Thomas Power reflects on selling Ecademy (run for 14 years, sold in 2012) and the core insight that its 650,000 members were organized as about 5,000 local "academies" of roughly 100–150 people—aligning with Robin Dunbar's anthropology-based Dunbar's number. After a period of grieving, Power and Penny Power intentionally rebuilt community offerings much smaller (mastermind groups of 12, then intimate groups of ~100), framing this approach as a 'big small' strategy: scaling impact by many small, tightly-connected groups rather than one large undifferentiated audience.
Chapters
The one really big learning for me is those 650,000 members were actually 5,000 clubs of about 130 people. Okay. And when I had time, we sold the business in 2012. We were running it for 14 years. The big learning for me was 650,000 members. Sounds like a huge number, which it was. But when you think about 5,000 clubs of 130 people, that's what it actually was. The Sydney Academy, the Farnham Academy, the Brussels Academy, the New York Academy, the San Francisco Academy, lots of these little groups, these small intimate groups around the world of between 100 to 150 people, which is Dunbar's number, Dunbar's Law. Robin Dunbar from Oxford University, professor of anthropology. And I looked at that, and as Penny will say, we went through a long period of grieving or bereavement after we said goodbye to Academy. And it took us a long time to recover from that. And so when we came back, we wanted to come back small. And then Penny said, well, let's start very small with just Mastermind groups of 12. And we built three groups of 12. And then when Covid came along, we said, it's time to build one of those small, intimate groups again. But let's just keep it down, just like Academy, let's keep it down to a nice small number that's manageable. And as Penny says, that we could get our arms round and that's 100 people. And then it just started to settle with me. Oh, goodness me. This is much more significant than we. And we realize we're actually at the beginning of what I call a big, small strategy. And it sounds like an oxymoron and it sounds very confusing, but we see it with SUVs. We see giant SUVs 10 years ago. Now we see little copies of them which are tiny, but they look like big ones. They're big small. And big small is coming to wall products. You notice it in all devices, phones, cars. And so big small strategy is actually a label I've given to community building. Lots and lots of small groups of a hundred.
