Community is hard to scale (and often, isn't actual community)
I wrote a post a few weeks ago about why community is important to your business.
Business veterans won’t need to read more than a few lines into it, because you probably already know that as a service provider, get referrals and leads for your business is predicated on having a strong network.
Personally, community is the only reason that my business is still alive right now (albeit in a different form). I’ll get to that in a second.
With the advent of the internet, and thus information, it seemed that information alone wasn’t enough to sell at premium pricing.
Over the last 30 years, the internet democratized information — in my opinion, that’s a good thing.
But in order to differentiate, there has been a major shift over the past five years to include network and connection alongside information.
AKA everyone who sells almost anything decided they needed to get into the community business.
Authors started talking about having “a community around their books” and Facebook rolled out groups to be a placeholder for in-person communities.
Information sellers sold a “community of like-minded individuals” as a selling point of their products.
Even at events, we saw an uptick in “strategic community interactions” — which often weren’t done that well but at least could point to evidence of working to connect members (mostly, this looked like a pre-event cocktail hour that relied on the extroverts in the group to take up space and start conversations. That’s simplistic, but it was odd to me when I first went to one.)
None of these innovations on “community” were bad things in my opinion.
As a new business owner in a rural town in Montana, I was excited to have access to “like-minded people” across the country.
But I soon realized that what these online gathering places purported as community was not actually what it was.
It was a gathering of individuals around a thought leader.
Which isn’t actually a bad thing — it’s just a different thing.
Thought leadership isn’t community.
Hang tight before you string me up and tell me why your community is different because people talk to each other in your comment section.
Community relies on harnessing the power of its members. True community believes that each member is an expert and has something valuable to give the other members.
How this is executed is different — it looks like a culture of referral and a culture of connection. It looks like the leader amplifying others and sending intros instead of providing advice.
Thought leadership is the exact opposite.
It values the ides and thoughts of the leader above all else. The way this is executed is often in terms of “advice-giving” and generally, advice-giving outside of one’s deep expertise. It looks like “this is what I would do” instead of “what are some options of ways we could overcome this?”
None of this is bad.
But I need everyone to know the difference between community and thought leadership because you may be missing out on a real thing that you crave.
Thought leadership can be really effective — it gives people struggling guardrails to follow. It allows people considering a counter opinion. It provides a lot of structure (“do this not that” is good particularly if you’re struggling to commit to a direction).
But, it also allows the recipient to punt on the discomfort of forming their own opinion. Which, in my opinion, is crucial for business ownership.
Participating in a true community means that you are coming to the table expected to have your own experiences and share them freely.
That can be very uncomfortable for people, and it can also be hard to manage when you’re the community leader.
Helping people get value out of the community is the leader knowing how they can actually help them — and that takes work to KNOW people.
Which is hard to scale. It’s hard to know 50 people well, let alone 200 people.
Which is why good communities start by empowering members of the community to be leaders and to hold space as well.
Building a culture of leadership within a community is important (actually essential) to its survival.
Community leaders are good up close. Thought leaders are good from far away.
I’ve long believed that community leaders are better up close than thought leaders. Community leaders create communities because they genuinely believe that other people know more (or at least different) than they do.
Thought leaders become thought leaders because they want their opinions heard. Which means, it’s challenging to be up close with a thought leader. If your status is predicated on how much you know, what happens when someone in your community pokes holes in what you know?
As we’ve seen in the summer of 2020, A LOT.
But when you build a community, and you value all members (and in fact, empower members to have agency and ownership), you’re giving members an incredible gift, which is the ability to be valued when their opinions differ from the community leader.
And now, a story.
When I started hosting my own events in 2015, it would have made sense for me to do typical “thought leadership” style events — aka teaching a workshop or standing up in front of a group of people and giving them some tactics that I found relevant to my business’ success.
This is the direct path to cash — show off your expertise by talking about it to others and teaching your methods.
But I didn’t do that — mostly because I didn’t think people would pay to hear me talk (I wasn’t known in my community yet).
However, what I did do was invite people in — first to my home to talk about stuff and then to a formal event.
Even that formal event (40 womxn the first time) was focused on small group discussions.
I’d ask each member to fill out a questionnaire.
I then paired each person with a group of 4-7 people who had some similarities.
I gave each group discussion questions.
I sat back and watched as connections were formed.
It took forever.
It took me so much time to make these introductions — all the while, I was trying to run my business as an event planner.
It wasn’t scalable for me — maybe 250 womxn total came to 8 events (so many repeat buyers!), but the result was astonishing.
Deep friendships and connections that still exist in my local community to this day.
People who always say “I met at one of your events! It was life-changing!”
I did that.
But, absent a true cash plan, I had to abandon these events because they simply didn’t make money for the time I was spending, and I couldn’t see a path to scalability and profitability.
People begged me to monetize my formula for my events.
I’d sold out 8 of them, so people were curious how they could do it too.
I had emails in my inbox asking if I could write a “handbook” of best practices when running networking events.
People interviewed me on podcasts about the unique format of the Boss Lady Bash (which, to me, wasn’t unique. It was having a conversation in small groups).
I never did.
I didn’t know why then, but it never felt right for me to sell the “formula” of my events.
People told me I was crazy, that I was “playing too small”, and that I needed to “recognize my own genius.” (seriously. These were words people told me about the IP I’d developed.)
But what I know now that I couldn’t put words to then was this:
I couldn’t teach someone curious about monetizing relationships how to genuinely see and hold true space for their members.
I probably still can’t.
Because my formula wasn’t that hard to see (it was literally written on my sales page and you could have paid $50 to come to an event and copy everything).
But the product wasn’t the event. The product was engineering a way for people to feel seen and heard.
And that’s not something that can be explained in a three-minute video lesson about community-building.
So, I let it go — the relationships stayed with me (and, TBH, is the only way I’ve been able to pivot into coaching and consulting — because the relationships and the trust I built starting in 2015 had laid the seed for a latent demand that I’m only now getting around to monetizing).
It wasn’t until a few years later, when I’d niched into providing digital communities a place to client said to me:
“I love our community. But community is slow and difficult to scale.”
Relationships are hard to commodify. You can’t dump people into a chat thread or a Facebook group and expect connections to form organically.
Sure, people will meet each other.
But there is a reason that most deep friendships and relationships start off at an event, during a small mastermind, or need in-person experiences to sustain (which was my primary business for 7 years so I know a thing or two about in-person experiences as a driver to a rich community).
The reason is that being seen requires an enormous amount of trust and vulnerability. And that is very, very hard to manufacture all at once.
Take churches or religion for example.
I’m not particularly religious, but religion as a model for community building is an excellent place from whence to draw inspiration.
Religious communities don’t only rely on the thought leadership in their text book.
They also didn’t ONLY rely on in-person experiences (church, or communal calls to prayer, or Shabbat service, etc.) explaining those texts.
They relied on the empowerment of the community to be catalysts and shepherds of the information.
They relied on communities of neighborliness and support, empathy and vulnerability to maintain the ideas of the thought leader.
They relied on volunteers and “church ladies” and ownership.
Now, that’s not to say that churches didn’t have dangerous thought leaders that used their influence to solidify dogma. That happens all the time.
But the perpetuity of deeply religious communities RELIES ON THE PEOPLE IN THE COMMUNITY.
And if there wasn’t significant effort in making those people feel seen, heard, and supported, the business model would crumble.
Community is incredibly powerful, but it is incredibly hard to scale.
However, being a solid community and relationship builder will be a difference-maker for your business, because at the foundation of community is trust.
If you can build trust, then you will never lack for clients again.
Other posts you like might around the topic of:
“Business Operations”
Networking is actually fun, and this post talks about how traditional "networking" traditionally is done through a lens of inauthenticity. When you're actually trying to make friends in business, networking is the single best way for people to refer you.