Latest / Beyond Fulfillment Podcast / From Fired To A Seven-Figure Exit: The Business of Bouncing Back with Carol Tice

Transcript

From Fired To A Seven-Figure Exit: The Business of Bouncing Back with Carol Tice · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:04
  You don't have to is what I'm here to tell the world is like really.
• 0:08
  When you're authentically you, you can sell in a way that feels comfortable for you.
• 0:14
  What does a successful exit actually look like?
• 0:18
  Most founders dream of it, but few pull it off.
• 0:21
  Especially when their business is built on their own personality.
• 0:25
  Today's guest is a masterclass in how to build for freedom.
• 0:29
  Carol Tice is a former business journalist for Forbes.
• 0:33
  An entrepreneur who scaled a $25 a month membership site into a multi million dollar exit.
• 0:39
  She scaled the Freelance Writer's den to over 1500 members and more impressively successfully sold it in 2021 to start her second act.
• 0:50
  Now at age 65, Carol is redefining retirement.
• 0:54
  She's running the Community Growth Academy entirely from an rv, traveling the country and teaching experts how to escape the one to one coaching trap by building low stress, high scale communities.
• 1:07
  We're breaking down the art of the ask how to future proof your career against AI and why Carol chooses the stability of a crowd over the burnout of high ticket clients.
• 1:18
  If you're ready to build a business that is exit ready, authentic and and mobile enough to follow you anywhere, this conversation is for you.
• 1:27
  As always, if you found value from this content, please like and subscribe.
• 1:32
  All right, Carol Tice, welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
• 1:36
  Thanks for having me.
• 1:37
  Yes, we are excited to talk to you.
• 1:40
  So Carol, you've got a rather interesting entrepreneurial journey.
• 1:44
  So you spent decades as a business journalist and a ghostwriter.
• 1:49
  You wrote for some major publications like Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine and Seattle Times.
• 1:56
  And you also authored multiple business books.
• 2:00
  And along the way you started an online community for freelance writers.
• 2:06
  Eventually scaled that and you had a very successful exit.
• 2:10
  And now in rather than just riding off to the sunset and retiring, you've started another company where you're actually teaching people to do what you did, which is build an online online community and sell it.
• 2:23
  But if you would, could you just like walk us through your, your backstory and how you became an entrepreneur?
• 2:30
  Sure.
• 2:30
  Yeah.
• 2:31
  It, it was kind of unlikely because this the last staff reporting job I had at the Business journal in Seattle, I loved it.
• 2:40
  I thought I was never going to leave.
• 2:41
  I loved my editors.
• 2:43
  And then they all left and the party was over.
• 2:45
  And then and I was the most highly paid reporter.
• 2:48
  I got laid off and I thought well I'll find another job.
• 2:51
  You know, started freelancing and it just went really well.
• 2:57
  And this is during the like 08-090:10 downturn.
• 3:03
  And at the same time I Discovered blogging.
• 3:05
  And I was like, oh my God, a platform where I have the publish button and no editor tells me to rewrite it and stuff.
• 3:12
  I'm in.
• 3:13
  So I had started blogging about freelance writing because I had noticed not all freelance writers were ramping their business to six figures.
• 3:21
  Like I was in that economic downturn period.
• 3:25
  A lot of other people were like, oh, I'm starving.
• 3:27
  The economy, I don't know how to get clients.
• 3:29
  And I was like, okay, well, I could offer some help here.
• 3:32
  And I think my whole original vision was like, I would write a book and it would sell a bazillion copies and I'm reached the end.
• 3:39
  Like, I didn't know anything about selling.
• 3:41
  I had been a journalist.
• 3:42
  I.
• 3:43
  We were taught to think of the advertising sales side of the paper as the dark side of the force.
• 3:48
  You know, I had totally new world to me.
• 3:53
  But I love blogging and I started looking for ways to monetize my blog.
• 3:56
  And while I was doing that, I joined a paid community for bloggers.
• 4:02
  And as soon as I got in, I was like, wow, I love this.
• 4:06
  I'm learning so much.
• 4:08
  This ability to talk to a bunch of other people going through the same thing I am is amazing.
• 4:14
  And, and there's nothing like this for freelance writers, and there should be.
• 4:18
  And then I kind of just sat with that and the blog kind of got discovered and its audience grew.
• 4:26
  And I ended up going to a conference and getting really inspired and coming home and thinking, I need to just put the hammer down and launch this and stop musing like, oh, it would be really great if I
• 4:37
  made a community and just do it and just did a 90 day launch.
• 4:42
  Surveyed my people.
• 4:43
  What would you like in a community?
• 4:45
  I think this format would help you and open the doors.
• 4:49
  So that was kind of the start of it all.
• 4:54
  Also, the other factor around the same time is that my husband developed a seizure disorder and was selling cars 80 hours a week.
• 5:03
  And really I kept getting calls from Seattle, from emts, hey, we're here with your husband.
• 5:09
  He's, you know, dropped to the sidewalk, walking, walking to work.
• 5:13
  And I wanted that to stop because it was pretty intense and I felt like he needed to just take some time off and heal.
• 5:20
  We had also just adopted that unexpected third kid and could really use his stay at home parents.
• 5:26
  And I went, you know, I don't know, I just have this instinct that if you did more kids stuff and I had more work hours, I could replace your income.
• 5:36
  And that turned out to be way more than true.
• 5:39
  I.
• 5:39
  I broke the thing where we swap jobs and, you know, made.
• 5:43
  He could never earn what I was making from the.
• 5:45
  From the business.
• 5:47
  So then.
• 5:48
  Then we did that for a decade.
• 5:51
  Okay, all right, so look, you're.
• 5:55
  You're a journalist.
• 5:56
  Get laid off after everyone leaves, you kind of stumble in entrepreneurship, right?
• 6:02
  And that.
• 6:03
  That was right around the time blogs were really taking off.
• 6:06
  Was that right?
• 6:06
  Yes.
• 6:06
  Okay.
• 6:07
  Yes.
• 6:07
  It was kind of a hobby gone mad thing.
• 6:09
  Like, it just kept blowing up, you know, and I finally found a way to earn from it.
• 6:15
  And I loved doing it, loved helping other writers, and I went with it, you know?
• 6:19
  Okay, so perfect timing, right?
• 6:21
  You start the blog, if that gets successful, and then you have this idea to start the paid community.
• 6:26
  When you see what the paid community space is all about, you sit on it for a little while, you finally decide you're going to.
• 6:32
  Now that's interesting too, because so often we see when people have an idea, they don't act on it right away.
• 6:38
  It just kind of fades away and that's the end.
• 6:40
  But you kept coming back and you finally said, I'm gonna do this.
• 6:43
  And like you said, you put the hammer down and you did it.
• 6:46
  You started back then and back then communities, very technically complex.
• 6:51
  Not.
• 6:51
  It's not like now where I'm on school, and it's like, I pay.
• 6:56
  I pay 1% of what I used to pay for backend.
• 7:00
  Literally.
• 7:01
  Like, it was so complex.
• 7:03
  And I'm not a tech person, so that was sort of my thing that was kind of holding me back.
• 7:08
  And I was like, I just decided I needed to figure out how to solve it and get it up.
• 7:13
  Okay, well, yeah, so let's dig into that too, because.
• 7:16
  All right, so you're doing well with the blog.
• 7:18
  You want to start this community, you say, I'm just going to do it.
• 7:21
  You do it.
• 7:23
  And like you said, this is a decade plus ago.
• 7:25
  So things are not where they were technologically with all these resources we have today.
• 7:29
  So how.
• 7:30
  How did you go about getting it up and running back in those days?
• 7:34
  I stole the tech person from that blogging community that I joined.
• 7:40
  I hired them to do it.
• 7:43
  They were like the only person I knew who knew it, who was doing a community.
• 7:47
  And I was like, will you help me?
• 7:49
  And, you know, I paid them a few thousand.
• 7:51
  They got it functional.
• 7:53
  And it was so, you know, you had to make affiliate software, talk to forum software, talk to paycard software.
• 7:59
  Like, it was all a bunch of WordPress plugins.
• 8:02
  It was a nightmare.
• 8:03
  Total complex nightmare.
• 8:05
  To do back then and, but you know, I knew he had done it once before so I, I got him to put it, to stand it up.
• 8:13
  Okay, so you show how resourceful you are.
• 8:15
  You find someone that knows what you need, you pay them, they get it done, you get the community up and running.
• 8:21
  And so what was it like in terms of.
• 8:25
  Because you know, earlier you said too right, you were just a writer, you weren't really into sales, you kind of didn't know anything about that, but you just, you love what you're doing, so you just went with it.
• 8:35
  So now when you, you start this community and you have to go out and get members and do the marketing and do the sales, like what was that process like?
• 8:45
  I a, a huge learning ramp of following blogs like Copy Blogger and you know, Copy Hack, Copy hackers and people who were marketers.
• 8:58
  And I acquired a couple of mentors who came out of the marketing space and were kind of hardcore marketers and, and would get on me like send more emails.
• 9:09
  You can send 10 emails on the last day, you know, and I, I learned how to do marketing, but I learned how to do marketing my own way in kind of not a hard sell way.
• 9:21
  I'm still not a hard sell person.
• 9:24
  I'm not doing those two hour webinars where they grind you and tell you your life's going to die if you don't buy their thing.
• 9:30
  And I did it my way and basically by just talking about what your pain is and what I have for you that you need and what, you know, what happens if you don't have this shortcut and just giving
• 9:49
  a lot of value, letting you know, sneaking things out from under the curtain.
• 9:53
  Here's the free example of the kind of, you know, quality programming you get.
• 9:58
  We did a lot of classes where the first session of the class was free.
• 10:02
  Just come to class, see if this is a class you want to take and then just, you know, upsell them the rest of the course.
• 10:10
  So yeah, I'm here to say that you don't have to be a selly selly kind of person.
• 10:15
  And that was one of the things that appealed to me about paid community is that, you know, when you're not selling a $10,000 offer, when you're selling it's $25 a month, no obligation leave any time, then that's a
• 10:30
  lot easier, you know, that's a lot lower lift and that enables you to be less, you know, hardcore marketers.
• 10:37
  Sell, sell, sell.
• 10:39
  I just wanted to spend more time.
• 10:42
  It's like this is how community intersected with all of my interests.
• 10:46
  I wanted to spend less time marketing and more time helping people.
• 10:51
  Helping.
• 10:52
  Helping writers make more money or now in my new business, helping people get their communities launched and running and earning.
• 10:59
  And I wanted to impact a lot of people.
• 11:02
  So when you're selling a $10,000 offer, it's like, how many people are you going to coach this year?
• 11:06
  You know, 20 people, 15 people?
• 11:11
  I wanted to actually influence the course of my whole industry.
• 11:15
  I wanted to.
• 11:16
  To shut down scams, educate a lot of writers about what their value was in the marketplace.
• 11:24
  So you can't do that coaching 20 people in a year.
• 11:28
  You know, you need to impact thousands of people, which is what we did in freelance writers den.
• 11:33
  14,000 people or so came through the doors before I sold it.
• 11:38
  And the reliable income, of course, side of it, when you're booking coaching clients, that's a lumpy, bumpy.
• 11:44
  You got to always be selling and getting that next client and you have down months.
• 11:49
  And I couldn't have any down months.
• 11:50
  I was the sole support of a family of five, and I needed every month to have revenue and having that, you know, regular monthly membership, it's so forecastable.
• 12:04
  You see it heading down, you open the doors, you have a sale.
• 12:07
  You know, you just have a lot of ability to make your income what you want it to be and make it really, really stable.
• 12:15
  And that was it.
• 12:16
  Just fit where I was at.
• 12:18
  And I still love this model.
• 12:20
  Okay.
• 12:21
  Less marketing, reliable income, you know.
• 12:25
  Yeah, for sure.
• 12:27
  So you start this community, you get it up and running, you're figuring out the sales and marketing.
• 12:33
  You said you did it your way, right.
• 12:35
  You acquired some marketers that are some mentors rather, that were marketing space, that were more of the hardcore sale type.
• 12:42
  Now, that's interesting too, because being new to the space, right, so much of the wisdom out there is, you know, when you find someone that is.
• 12:51
  Has done what you want to do, take their advice and follow it and do what they say.
• 12:55
  But clearly.
• 12:56
  Right, that didn't resonate with you in terms of.
• 13:00
  I did follow it, but not as hardcore as they would do it.
• 13:05
  You know, they would do emails that go on for miles and send 10 of them in a day.
• 13:09
  And like, I'm gonna do it.
• 13:11
  It's gonna go on for half a mile and I'm gonna send maybe three the last day.
• 13:15
  You know, just.
• 13:16
  I just did it to my comfort level of what I felt okay doing.
• 13:21
  You know, I.
• 13:23
  I know that people go a lot harder at their marketing than I do.
• 13:28
  And you know what?
• 13:29
  I made enough hido between the exit and revenue from the business.
• 13:33
  It was 6 million in revenue.
• 13:35
  I had a staff of 10.
• 13:37
  You know, I had a great life.
• 13:38
  I had a five bedroom house on like Washington and Seattle.
• 13:41
  You know, I'm very happy with how it turned out.
• 13:44
  As a reporter, you know, this is income I never ever could have imagined making.
• 13:50
  Totally, you know, grew beyond my wildest dreams.
• 13:53
  So, you know, I, this is why I wanted to be on your podcast about beyond fulfillment is like what is fulfilling?
• 14:01
  Is there an enough for you?
• 14:03
  Because there was for me.
• 14:04
  You know, there isn't enough.
• 14:07
  And I, I wanted to do it.
• 14:11
  Being the person I am.
• 14:13
  I didn't want to become someone I'm not.
• 14:14
  I wanted, didn't want to be one of those fake, you know, sleazy used car salesman vibe kind of people.
• 14:20
  I, I didn't want it that bad.
• 14:22
  I wasn't willing to like get a personality transplant and become someone I didn't like.
• 14:28
  I wasn't going to do that, you know.
• 14:30
  And you let me tell you what actually happens with the knowledge that runs your business.
• 14:37
  Someone spends a week writing an sop.
• 14:39
  It goes in a binder, the binder goes on a shelf.
• 14:43
  And when a new hire has a question, they find the person who knows and they ask them.
• 14:48
  That's tribal knowledge.
• 14:50
  It's valuable.
• 14:51
  And it walks out the door every time someone leaves.
• 14:55
  With Quickly Doc, you just film your experts doing the job.
• 14:59
  It takes five minutes.
• 15:00
  QuicklyDoc turns that into a professional searchable documentation that your team can pull up right from their phone.
• 15:08
  So when someone searches how do I reset the controller?
• 15:12
  There's the answer straight from the person who actually knows.
• 15:16
  Film it once, reference it forever.
• 15:19
  Go to QuicklyDoc.com beyond for your free pilot and stop losing what your best people know.
• 15:27
  Don't have to is what I'm here to tell the world is like really, when you're authentically you, you can sell in a way that feels comfortable for you and it doesn't.
• 15:37
  You don't have to follow the conventional wisdom.
• 15:39
  You don't have to have a $10,000 offer.
• 15:42
  You can design your business the way you want it to be.
• 15:46
  I definitely got a million tips from my mentors on how to construct an email that sells a thing that I still use today.
• 15:56
  But you know, I'm still, It's my flavor, you know, I took it and synthesized it into what would work for me.
• 16:04
  You know, absolutely love that.
• 16:07
  Okay, so in terms of the like the takeoff process did things take off right away when you launch this community?
• 16:16
  So the community growth story is that we launched pretty rapidly to about 500 members, which went before I launched, I thought would solve all my life problems because of course I didn't know how expensive the back end was
• 16:29
  going to be.
• 16:29
  And, and that you actually hit a point where you physically cannot personally answer every forum question, build every course.
• 16:37
  You know that you are going to need a team of people.
• 16:41
  So I knew it needed to grow more.
• 16:43
  And when we got stuck there, I talked to my mentors and one of them was like, well, the thing is you need to close the doors.
• 16:51
  You're.
• 16:52
  It's just open all the time.
• 16:54
  And I think you would get better retention and better sign up in your campaigns if you were only open some of the time.
• 17:00
  And I had certainly seen communities like this, some of them are only open like one day a year.
• 17:05
  This is the only day you can get in.
• 17:07
  You know, I had seen like extreme examples of that and I was totally terrified to do that because I felt like I was disappointing people.
• 17:15
  Like, you know, you come in, you come to my side and you're like, I want this and you can't get in now.
• 17:21
  And now you're sad.
• 17:22
  And I'm like, ah, I don't want to make people sad.
• 17:25
  That is not my vision for this.
• 17:27
  But we started a wait list and we went for it and it ramped it to a thousand.
• 17:32
  We were open like four to six times a year for brief periods.
• 17:36
  And so people stayed in because they didn't know quite when they could get back in.
• 17:39
  People joined because they didn't know when they could join again.
• 17:43
  And it worked.
• 17:44
  You know, it worked to create more exclusivity and scarcity and administratively, it was also fantastic because when you are always open, you are always onboarding new people and it's a major energy drain on your team.
• 18:00
  So we would say we are shutting the doors now because, like, we spend most of our time serving our members.
• 18:06
  That is our mission.
• 18:08
  And so we can't be here selling you a thing all the time.
• 18:11
  We got to go off and do our main business of helping writers make more money.
• 18:16
  And so we're closing the doors and people would join and be like, okay, that makes, you know, that felt like it made sense.
• 18:23
  It was like not fake scarcity, really.
• 18:26
  It was needed on the back end as well as just in how to operate the business and how to drive membership up.
• 18:35
  Okay, so.
• 18:38
  Then we hit the wall at a thousand and I heard a business consultant and by then I had been approached about selling and had gotten to see their run sheets and got a sense that 1500 members was going
• 18:53
  to be where it was going to more make sense to me to sell the business, not a thousand.
• 18:58
  So I needed to 50% grow again.
• 19:02
  And she was great.
• 19:04
  She really took me through the business.
• 19:06
  And over the years we had gotten kind of distracted.
• 19:10
  I had a side business that was a co LLC with another coach, and I had a coaching program which buyers don't care about.
• 19:19
  You're the coach.
• 19:19
  It's going away, you know.
• 19:21
  And she was like, you've got to shut down all this miscellaney that's grown up and all roads just lead to join the community and that's it.
• 19:28
  And that's what we did to grow it the rest of the way.
• 19:32
  So it sort of needed a different solution each time.
• 19:36
  Okay, so just like so many others, right, that the journey is not tipping you places you didn't think it would.
• 19:42
  There's always new problems to solve.
• 19:44
  There's new levels of growth you have to step into.
• 19:47
  And so let's talk about the process of selling.
• 19:50
  When you first, like you said, you got approached and that's when the wheels started turning in your head in terms of I could really sell this.
• 19:57
  So what was the process like from that point to when you actually made the exit?
• 20:03
  I think I got asked a couple, three times and I.
• 20:08
  The first time I was definitely not ready to sell, but I was curious about the process and that's when I started learning things about how to run a business so it can be sold.
• 20:24
  Like you need monthly p L sheets.
• 20:26
  Like, I wasn't doing that.
• 20:28
  The business was just throwing off cash.
• 20:30
  I did my taxes once a year.
• 20:31
  I had a great lifestyle.
• 20:33
  You know, I was like, oh, made.
• 20:35
  I made more money than I ever imagined again this year, you know, and I just wasn't doing that.
• 20:43
  I kind of knew what my overhead was, you know, it was just sort of in my head.
• 20:47
  I wasn't.
• 20:48
  I'm not a numbers person.
• 20:49
  I'm a writer.
• 20:50
  I'm a word person.
• 20:50
  So I wasn't sitting there doing spreadsheets about things, tracking, you know, what's the lifetime value of one of your community members and what's, you know, what's your ad, Facebook ad conversion rate, you know, what's your click through.
• 21:07
  Like there were all kind of metrics that I was not paying any attention to.
• 21:12
  So, you know, where's your operations manual that documents what each role in your company dies and how many hours A week.
• 21:20
  Are you working in the business?
• 21:22
  Are you documenting that?
• 21:23
  You know, this was a whole new world to me really in terms of thinking about my own business, which was more like crazy hobby to me, you know, like, wow, I love doing this.
• 21:35
  It makes money, you know.
• 21:38
  But as my kids approached kind of graduating high school time and we thought about selling the big house and downsizing and the next phase of our life and also just how the freelance writing world was evolving, I started
• 21:52
  to feel a sense of an ending.
• 21:55
  And around then I was approached by a broker who I thought could actually sell my business, who specialized in only online business and had a good track record and knew had a big buyer network where I thought it
• 22:09
  was real, like.
• 22:11
  Because the thing people may not know is when you sell a business and you use the broker, which you should, you hand them a chunk of money to get started.
• 22:23
  You just.
• 22:24
  In my case, I handed them I think 12 grand that you're never getting back.
• 22:29
  And that's a big leap, you know, to believe in.
• 22:35
  You have to really believe in who you're working with, that this is gonna go, you know, and this is going to happen.
• 22:43
  So, you know, I went with them.
• 22:46
  And this was the depths of COVID Winter is when it ended up selling and that I could go on and on about the sale process because it was so crazy, because it was the.
• 22:58
  First winter of COVID Okay, so crazy times.
• 23:02
  And you, of course, you make the sale and then rather than just kind of riding off into the sunset, retiring or whatever, you decided to.
• 23:12
  Well, I guess that.
• 23:13
  Is that when you moved into the RV and started living the RV lifestyle?
• 23:17
  Well, when we sold, we bought the RV and we did a tryout trip.
• 23:22
  We went for three months.
• 23:24
  We liked it a lot.
• 23:25
  And we.
• 23:26
  What we realized is we didn't know where we wanted to downsize to or what retirement would look like.
• 23:32
  And I didn't actually do nothing kind of for four years until starting the new one.
• 23:36
  I was ghostwriting books.
• 23:38
  So I went back to my own freelance writing, but just mostly books, just kind of all books.
• 23:43
  I've done like a dozen ghostwritten books since I sold.
• 23:47
  And I love that as well.
• 23:49
  I love helping, you know, thought leaders get their great ideas out there and I enjoy that.
• 23:56
  But I had one of my mentors come back to me who was doing a program to help people launch.
• 24:02
  And I was like, well, I can't launch another business because, you know, I have a non compete and freelance writing is all I know about.
• 24:09
  And he was like, well, what did you learn in 10 years of running a paid community and I was like, paid community.
• 24:19
  I love the community.
• 24:21
  Paid community is the best business model on the Internet.
• 24:25
  I could talk all day about it.
• 24:26
  Oh, there's so many things to know.
• 24:27
  And we were just off building it, really.
• 24:30
  As soon as we thought of it, we were just like, this is the next thing.
• 24:34
  Yeah.
• 24:35
  Much like when I had the first one, it's like both of these times I just sort of felt pulled by invisible thread out of my umbilical cord, like, go this way, Carol.
• 24:45
  This is where your opportunity is.
• 24:47
  Like, it's, you know, it's really a, almost a gut instinct of like, this is where I belong.
• 24:53
  This is where I fit in the marketplace.
• 24:55
  This is where I have something that will be useful to people, you know, and that's kind of what my purpose is to where can I help people?
• 25:05
  You know, where.
• 25:05
  What do I know that would provide a shortcut to people, to a better life?
• 25:11
  That's kind of what my two communities have in common.
• 25:14
  Okay, wow.
• 25:15
  So amazing.
• 25:16
  So you're thinking you can't do another business because you have the non compete.
• 25:19
  And then your mentor says, what about paid community?
• 25:22
  And it's like the light bulb goes off and you're off and running building this new company.
• 25:26
  So tell us specifically what does the new company do and what's it called?
• 25:30
  It is Community Growth Academy on school, which if people don't know it's S K O O L is one of the big platforms that is set up for community.
• 25:40
  It's entirely about community.
• 25:42
  And I basically took everything I learned from the minute I had the first thought about the first business to selling it and turned it into courseware and worksheets you can do to kind of follow that same journey and
• 25:58
  build in a way that kind of builds in success.
• 26:01
  Where you do the market research, who are your competitors, you poll your audience, what do they need from you?
• 26:07
  And then you build and deliver it and keep talking to them and keep finding out what they need from you and keep creating it.
• 26:16
  Where what tends to happen is people kind of go in a room and they're like, oh, I want to do this.
• 26:21
  And then they like build the whole thing in a vacuum, you know, and then.
• 26:26
  And they aren't building a list and they aren't building in public as they're creating it, they're not building interest in it and it opens and nothing happens.
• 26:34
  And that's just a really common community story.
• 26:37
  I used to have people call me Carol.
• 26:39
  Can you look at my community?
• 26:40
  You know, why Isn't anyone joining?
• 26:42
  And I'm like, well, did you do this, this, this, this?
• 26:44
  No, I didn't do those things.
• 26:46
  You know, so I felt like I could give people a step by step through it, the process.
• 26:49
  And that's basically what we have.
• 26:52
  And people have launched and one of them is at 600 members and.
• 26:57
  And just doing amazing.
• 27:01
  One of my early launch people had a lot of expertise in investing.
• 27:05
  So popular topic, how to get money for retirement.
• 27:08
  And he has a sort of contrarian approach.
• 27:12
  He.
• 27:12
  We did a book together is how we met, I guess wrote his book.
• 27:15
  And then I sold him on the idea that he should wrap all of his consulting services and stuff that he wanted to do around the book in the community so he could just sell one thing and not eight
• 27:25
  different things.
• 27:26
  He put it up and it just, it just took off.
• 27:31
  Wow.
• 27:32
  Yeah.
• 27:32
  Okay, so I mean, that's an example of what's going on.
• 27:36
  All right, so you're literally taking everything you did and just kind of reverse helping people reverse engineer.
• 27:42
  Like this is step by step what you need to do.
• 27:45
  And like you said, building in public, generating interest before it's done and.
• 27:50
  And all the other things that you did and you kind of.
• 27:53
  And then also too building it with the exit in mind and not.
• 27:57
  Yeah, so they can do better than me on that side because I gave them.
• 28:02
  I did a course called Built to Sell so you can think about things about like, how much am I in the branding is how much is a picture of my head, the branding of this, you know, because that's
• 28:12
  not what you want if you're selling it.
• 28:14
  And yeah, we had to do a lot of redesigning and things, so yeah, they could do it better than me now.
• 28:21
  Okay.
• 28:21
  All right.
• 28:22
  So Carol, if people want to find out more about this, this Community Growth Academy.
• 28:26
  Wait, it's on school.
• 28:28
  It's called Community School.
• 28:30
  Community Growth Academy.
• 28:31
  And you should have links for a free case study all about in great detail how I built freelance and sold freelance writers den.
• 28:40
  And more freebies I think are looking around, including that 600 member story that I just mentioned on the about page of our community.
• 28:50
  Okay.
• 28:50
  And if people want to reach out to you online for any reason or to engage with you or learn more.
• 28:55
  What.
• 28:56
  What's the best way people can find you online?
• 28:58
  LinkedIn, carolommunitygrowth, dot school.
• 29:04
  I'm easy to find.
• 29:05
  Okay.
• 29:06
  All right.
• 29:06
  And we will link all that in the show notes.
• 29:09
  Okay, Carol, thank you so much for taking time to be here and sharing all this valuable wisdom.
• 29:14
  From your journey with our listeners.
• 29:16
  We greatly appreciate it.
• 29:17
  My pleasure.
• 29:18
  My pleasure.
• 29:18
  As I said, I can talk about paid community all day.
• 29:21
  I love talking to paid community, so thanks for giving me the opportunity to do that.