#92: Behind the Scenes of Growing The Advance
This year has been quite the whirlwind year for so many of us.
And for me personally, I started a new business.
I'm going to be sharing a little bit of the behind the scenes of the growth of the Advance Women's Expert Network along with:
Why we grew it the way we did
Some of the things that we ran into that were expected and unexpected
How we address challenges
Stay tuned for this behind the scenes episode!
Check out my new free training on www.yournextmillion.me, where several of my seven figure clients and colleagues share what they're doing in the next year to scale their businesses to the multi-million dollar mark and beyond.
Listen to the Show:
Laura (00:00)
This year has been quite the whirlwind year for so many of us. And for me personally, I started a new business. And having really thought through the different reasons why I started the business that I did, and what I thought maybe the alternatives would be is something that I thought might be very helpful to share with my podcast listeners. So in this upcoming episode of The Scale with Joy Show, I'm going to be sharing a little bit of the behind the scenes of the growth of the Advance Women's Expert Network, why I grew it the way I did, some of the things that we ran into that were expected and unexpected, and how we're addressing these challenges up next in the Scale With Joy Show.
Around this time last year, I started to see a vision for a women's network where like-minded experts could come together, who sell all over the world, connect and create connections and referral relationships just like the types of networks that I had been part of when I was in traditional business. These networks, while quite male dominated, were very effective in helping people grow their business, mastermind solutions to problems and just overall be an incredible place to create huge leaps in business. When I pivoted online, what I realized is working by yourself in your home, absolutely puts the solo in solopreneurship. I was used to having a pretty big team and having lots of different people around me, who I could bounce ideas off of, between local business owners and being part of some of these CEO networks.
And again, I was usually the only woman in the room, but it didn't always bother me unless they were making a derogatory comment, which happened from time to time, simply because they were very powerful. What I found with all women networks is that it was a lot of cheerleading, but not substantial business conversation. And so I approached my business partner, Kelly Roach, who is now a dear friend and like family to me. And we came up with the idea of launching The Advance together. Now I was very intentional and very thoughtful about the type of business that I wanted to grow next in my suite of offerings. My consulting practice, my chief marketing officer consultancy, as it is consistently full with a wait list. And I didn't necessarily want to grow that into a group program because I actually love the offer. I love the clients. I love having a wait list. I love how time leveraged it is. I love the quality of problems that I solve with my clients. I am energized by the work that I do with them.
And there was really nothing I wanted to change about it. I knew I wanted to serve in a way that included a high volume of amazing women, but I wasn’t interested in bringing on more clients then I felt I could give my very best to in terms of our work together. Part of why my consulting offer is incredibly unique and creates so much value is the fact that I go deep with them and their teams and provide tremendous transformation
with customization. And maybe at some point, I'll think about doing something else for that particular client I currently serve 1:1. But at this point in my life, my heart was really focused on elevating the women who are looking to create what I’ve created for myself. So what was I going to grow next? I have always loved memberships. I'm a community person. I love groups of people and particularly groups of women. And if you've had any insight into what I've been through in my own career, that might surprise you because I've also been very much burned by groups of women.
But to a certain degree that actually fuels my mission. It makes me more motivated and more excited to create something that doesn't exist, that is different than maybe what I've experienced or what you've experienced in women's networks in the past. So we launched in February of 2020. We brought in about 250 members, and it was an incredible launch. We had a tremendous amount of traffic to our sales page. Our original goal was 5,000 views to our sales page and we got 6,000. Our sales page was redesigned about halfway through the launch. The first sales page converted at 4%. The second one converted at close to 7%, which is quite remarkable for a membership. If you know anything about traffic and converting, memberships are a hard sell, and in general, people don't like signing up for memberships as much as they like signing up for a program that has an end date, even if the program is more expensive and is a longer commitment than a month to month membership would be.
The mindset of membership purchasers is sometimes trepidation when it comes to anything recurring, whether it's a gym membership, meal delivery or an online business networking membership. At the time we allowed new members to go from quarter to quarter. And what we found is this contributed a little bit to an extraction mentality. I'm going to come into this community, get what I want and then peace out. And I realized it was the exact opposite of the culture that we were looking to cultivate. So while this was an incredible launch and [inaudible 00:05:35] most of it as a result of the traffic that my business partner, Kelly Roach, brought to the table, which is very much our agreement. I run the day to day of The Advance along with maxing out at about half a dozen private consulting clients. And she lets me borrow her influence and her audience when we launch. And it works out really nicely. She also supports me tremendously behind the scenes with big picture strategy questions when I am just too close to it to be able to see what the answer is. And it is a wonderful, wonderful partnership experience for both of us.
When we regrouped, it was really taking a look at how we now grow with traffic outside of Kelly's audience, knowing that the next time that we launched, most of the people had heard of The Advance at this point. Now it's very likely that they're still making a decision and considering it, but we also need to look at what are some additional traffic
sources that we can tap into in order to be able to grow this membership. And again, most networking memberships are 2 digits, maybe $30, $40. And we intentionally priced ourselves higher because we provide a higher level of service on the back end of our membership, thinking personal introductions then helping people create personalized relationship building plans. We also have a very hands-on community manager who serves our members in a way that simply doesn't exist with some of those lower level memberships. In addition, we knew that the pricing would position us for higher level experts. And while that hasn't necessarily been exactly what has happened across the board, in general, the people who are part of our membership are very high level experts.
In launch we created a waitlist launch, email only overflow open cart, and we brought in another 20 members. And to me, that was pretty exciting. It was pretty much a two day email sequence. And it was simply to our small list as an overflow from the previous launch. At that point, our list was maybe 2,000 people. So 10% off the list is really high. We also, from day one, launched an ambassador program where our members received 20% recurring of anybody that they bring into our membership. Many of the people who came into the membership during our May launch were referrals from our current members.
Fast forward to June. We then created a traditional live launch with our own private Facebook group leads, to running traffic, to new leads for new audiences, into a private Facebook group where Kelly and I delivered a five day masterclass on how to grow your business through relationship building with an offer at the end. That launch converted a lot lower, about 2.5%. We brought in 50 people. And with typical attrition that tends to happen within a membership, which is usually anywhere between 8 to 10%, we were looking particularly at our price point, we were looking at bringing in more people than we were losing. But it certainly wasn't the numbers that I was looking to achieve.
In August, we created an open house. This might be something that you thought about, and it was completely ambassador driven. We ran very little traffic to our open house and it was mostly designed for any warm lead in our system, as well as our ambassadors. This open house ran for two weeks because our networking pods are bi-weekly. So our theory was, well, then people can bring their friends to the networking pods. And at that time, we brought in another 50 members. While we would definitely make some logistical changes, the result of bringing in 50 new members without the launch lead up being quite so involved was wonderful. And the fact that the members who did come in came in through a friend resulted in welcoming women who were much more aligned with our mission and vision and committed to relationship marketing.
And then this past November, we live launched again but on our public page, thinking, well, maybe if people don't come into the Facebook group, they'll catch us live on Kelly and I's external page and determine whether or not the advance would be a good fit for them at that time. And again, our launch converted at 2.5% and we again brought in 50 new members.
So moving forward, this has been a really interesting and exciting year in a lot of ways. We currently have, at the time of this recording in November of 2021, after launching in February of 2021, 307 members. To me, that's a pretty big win. It is not easy to grow this type of membership. And we are creating a whole new space that doesn't exist in the market at all. Some of our big lessons learned is that our ambassador program is incredibly powerful. 30% of our current members come from our ambassador program. We've also been developing external affiliates as well. And in the past few months, we've partnered up with one affiliate a month and also brought in a tremendous amount of leads that way. We've launched our YouTube channel, become way more active on LinkedIn and moving into 2022, it would not surprise me at all if we hit 7 figures in the first 12 months. So the question is, how did we do that? What was hard? What was harder than I expected? What was easier than I expected? And what are some of our lessons learned moving forward?
I'll start with a little bit of what I did expect. I expected that this community would be the premier place for high level experts who are brilliant practitioners to network, collaborate and grow their business. And that is something that we have seen tremendous results from. People who have been consistent in The Advance for the last six months, since the beginning are regularly getting new clients, getting tagged in referral opportunities, getting on podcasts, becoming part of visibility summits. And it is so exciting to see those constant results from established experts who are good at what they do, and simply needed a new way to grow their business that wasn't dependent on launching themselves silly or acting ridiculous on social media. And so that message really resonated with our ideal client and it's something that they love and they get a great result from.
Something I didn't expect is at the price point, some of the members not necessarily having an offer that is ready to be referred. And so we've addressed this in a couple ways. To help our current members, we've launched an internal program that was complementary for current members, but will be separated out next year called High Ticket Blueprint, which is the simple steps of pricing, packaging, position, and selling your high ticket offer. And we did this simply to help our current members who maybe just aren't at a place yet where they could get a result from networking because of the
way in which their offer is structured, be able to focus on their offer for a little while before they have any expectations that they're going to get referred.
The second thing we've done is we've moved to an application process, and this was a big decision that we struggled with for a while. But we've decided to move to an application so that people who are coming into The Advance and current members are comforted by the fact that we are vetting people who are entering. We don't necessarily vet them by their revenue amount or by their years in business, because somebody could have started this year and have a fantastic offer and feel very confident in networking. And somebody else could just be at maybe 70 or $80,000 a year, top line, but it's very intentional. They only want to work part-time and it's with a few very select clients. So figuring out what those qualifications of our ideal members are for the application is a little bit tricky. We created a short application. It's a combination of who are you? How many years of business have you been? What are your core values? What would you like to contribute to the community? And just making sure that we have people coming in, who we feel confident will get a result from our membership.
The third thing that we're doing is we're going much heavier on our ambassador program, creating exclusive events for our ambassadors, big prizes like VIP days with me and just taking extra amazing care of the people in our community who are bringing their friends in. We have just found that amazing people know amazing people. And it is one of the best ways for us to meet new members who we know will be successful in the community.
And finally, we are inviting people as part of our paid traffic strategy to apply on a regular basis with limited time bonuses and special incentives to replace the urgency that often comes with launching. Launching a membership offer like this is particularly challenging. People have lots of questions and they want to think about it. They don't want to be motivated by lots of scarcity. They want to have intentionality with their purchase and we find that the more established and aligned the entrepreneur is, the more thoughtful they are about not only how they're spending their money. But how they're spending their time joining a new membership. Our plan in 2022 is to have an ongoing evergreen application funnel where we are continually bringing in 2 or 3 members a week currently at the time of recording. And we hope to increase that to four to five members a week as we continue to optimize that funnel. And the combining that with one or two launches next year from a new member acquisition standpoint, but also from a brand and building perspective.
The thing about launching is that it gets your brand name in front of so many new people. Even if the actual conversion isn't where we need it to be in order to reach our
new member growth goals, as long as we're bringing people in for our evergreen application funnel through that, we can look at launching as as much of a brand strategy play as much as being able to grow the membership. It's our expectation that we will probably double membership next year and continue to spend lots of our time and effort customizing the delivery of our membership to increase the amount of results that our members actually receive.
The Advance is a really interesting offer. Again, it doesn't exist in the marketplace at all. The most comparable brand might be BNI, Business Network International, who was actually a corporate client of mine several years ago. And what The Advance does is it creates a similar referral network opportunity, but with online female coaches, consultants, and done for you service providers. We have a couple men in the community as well, we really appreciate them. It takes a very cool guy to be surrounded by brilliant women.
So some of the things that were most difficult about this year were those lower percentages on our launch conversion compared to our initial start along with figuring out how to eliminate the extraction mentality that came with offering our membership quarterly. After our initial launch in February, I thought to myself, oh my gosh, this is going to be pretty easy. Every time we launch, we're going to bring in 200 new people. Great. And it ended up being much more challenging and much more disappointing after each launch than we expected. With that said it was still a good launch. All of our launches after Feb were still six figure launches, but it was increasingly obvious to me with each one that we needed to grow our own audience well in advance with brand building and awareness campaigns. So that when we go to launch, our audience is much warmer than they would probably need to be, if this was a program offered with a specific end date. With the application, we've also extended our guarantee and created more insight into what it is that people are signing up for once their application is approved by our team. In addition, we now ask for a year commitment (we do offer a 30 day opt-out if something unexpected comes up) but overall that probably has likely decreased conversion rates but increased the quality of the membership experience.
So all in all, our growth is going well. We have three full-time team members, one in marketing operations, one in community management, and one in new member development, otherwise known as a full time social seller. And each one of those roles has key performance indicators that I go over with weekly so that I know how things are going. This has been quite a challenging year, just navigating as much as possible and navigating all the different shifts in our approach. And my goal overall was to get as much data as quickly as possible so that we could do more of what's working and less of what's not.
Kelly has said to me again and again, the first year of a business is always the most challenging. And she's so encouraging that we are on the right track and doing incredible work. And I am so grateful for her partnership, her support, her belief in this brand. It has been quite a wild ride so far this year, and I hope this is helpful and insightful to you on just seeing what are the ways in which we've grown, the mistakes we've made and our plans on how to move forward.
At the end of the day, it’s not the mistakes you make and the challenges you encounter along the way, but the way in which you rise to the challenge and surround yourself with the brilliant minds and hearts of others who will, together with you, create something beautiful.
It’s times like these that returning to the mission, vision and values we set out with are important and that the women we serve everyday are creating growth in their own lives as a direct result of our work together. It’s the realization of that work that makes it all worth it.
The Scale with Joy podcast dives into the mindset and strategies of scaling your company to the million dollar mark and beyond. Each week, we follow the journeys of innovators, disruptors, experts and leaders - sharing behind the scenes stories of their most challenging moments and greatest lessons learned-all while building their multi-million dollar empires.