struggling with, I think that, that is a great point to start from. And then being driven by curiosity, trying to understand what exactly is that problem, how can we solve it, how can other people help. I think being driven by this curiosity while Bringing people together is a good point to start, and it's a very natural, authentic thing. And more as a back thought, you will build a product, a service, a community that tackles that problem, but it's not like this deliberate forced thing that comes off as unnatural. So just curiosity in whatever you try to solve and to do.

Yeah, be curious. It's, uh, that's a good way to look at it.

I'm— we had this online community for blockchain— sorry, when I want to jump in— for blockchain entrepreneurs, and I never thought of building a community as we were, as we were doing it. So all we did was trying to initiate conversations among the members, and we brought them on to calls where they would talk about their core expertise, be that they built a currency or a protocol or some token for some, some exchange platform. So all we did was really trying to find people that were interesting from the community, invite them to speak about what they do, bring on other members to share. And that was super interesting. And we didn't really have to make an effort, and people felt so connected and really appreciated what they, what they gained from these cohorts and from being brought together in that way.

Yes, that makes sense. And what I was about to say is I'm curious how community building has changed over the years with the advent of social media and LinkedIn and Zoom and Teams, has it made it easier to build community, harder, different?

I would say different, neither easier nor harder. I think different in the sense that it's easier to bring people together, but it's also easier for people to leave. So it's becoming more fleeting and The clarity of the why, why are we here, has to be really clear. I think like in the old days without all the social media platforms, if you think like in a physical world, people coming together in a room, it's much more, takes much more commitment because you have to go there, you have to spend time, you can't leave if it's if it's boring. And now if you are on a call, you just— on a group call, you just leave if it's boring, and you just jump off. So different in the sense that it's definitely more fleeting, and that you have to counter by being really clear why we're here. What are you getting out of this? What do you have to contribute? So I think we have also to be much more deliberate with the why and to communicate this to members.

And how does size impact the fleetiness online versus in person? I've personally found that large community, um, conversations and, and opportunities online, it's very difficult to engage, but in a large conference room of attendees, it's, it's a stronger feeling. You feel more connected sometimes with larger groups. How have you seen the size of communities play out differently on online versus in person?

Well, I think there's, there's a, like, several points. One is, um, a lot of people I think are always aim for big is better and I want more members, when it's really about the, the value that individual members get out of this thing. And if that is a lot, the community doesn't need to be big. So a group of 50 people can be more valuable to somebody than a group of like 5,000 people. And I think the other thing with being in a room together brings a different kind of commitment because you are in the room physically. And I always feel like being on a call with like 20, 50 other people for an hour or two, you never get the same kind of vibe like you would get in the same room. And I don't know whether it's sort of like if there's a magnetic field emanating from our brains that sort of brings us together. But I know so many, I can remember so many events, in-person learning sessions with EO or other organizations, where we had to stay in the same room for hours and hours and hours. And that really left an impact. I've never had a similar experience from a Zoom call with 50 other people. Right. So I think there's something being said about being in the same room.

Yeah, and I wonder if this— is that changing our universal experience around community? So much more of our communities are online with social media, with Zoom meetings, with, with online learning and conferences. Is the expectation different? Is the universally, like, the idea of a community now is hybrid and people are associated that way, or is it two separate communities? You've got your in-person communities and you've got your virtual communities.

I think there's a misunderstanding— or misunderstanding is maybe a hard word— but with virtual things, you have to make a deliberate effort to make that work. We come from this offline world, these in-person things where we had a certain culture of like, you're punctual ideally. You don't sort of get up in the middle of a talk, you don't sort of interrupt people. There's some like things that we just don't do because it would disrupt the flow of the thing. And I think with virtual things, we have to develop certain habits and commitments to make it more binding. There's a difference in attending a call, a group call, and having myself as a video on. So I always turn off myself, my own video, because it's distracting to me because I end up watching myself. It's like the least interesting thing. So that is a cultural thing that I think we have to learn to turn off our own video, to pay full attention to the screen, to really listen, not check messages in between, because it's all taking away our attention. And these are things that we have to learn. And then virtual or hybrid things can work. But we were thrown into a world of online events with no prior training or culturalization. And if we want to make that work better, then we have to introduce certain habits or cultures around online. And then I think it can be nice mixed with hybrid, because the big benefit of online is it doesn't matter where you are. And I, being, having been a part of the Berlin chapter, the London chapter of EO, that was always very localized back in the days. Now I'm a part of the MAPA branch chapter that's across Africa. It doesn't really matter where members are. So that's a great, great advantage, but we have to work hard to make up for the loss of proximity and being in the same room.

Yeah, in many ways, community building has been enhanced with technology and virtually but also limited. And it would make sense that technology will continue to improve to make that community experience stronger. Yeah, I just can picture holographic community rooms and tactile sensations that you could get out of your technical, you know, out of your equipment. There's all sorts of evolutions that probably are coming our way to, to bring that personal experience closer online than, than the current?

Yeah, I think that a lot of things we can do right now that are not rocket science that I see missing in a lot of communities. So just to give an example of what we've done, we changed the name of people in the group. They became members to give that sort of— to elevate the experience a little bit. Whenever we had new members join, we did an introduction for the members. So we sent out a message with a photo, we wrote a highly stylized introduction to make that person really look cool and interesting, and to make members understand what that person brings to the community and why we've chosen that person. And Other things like sending a weekly mailing that summed up what has happened in the chats so that people that couldn't attend or are just not that online would still sort of stay in the loop. So there are like a lot of things that we can build or do to make a virtual experience still more engaging. Yeah, changing names and bringing more visibility to what's happening in the group and who are the other people. And I think that is the biggest challenge. If I meet a person in a room, I see the whole, the whole body. I can read what the person is like, probably also smell to a certain degree sometimes. And it's a different experience than like here now. I just see your head up to the shoulders. And it just gives only part of the information that I can get from you. And so we have to make a conscious effort with, uh, online things to make up for this loss of information by talking more about who's that person, what do they want, what, where do you want to go, how can we help them, all that.

Yeah, I love that. There are simple things that we can do now. One of the things I, I happen to facilitate probably 4 or 5 monthly community meetings for different organizations, and virtually And one of the things I found really simple and effective is at the beginning of that meeting, I do random breakouts into 3 to 5 people. I give a topic. Let's— we're going to break out, make some quick introductions, and discuss this one idea. And that is the best part of the meeting usually for everybody, is that first 10 or 15 minutes with a smaller group. And then when we come all back in the room, then we might have more of a learning event or kind of a speaking or one-way communication, because it's just hard with 30, 40 people to get any type of intimate conversation. But when you do, at least with Zoom— and I've not done it with Teams— but the random breakout rooms, it's a great way.

I think it's great because they, at the beginning of this big thing with all these people that they never get a chance to talk with over the next 1, 2, 3 hours, but they can form their little tribe of like 3, 4, 5 people and can create this intimacy that allows them to open up. And I guess then after that first call, they're more open to the bigger group, and it's easier to then engage and get insightful statements because they're sort of more at ease with the, with the whole group. I like it. Yeah.

Any other online tips for community building? I'm sure you'll come up with some.

Well, I would say technology is overrated. So I remember we had a lot of discussions around sort of what platform and what features and da da da da. And my experience of the platform that is easiest to use for all members is the best. And don't overcomplicate features over personality. And everything that helps to bring out the personality of members in an online setting is 10 times more valuable than having another feature of like, I don't know whatnot.

So yeah, that's great. I know you do some work Well, some of the work you do that probably spurred from your community building is on more lead generation activity for businesses and, and coaches and executives. And I've found it fascinating because your approach has been evolving over even over the last several months as far as what you see is effective in that arena. So talk a little bit about what are some of the best practices that you see today for executives and/or sales leaders or business owners that are trying to leverage LinkedIn as a way to build their— and we'll transition from community building to prospects, because you've done a lot of good work in that area. And I know you have iterated quite a bit. Can you share some of the best practices and what you've learned?

Yeah, absolutely. So you're absolutely right. It is, it is a journey. It's ongoing. And coming back to what I said in the beginning with there is no one marketing framework or one platform that works because every product is different, every service is different. And I think the biggest thing that I've learned over the past 3 years working for the EO Accelerator, or trying to find members for the EO Accelerator, for EO chapters and for business coaches, is, is the person that you're trying to reach out to, is that person ready to speak with you? Is that person ready for what you have to offer? And very often that's not the case. So if you sent a cold email to somebody who's not in the market for business coaching, you can hammer that person with emails. And I had a really interesting experience. We did a cold email campaign for the London chapter and with little success, barely anyone responded. And the funny thing was like 6, 12, 18 months later, I had a couple of people come back to me that hadn't replied before. Saying something like, hey, Simon, 12 months ago, you sent me this email about the accelerator thing. Tell me, what is the accelerator? And so when I first reached out to that person, he wasn't ready. But the seed was planted in his or her mind. And 12 months later, they came back and said, tell me, tell me about this thing. I'm ready now. Now I get it. And I want it. And I think that's the first dynamic that we have to understand, that in some— and with some services and products, often it's not the right time to sell now. So it's more about establishing a contact or building a connection. And that is where community building comes into play, because it's a different way to engage with people. It's not like, hey, you want to buy this now, but you want to be part of this thing. And that thing, whatever it is, will expose you to ideas that ultimately might lead to you becoming a client for a coach or for a service. So, yeah, does it answer your question?

Oh yeah, I think so. Yes. I mean, in my experience with the cold emails, it's the same. We've used that tactic for ourselves and for others to attract prospects. When there is a hit, which is seldom, cold email just seems to be a really, really, really bad tactic these days for, I don't know, for service products like I do, like I have. But when there is interest, it's also very what's typically known as top of the funnel. It's very early intrigued but not ready still. And so that touchpoint, if there's even a conversation made, it could be months away from that lead being ready to have a strong conversation. But there's other tactics that are much more instant. Google comes to mind. People are searching for business coaching and they come up with, you know, they see an ad, they're going to click and they're ready to buy. Most likely they're not searching for something going to do 12 months later. Usually there's some funnel searching going on there, but those are just two different techniques. But a community, it sounds like, can bridge that gap and it can put people that are anywhere along that spectrum in the funnel into one community that can can continue to be nurtured. So when they're ready, the opportunity is there. When they're not ready, they're still receiving value from the community. And, and you're building your, your funnel through a community. Is that how you see it?

Yeah. And let me make a comment of Google Ads on Google Ads, which I think has spoiled the expectations of some people because Google Ads are great for transactional things that you can clearly define. I want to buy a new car, I want, I don't know, I want a new Tesla. So that is, I can type that in. But already with the business coaching thing, I can look for a business coach, but it's so such a wide field. And it's so dependent on the personality of the coach. That's an area where I'd rather go with somebody who was recommended to me from somebody that I trust, then look for a, for a Google ad, because it's less transactional and small personality-based. So I think a lot of people have this expectation that Google Ads can solve a lot of things. And I think in a lot of cases, it's just not the right channel or the right tool because it's, it's a different dynamic. And with the community building, to come back to your question, it's a great way to, to engage with people that are top of the funnel and not quite ready for like the big thing, but that have an interest, that sort of sense a problem. And I think often with business coaches, nobody says like, I want to remake my whole company and put it on an operating system like EOS. It's mostly like, I don't know, we always seem to hire bad people. What are we doing wrong? And then so if you start looking into this one thing, and then there's sort of like the whole cascade of other connected things that all tie together. But nobody looks for like, I want to remake the whole company. But I wanna hire better people. So it's like small concrete things, and a community might be a better place to get answers to these things, or hoping to get answers. And then they are introduced to the bigger idea of like, okay, maybe not just try to fix people, but fix the whole company by introducing a systematic operating system addresses all these issues that you didn't really know you have.

Yeah, yeah, I agree with you on Google. It has spoiled many people, and that changed many other people's expectations of how simple marketing should be, right? And it's far from it. It's so far from it.

Yeah. And also, for me, it's one thing that I've learned to now say when we start working with business coaches to say, you should at least expect 6 to 12 months before you can really make a good call on whether this works for you. And Google Ads, you turn it on today, and tomorrow, you know, whether it's sort of working or what you can tweak. But this relationship building, community building, that takes time. But the good thing is, even if you turn it off after 12 months, it keeps running. If you turn off Google Ads, it's off, right? You don't get anything else. But if you have a community running, or if you have a strong LinkedIn profile, which I see as some way of a community that keeps giving you dividends far beyond the point when you stop publishing stuff, because people still find you and engage with you.

What are some of the elements of a good LinkedIn profile?

Um, that is a good question, and, uh, I think it's, um, people might invest or spend too much thought on like what needs to be written and sort of how does the profile need to look like. Uh, we've seen crappy profiles that didn't match any of the high standards of copywriters, and they still kind of work. I mean, they work better if it's clear what you do, if you have a nice photo, if you have a good header banner that sort of supports your core message. All of these things help, but I think the most important thing is to invest time. It's something you should spend 30 days and 30 minutes a day on and engage with people, you should publish something. And it's really about the engagement. It's— I see a lot of people who just publish stuff and sort of hire an agency. And then you see these nicely styled graphics with witty quotes of like some smart entrepreneur. And it's sort of like so without any personal character and it sort of feels bland and it's being done by someone and this person who owns the profile is never online. So one simple dynamic is like when you comment on someone's post and you get an instant reply, how does it make you feel? I mean, it's such— it's so much nicer to sort of get an instantaneous reaction And if people have an agency that publishes the post every week, Monday at 9, and then they comment and there's no response, or like a week later, it's sort of a futile effort. It's sort of, it's only, they only see LinkedIn as an advertising platform. We just sort of blast our stuff out, but we're not listening to people who come back to us. And I think that's sort of It's, it's paying in the same direction of community building. You want to interact, you want to have an exchange, you want to communicate, and that's how you nurture relationships and how you build a community.

Yeah, I know, uh, we had an exchange on LinkedIn not too long ago, and, and it's always great when you post something and you get a quick response, like, oh, someone's actually out there listening, and, uh, I have a team that does some of my LinkedIn writing, but I feel very much that it's my responsibility to monitor posts and respond and engage. That's how I've always viewed LinkedIn is it's like going to a cocktail party and not talking to anybody if you're not engaging. You can be the best dressed person in the party, but if you're standing in the corner and not talking to anybody, you're not getting any value out of that, nor is the rest of the party. You being there.

That's a great analogy. I'll keep that one.

Yeah, you can— my ideas are open source. And on that topic, I think we were engaging about marketing spend. Is that a big good— I'd love to pick your brain because we had, I think, differing perspectives, not necessarily competing views, but just different perspectives. And I was suggesting that you know, as you talk about recessions and we go into recession potentially or not, that marketers and agencies and people will say, well, don't stop spending money, keep spending. You can't, you can't cut off your marketing. It's like cutting your nose to spite your face. And my perspective was, in some instances, it may be good to not spend, but you need to have someone thoughtful to walk you through the process, like a a strategic leader to think through what's the right spend, or maybe it's just let's optimize the spend or change the spend, but it's not as simple as just keep spending. What do you, what do you think? Because you had a slightly different perspective.

Well, I think in the end we didn't disagree that much, but definitely I think the worst thing is to just cut all spending regardless of like just like, okay, we gotta bring down costs. And I think it definitely makes sense to look at, okay, what are the things that have proven to work in the past? And let's focus on that. Let's maybe cut back a little on like experiments, unproven experiments that haven't brought in any ROI, and just take that spend and invest it in the areas that we know work and focus on that for the time being. So I think we are aligned on that. But I think, yeah, it surprises me that there are still companies that sort of then just cut everything and it's like, okay, every department has to cut back by 10%. And it's like, yeah, maybe not that one because it's sort of the one that fuels your business, maybe.

I like that. I like that take. You explained it better in person or virtually than you did on LinkedIn. The idea of invested expenditures that we just have been experimenting with versus tried and true things we know have ROI. That separation, I think, is very important for companies to make across the board. And and don't often look at expenses that way. If you look at a bucket of operating expenses, rarely do you pull out, well, what if, what if those expenses were truly experimental and not necessary, or things we were just trying or doing because we could, versus the things that we absolutely needed to do to operate. And marketing has so many of those types of expenses. It seems like most of marketing is an experiment. At some level, all of marketing is experiment at the beginning until you figure out what's working, then you can pour some gas on it. But I would guess most people's budgets, if they looked at their operating marketing expenses, a large percentage is experimental. They just don't know if it's working. Would you agree?

Yeah, it's a, it's a wild field. So I think a lot of companies might just be bad at tracking what works and what doesn't. They just do stuff and they can't really pinpoint and say, this happened because of that. And I understand very often in marketing it's hard because you can't— if you don't run like a clear ads campaign where you can see, okay, we spent $100 and we got $200 back in revenue. That's clear-cut. But like all this fuzzy community recommendation after 6 months people come back thing, that's much tougher to measure that. And it's, I think it requires a lot of experience from somebody who's done things like that in the past to say, maybe we we can't really see how it works, but I know, which is always dangerous to say, because I've done this previously, I know that this is like the thing that works. I'm just thinking, I've worked with a couple of very junior marketing people, and I was more like in the guidance role and helping them, like a fractional CMO. And the interesting thing for me to see was that they looked at everything like a clean slate, and they didn't really know what works, what doesn't work. And I came with experiences. And you could also say opinions about certain things where I could say, okay, you are in the IT industry, you're never gonna sell IT services to other companies just by doing an AdWords campaign. Don't even try it. It's never worked. So I'm always torn because sometimes I think, who I am to say that, let's try it. And very often I'm like, we don't even have to try this because it hasn't worked and the dynamics of this product are different. Yeah, so I think I went off on a tangent here, but—

No, not really. You did a nice job summarizing like the thought there. Many companies just don't measure to start with. And so they don't know what's an experiment, what's working, what's not working. I think when you go into the cut mode or the optimize mode without those, without those metrics of what's working, what's not working, you just say, heck, let's just scrap it all. Let's just start over. And that's the danger you were alluding to, is you just can't cut everything. There needs to be some some data to help decide what to keep doing and what not to do.

And I think you need somebody who's really— so thinking about business coaching, thinking about high price point products that are services that are being sold on a personal basis, um, you need someone who really has been around for a while in that company So they know like, hey, John Doe, he's called us 3 years ago and he's gonna come, he's gonna become a client at one point. And really have sort of a big picture of like a lot of names that have touched the company or the business in the past and have a sense of like certain people will return. We didn't convert them right away. And I think that's a challenge for a lot of businesses. You have CRM systems, you can capture a lot of information like this person got an email 2 years ago, they called us 18 months ago, da da da da. With a community, I feel the way I saw that often was I had more of a connection with people. So I had a bigger contacts of like, okay, this person is connected with that person. And so they did it. It was a lot of soft selling and relationship building that was hard to capture on a CRM system. And I think that is something that is hard to grasp if you come from this Google Ads world, and you're like 25, and you want to sort of like quickly turn something around. There are a lot of relationships among people that are hard to capture in the sales process, but that sometimes bring in money that are— well, it's dangerous to just cut something because, well, it's not, it's not doing anything. And it is, you just got to be more patient. So yeah, but it's—

yeah, you can't track, you can't track everything. It's really hard, I should say, to track everything well. There's so many soft interactions. There's conversations that happen in passing, in groups, and at events. I'm a big believer in just making random connections, um, and adding value through connecting other people randomly.

That—

I mean, it's not random as much as just for the sake of creating connections. And I can tell you, I can look back almost every time at a lead or referral I get is because of some connection I made many, many months ago, completely unrelated. And it's— you can't track that in a CRM.

And that just—

that's, uh, things that happen in the universe that we don't have much control over. You just have to be open to it and play the rule, play the game.

But it helps to have some of the bigger system like, uh, to know, okay, what we do on LinkedIn has an impact. So for example, what I've seen over the past months when I started posting daily, I don't see a lot of people, or I see people commenting and liking the posts, but I've met a lot of people that told me, hey, I like your posts, I read everything you do. So I'm having an impact that I can't measure. Just because people don't leave any traces by just viewing the stuff. And it's, but it's, but it's, yeah, leaving, it's having an impact on their mind. So they remember me. And building a system between LinkedIn, having a podcast, having a good email list, you can have some touchpoints that you can measure. But there's a lot happening among them that you can't track, and you gotta trust that it works.

And I think that's the thing for C-level leaders and, and business owners to understand is that now our personalities and our profiles are so much more visible than they ever were as individuals. And the power of that is that we can spread more awareness of our business through our personal profiles than ever before. We're also at risk if something happens personally, it can have a business implication pretty quickly as well. But I think it's more of the former that's important to grasp. So your online profile, I think I heard it the other day, if you look up Tesla, it's got X million users. If you look on Elon Musk, it's 10X that. I mean, the profile of the individual drives that company, owns that company, or in that company is 10x as powerful as the profile of the company itself. And that's the opportunity when you think about communities. It's not companies that join communities, it's people. And it's not companies that are leading communities, it's people. So as executives, that's our opportunity is to really leverage this space and technology to build stronger profiles and better communities for ourselves and our teams.

Yeah, what you're saying is so true. I mean, with LinkedIn, you have the company profile, you have the individual profile, and everybody follows Elon Musk. A few people follow Tesla, because we, as human beings, we are made to interact with fellow human beings. And a company is sort of just an artificial product. It's nothing we can really identify with. Yeah, brands help to a certain degree, but We want to see faces, we want to see expressions, we want to see viewpoints, taste, values, and really get a sense for who that person is. And I think a lot of C-level people are too shy when it comes to being visible and being transparent, because in the end, that's part of the role I think they have for the company that they serve. That they give a face to that company and they ought to live more of that personality on LinkedIn or whatever platform they choose.

Yeah. Well, let's switch gears. Tell me something about yourself individually. What do you like to do for fun?

What do I like to do for fun? I like cycling.

Oh yeah?

I'm really excited to be back in London. I haven't been here for 2 years, and it's just— I just love cycling through London and going to meetings. And while everybody else is in a stuffy subway car, I can sort of freely float on the street. So I think—

Is London bike-friendly?

Surprisingly, yes. It's one of the safest cities, I would say, for cycling. They have a lot of bike lanes, and it's a very common and accepted thing. Every bus, if they sense you hovering around somewhere, they quickly stop and wait for you. So it's a really bike-friendly city and it's a good place to cycle.

Great. Have you done any racing?

Well, not like competitive, but I did a fun thing. I did a couple of charity rides from Paris to London. Sounds like crazy, but it's sort of one of the life lessons that I took, that if you sort of ride at a steady pace and do that over a prolonged period of time, you get very far. You would think like Paris-London, isn't that like fucking crazy far? And it's indeed, it takes you 3 days if you cycle for 6 to 8 hours a day And you just get there. You just sort of like keep pedaling. And it's great fun. I did it as part of a charity ride for an organization called Tech Bikers. So we raised funds for a literacy project in developing countries. And so that's a fun thing I like to do.

There is a— race across Iowa. It's called RAGBRAI, and it stands for Race Across Greater Iowa. I don't know, the words, the letters all mean something, but they start by dipping, um, the back wheel of the bicycle in the Missouri River, which is on the western border of Iowa. And then it's a— usually it's a 7, 8, 9, 10-day, uh, route across Iowa. And then they dip their front wheel in the Mississippi, which is on the east side of Iowa. And it's a big, uh, it's a big deal. People have been doing that for years, and it becomes an event at every stop along the way. So there's always a different route, there's always little towns that they're stopping out, and those towns host big events. It's, it's, it's a campground, you know, idea.

The—

all these, uh, buses come and they're pulling all the gear and the bicycles get off. And it's a race, but it's really 10 days of partying, I think, for most of these people. Because every night there's just festivals and energy and fun. And then you— next morning you get off, you get on your bike, you ride 15, 20, 40, 60 miles. I don't know what the distances are. And you do it again. It's a— say it's the same stop every day. Everybody stops, I should say, at the same place every day, so no one's going ahead, but they are timing you between stops if you want to race it. I've never done it, but it sounded like a lot of fun.

You know what that is? That is community building. I mean, by being together with the same group of people for 8 to 10 days, um, you, you've built a community. I think that, that's what, what always fascinated me being part of these events. You, you're being thrown in a room with complete strangers, and after a certain period of time, it's like you, you've built this trust and you've built this relationship with other people that you would not have thought about before you've met them. And that's what really fascinates me, how We as a human species have this ability to connect and build these groups just because we sort of, yeah, we see ourselves in each other and sort of understand each other's needs. So absolutely fascinating.

Yeah, that's community building. Well, with that in mind, it's been great talking with you, Simon. I'm excited to continue our community building together. You and I have been talking offline on different subjects. So I'm excited to keep doing that. But if anybody else wants to reach out to you about the work you do, or to get to know more about you, what's the best way?

Best way is always to check out my LinkedIn profile. You will see lots of content that gives you an idea of what, what we do with StoryLux. And my name might be hard to find, Simon.

We'll have it in the show notes. So it'll be easy for people to access.

I'm highly responsive on LinkedIn, uh, following the preach what you walk, walk, walk the talk, practice what you preach, walk the talk, practice what you preach, walk the talk.

Uh, we do a lot of LinkedIn work, ride your bike and the training wheels take off. I don't know. There's so many different things we could go there.

Um, well, good.

Well, thank you very much. I appreciate your time.

Thank you for having me.

And thank you to all of our listeners. If you want to reach out to Simon, talk about bikes or community building or building a bike community, I'm sure he'd love to hear from you. And I would like to hear from you and talk to you next week on our next show. So thank you for tuning in.

And that's a wrap. There's another successful episode of the Fractional C-Suite Retreat. See our show notes and more episodes at fractionalcsuitretreat.com. This podcast is sponsored by Your CMO, helping organizations grow, save time and money with better marketing strategy and fractional execution. Visit them at yourcmo.com, yourcmo.com, spelled wrong on purpose.