Welcome everybody and congratulations on winning the school games. We want to start with Sam Ovens, CEO of school. Who who here was around school towards the end of last year when we did the season of madness was okay. Good. Last year school grew like by almost 700%. It was pretty crazy. Um, it was it was pretty wild honestly. Um, and we were doing the school games and then we decided to do the season of madness and we gave away Cyber Trucks and it was crazy like the name kind of suggests and things kind of I mean we were growing fast but things were kind of getting a bit scammy and like it was people were just a bit too money obsessed and stuff and it seemed like it was kind of ruining the vibe and the culture of of school and I was not feeling very good at that time and I was like kind of lost. I was like, "Oh my god, what should what should we do? How can I fix this?" And my wife was like, "Let's go on a vacation." So, we went to Sedona and then she was like, "Let's go on this walk to this uh to this vortex." And I was like, "What the hell is a vortex?" And she was like, "I don't know." Um, so I was like, "All right, let's go see it." And so, you know, in this whole vacation, I was feeling kind of lost and I was like looking for an answer and things were like blowing up to like like at cuz we were growing so fast. There was always chaos. So, I just had to like leave my phone in the bathroom at the hotel and just be like, "Okay, I'm just going to let things be kind of on fire and go check out this vortex." Uh, and as we were walking up there, I was like kind of feeling lost and wondering like what is it? What is the answer? Like how can I fix this? So then we get to the top of this this mountain. It's pretty beautiful. Uh, and we're at in this vortex. I still don't know what it is. And then has anyone seen those like rock towers that people make? Yeah. And so there's all of these rock towers at the top that people have have laid. And my daughter, who's like three, decides to just like kick one over. And I'm like, "Oh my god, I don't know if you're supposed to do that." And so she kicked over this rock pile. And then she like grabbed this rock at the bottom of the pile and handed it to me. and I still have it in my pocket, but it says on it, passion. And I was like, "Holy shit." It didn't really occur to me that much like at that in that moment, but then, you know, I've kept it in my pocket like ever since. And that's when I I realized that this is what school is about, passion. And the money is like secondary to the passion. But I think and that's how it was in the beginning. And but then at some point the money became the only thing and it was actually that was the problem. And so I was like okay we we really need to we really need to fix this. So since the season of madness you probably noticed we've made like a lot of changes. Um, and it's a lot of it is based on this insight that I had, which was, you know, school is about helping passionate people earn a full-time income doing what they love, right? That's one side of it. And then the other side of it is helping people discover their passion, right? And so we redid everything in school like we started with the school games. We did we made them quarterly and then we did the categories. And the categories was a way to make sure that each different like passion actually had a chance and it wasn't just dominated by these people that were just trying to like hack it to make to win the prize. And it really worked. Like the difference is night and day. If you look at the homepage of school and you look at Discovery, it's full of all of these passionate communities. And if you look at the people that win the school games, it's full of these passionate communities, too. And what's awesome is they're still making a ton of money. It's just there's also that passion piece there. And you know, I think it really worked and you guys were the first ones that have won in this new kind of style. And look at what we can do now. We can open with a trumpet player. We have a DJ. We have all kinds of different people mixing together now. And then I just want to talk about school's mission real quick. Like what are we trying to do? So school's mission is to help 1 billion people find community, right? And we believe that passion is the core to that. So communities should form around passionate people and we believe that something very special happens when you find your thing in life and also when you find other people that share that thing as their passion. And I think there's nothing better than when you can make your career your passion, right? Like I used to do skateboarding and BMX biking and like rock climbing and stuff and it was always you go to school or you go to work and then outside of those hours you get to do your hobby, right? But there was this term called like going pro and that was when someone got so good at like skating or whatever that they got paid to do it. And that's when they get so good so fast because it's not they can just do it all the time and that is their career. So the same is true you know with with almost anything. If you can, if your passion, if that's the way you make an income, like life is pretty good. Especially if you get to do it, hanging out with other people that share that passion, too. And I really think that that's what we're trying to build with school. We want to help people find their passion and help people go pro with their passion. And you know, you might wonder like what are we focusing on? Like what are if you've ever wondered like what are these people at school plotting? What are they scheming? Um, well, we really want to boil it down to just four main things. We want to have the best product, right? And it's kind of subjective, like how do you how do you determine best? Well, you know, we think simple, intuitive, it just works. That's very important. Should be fast and it it also needs to have power, but not too much because then it can get complicated, right? But I think most importantly, it should be a joy to use. And you should like using it. It's not when you hear when you think I've got to go to school. You shouldn't be like h don't want to do that. You should it should almost be a joy to use, right? So we're going to keep making the product better. We also want to have the lowest prices and fees. And I this is very important to me. So our fees are already the lowest, right? And we our price is pretty good, but I actually think we can do better there, too. And so maybe that's a foreshadowing of something. I don't know. And then best distribution, and this is a this is a new one that we really want to focus on. So we want to help good groups grow, right? Because if you have to spend your time not doing your passion, just trying to market your passion, that kind of sucks. So, we want school to be a place where if you are passionate about something and you've got a good community, we actually give you members and customers, too. And so, we want to be the best at that. And we also want to have the lowest churn. You've probably noticed this is a common theme now. We're talking a lot about churn. It's something a lot of people hide from, but we want to just like bring it out and focus on it. And we want to to make school the platform with the lowest churn because if you think about it, fees are kind of like taxes, right? So low fees is good and if you can grow as well and low churn, right? And then a great product. So, we're just going to continue doing these things for you guys. And we want to make your life simple. We want to help you grow. We want to help you keep what you earn with low churn, low fees. And we want to make your life fun. So, that's a little bit about what we're trying to do with school. And then I've got one final point, which is mixing is the key to innovation and creativity. So too often people stay within their field and things get kind of stale, right? Like if you're just in the copyright copywriting market, it can get a little bit weird. Or if you're just in any specific market, it it's like a little bubble or a little echo chamber and things can get pretty weird. And I swear the best innovations come when you mix things from different fields, right? And I think Leonardo da Vinci is one of the best examples of this. So you know he started as a painter right so painting oil paintings but he learned chemistry just so that he could mix his own pigments for his paints right he was like if I learn chemistry my paintings will have that extra edge. Then he dissected eyes at the morg so he could understand how light came into the eye and how humans kind of perceived light so that he could use that in his paintings. And he was one of the first people to understand how light worked in the eye. And then he also studied architecture and engineering so that his structures in his paintings made sense like with physics and everything so that so that when you looked at it things felt like they that would they worked basically. And so he mixed all of these different fields. You would think oh a painter should just paint but it was his paintings were so good because he mixed all of these fields. And the same is true you know with Elon Musk. If you look at he applied software engineering to cars. I don't know if you've driven a Tesla but it kind of feels like an iPhone. It is a computer which is pretty crazy, a car computer. And he also applied it to space, right? And then Steve Jobs applied art and emotion to technology. He tried to make machines human or feel human and he bring art and typography and creativity into technology, right? And I think school is about mixing. And if you look around you, we've got so many different categories, right? We've got cyber security, AI, paid ads, music, spirituality, sports, finance. And today is going to leave like plenty of open space for you guys to hang out with each other. like we don't want to just lecture you all day on all of this random crap. You won. You know what you're doing, right? And talking to other winners is going to help you unlock some things, I think. And I honestly think that the connections that you make today and the conversations you have with each other are probably going to be a lot more like valuable to you in the future than just taking down some notes and listening to some people lecture you. Um, and then final point, let's have some fun. Just wanted to give a huge shout out to Sam. He's really the genius behind the scenes that makes school such a joy to you. So, once again, please round of applause for Sam. Next up, we have none other than Evelyn Weise. She came second in the first ever school games and has been killing it ever since with Grow with Evelyn. Amazing group, happy customers. Let's welcome Evelyn to the stage. Hello everyone. I'm very excited. Okay, so I want to share with you today my journey from 0 to 8 million in revenue and over 33,000 paid members. Of course, we're doing Alex formula, which is proof, promise, and then path. What's some of my proof? So, I'm 35. I'm married. I have a 5-year-old son, and I started my online coaching business, education business journey in 2020. Since then, I've generated over 8 million in revenue. The 7 million here is what you can see in Stripe. And school doesn't have like a unified Stripe view, which is changing, I think, with the unified payments now. So, I just added a bunch of screenshots here from my various communities. So, you can see the overall revenue. In since 2020, I've generated over 60,000 customers, uh, 33,000 paid subscribers, so members like you. And I won a two comic club award. I came fourth in Hormosis 100. That was his internal kind of competition to see who can add the most additional revenue within 90 days on school. And so I added over 247,000 in additional revenue on school. I came second in the first ever school games with 81,000K new monthly recurring revenue with a brand new membership on the platform. I won again as an affiliate and I have spent personally on my online businesses since 2020 1.5 million on ads. So over the last five years I have definitely done my homework when it comes to building memberships. And my promise for this presentation is that I want to give you the key insights of what I learned and what I believe is worth copying right now. So I'm going to share my story, my background as well as my monthly recurring revenue journey. And then I will show you how I'm growing my school community. So I'm giving you my exact funnel and then we'll talk about churn. And I have three surprisingly effective ways to reduce churn that you have probably never tried. Sam and we did not coordinate this so I didn't hear about the stone before yesterday. I I wanted to open this with the discussion passion or profit, right? So what do I focus on today? I can honestly say that I do what I love and I love what I do because a lot of what I do is writing. I write posts and emails and YouTube scripts and ads and I always wanted to be a writer. That was my first love. I wrote my first book when I was eight. I've been a bookworm and I always wanted to do that. So when I was in school, I interned for a radio station and I got the opportunity to write little shows there for, you know, the local market is there and they have a Bwax stand and we're going to interview the man with the B wax stand and I wanted to write the best shows for Bwax stands and you know whatot and that that was my first boss and I really admired him and he said you you're so good at writing what do you want to do later and I told him that's what I want to do. I want to eventually write and become an author and that's what I want to make a living of. And he told me that's not possible. And he was clearly speaking from his own frustrations trying to keep the radio station over water. But I took it to heart and I decided that I will get a quote unquote bread job and I started to study law which you know spoiler is not a good fit for who I am. So I tried to finance it. um worked as a waitress on the weekends and around that time when while I was studying I also had a blog right so I never gave up on my passion of writing but I just did it on the side and that's when I learned you know SEO optimization and making websites and a little bit of coding so I can get my blog up there and listed and around that time my dad was tired of his 9to5 and he was actually really passionate about fitness and personal development so he created a membership and he was asking me for my help because he thought what I was doing with my blog is great and I'm surely can help him in marketing. Well, I couldn't and he had to eventually give up the business and that's something that always stuck with me, right? So, I felt so incompetent and I felt like I had really really let him down and from that moment that kind of planted the seed that I really need to learn marketing. So shortly after that, while I was working, I injured my back and so I needed to look for an office job. And one of the jewelry stores in my little town, they were just opening up that first online shop. And that was something completely new. And they were looking for a person that writes product descriptions. And so I applied and got the job. And they shortly after had a fallout with their marketing agency. And so I stayed up all night and I made a PowerPoint presentation with my concept exactly, you know, what I would do if I get a chance in marketing. And I sent it to my boss and I didn't hear anything from him in two weeks. And then we were outside smoking cigarette break. And he was talking to me and he was saying, "What marketing agency was that thing from that you sent me?" And I was like, "Those are my faults. That's what I would love to do with the business." And surprisingly, he actually gave me a chance in marketing. And that was how I got into online marketing. Around that time, Facebook ads started as well. And so that's kind of how I got hooked into that world. I didn't want to rely on that. So I started to study marketing on the weekends. And after my studies, I got a job for head of e-commerce at a non-food wholesaler. So I just uplevelled a job because I had uplevelled my skill there. I took the department from 0 to 1 million in the first year to 5 million in the second year. And when I was working there, so that was completely different from online marketing. It was also kind of digitally, right? But it was very very different. And we basically had uh product feeds where we would basically supply like certain goods. And I saw a pattern in the algorithm that it would basically order end of life and products with low availability at any cost. And I went to my boss and I said, "I think there's a huge opportunity if we build up a huge stock list, basically bundle all of the supply that we can find on the market because we had all of those relationships and feed it back into the system and that we could basically make a lot of money with the availability arbitrage." And he just looked at me and he was like, "No, we're not doing that. I don't understand it. It's a big risk." But I knew that it was possible. And back then I had lived in a house that I renovated with a nice garden and we had a neighbor and he had a big payout from a business that he started during the bot.com bubble and he had sold it and he had you know money laying around and I knew that. So I went to him I told him what I saw and I basically pitched it to him and he actually did back me up. So under his business, we started the arbitrage side and we grew it from 0 to 12 million in 9 months. And that was the craziest time of my life because I was still working full-time. I was still committed to do my best in that job, but I was basically getting up between, you know, 4 to 5 in the morning. Did the inventory for the other business, drove to work, worked, got out at 4, went into the warehouse, went home, did the back office work, went to bed at 12:00 or 1:00, and then up again and up again. And on the weekend, I would catch up everything that kind of was, you know, laying around. We first rented a we were first doing it from his basement. Then we rented a small warehouse. Then we rented a bigger warehouse. Then my partner started to help in the business back then. I had a fiance. More on that in a second. And we rented an even bigger warehouse and I hired my friends. And it was kind of so big. And eventually I also had to quit my job just because I couldn't do both anymore. Just when I quit my job about three months later, we lost the biggest clients there. And it went from, you know, 12 million to zero in basically one day. It was really, really crazy. And through that process, I lost my back then relationship. I we've been together for a decade. Had bought that house together, renovated that house together. I had, you know, my my garden that I made there. All of my friends, I lost all of them, all of my identity. So it was basically, you know, really scattered. I did have a big payout. So it was not failing because there was no money. It was failing because they dropped us because we couldn't offer competitive prices. And so I was sleeping on my sister's couch, you know, thinking I have accomplished nothing because now I have money, but I have no relationships and no friends and no identity and I don't know what to do with my life. I just have my my cool job quit. And I was literally just laying on her couch paralyzed, like not even watching TV cuz I was just out of everything. And so she was like, "We need to do something. We need to shake it off." And there was a festival near I'm I live in Austria and uh next to Austria is Hungary and there's a festival called Seat in Budapest. And she was like, "Okay, we need to dance. We need to you need to start living. Stop thinking." on the festival, I ran into my now husband and father of my child who was coming from Canada to escape the problems in his online business. So, we ran into each other. He did he pulled a trick on me that he probably learned from someone in the relationships category on school cuz he took a picture of me um on my phone of us and he sent it to him so he had my number and we really just ran five minutes into each other there. Then we didn't see each other but we started to text and then I learned about his business struggle and he learned about mine and it was the first time that I felt really understood in my ambition right and so kind of going back to community it really makes a whole lot of a difference if you have somebody who gets where you are in life right and that was the first time so I flew to Canada we started an advertisement agency because that was the only thing I knew to do and to monetize and then surprise I got pregnant and my son was on the way and I was working a lot and that was not a problem until I knew my son would be coming because it was something that I had been wishing for years and was told it would not be possible so easily. So it was like the biggest gift and I knew I can't keep trading my time for money quote unquote right that was the thought that I had and I instantly bought a guru course and got burned. So I was abandoning the idea of building a personal brand again and just kept running ads for others at that time in the Canadian and US market. There was coaching coming up in Austria. It was by far not such a big thing and my background was mainly in running ads for e-commerce businesses. So I realized that the skills that I had from there are really valuable because people were just blowing money on ads because they had such a high ticket back end that they really didn't have to care. And so I wanted to build up case studies around that and got the opportunity quote unquote by one coach to build a living case study for her and made her a full-on concept how we can grow her brand and her Facebook group. Back then there was free Facebook group to paid offers. So very similar now how it's now with the free school to the paid school and I made her whole concept just to be basically um ghosted by her and when she ghosted me that moment I looked at the concept and I was like I should be doing that and that was the moment when I became and never stopped being a living case study. So ever since then I basically just started to implement I grew my free group to a thousand members in the first month. I had my first 101toone clients who paid me $9.97 for three months coaching. So I basically was making 10K in that first month and people were asking me how did she do that? So I told them and then while I was servicing my clients I needed to find a way to keep funding my ads. So I added a little mini product to it and accidentally built a self-lidating offer fun which obviously was a thing in the online marketing world but I just didn't know it. And so people were again coming to me, well how did you do that? And again I would teach it to them. And then after that when my memberships were going so fast because I had the lead generation ads and the selfquidating offer funnels, people would come to me and say, "Well, how did you do that?" And then I basically just showed it to them. So my formula is pretty simple. I just do like set an ambitious goal for myself. What do I want to do? I declare I say that I will do it. Then I do what I say and then I templatize it and help others to implement. So I consider myself these days not a coach anymore. I think like a lot of us are not coaches. We're basically experience workers. So what that means is we just put in the time and effort and the risk of failing and embarrassing oursel and looking like an idiot and and losing money and whatnot. And after we have experienced that, we're condensing that experience into a consumable format. So our members in our communities, they can live vicariously through our experience and they can achieve the same thing but without having to put in the same amount of time, effort, inconvenience and risk as we do. And that's how I think we actually generate that value on the market that we're getting disproportionately paid for. So what did my monthly crank revenue journey look like? You see I have put up the graphs for you with all of the key points what I did. I got my start with Facebook lead generation ads with instant forms that where I was building my email list and my group at the same time. That's kind of my secret sauce that I'm shouting from the roof rooftop anyways because I know it's so effective. Um and that's how I built my initial audience to eventually then in September 2020 after I was done with the first one clients I launched my first membership which was basically just helping people with their ads at scale. Then I had my first funnel for my membership working which was basically I gave away a free resource and then on the thank you page I had a video sales letter similar to the school about page and I just told them about my membership and with that funnel I grew from um back then 11 to 100 members in one month. I was feeling like I'm the on the top of the world and because people told me it's so good you should increase your prices. I listened to them and I increased my prices and that broke my funnel and basically I was then you see almost one year dabbling around the 100 members mark and just couldn't really really get out of it. Then when you see the number four where things started to take off this is when I found my signature setup which was basically I those little front-end offers that I had created to offset my ad spend. I would put a seven to$9 offer on the front end and on the back end I would get people into my membership. So the first thing that I did was I actually closed the doors to the membership. I put it on a weight list model and then I introduced a front-end membership which was lower priced and I was running ads directly to the $7 community and then on the thank you page I offered a one-click upsell into the otherwise closed main membership and that's when you really see like the rocket here went off and I did this in various formats because I then did not only run the $7 upgrading into the $49 membership but also multiple different $7 to9 offers the then just one click upsell into the membership on a thank you page and then where you see all of those spikes that's when I learned um how to do launches basically so where you have a a live launch event and then so this was it was all going up until here and that's when I discovered school and so my focus shifted and the revenue in the Stripe account went down um because I started businesses on school that was pretty much that point that I showed you before, right? Number seven. That was that month after when we came second. We had a $8 community and did 81,000 in new monthly cring revenue. So, it was pretty wild. Right now, my monthly recurring revenue is at 96,000 from school. That includes Grow with Evelyn. That includes my alumni, my mastermind, and the affiliate commissions. and I still have around 101,000 uh K in monthly crank revenues that I make from my original memberships in Stripe. Now, those of you that are have paid attention to the graph, you will see that the my overall monthly crank revenue at one point was at 221,000, right? So, it's like why are we celebrating if the revenue is down? We're celebrating because revenue is not profit. And so I really want you to understand where I was in December 2020 free when I decided that I need to change something. My business was growing like you saw from a revenue perspective but my profits would keep declining month after month. I had in I was 90% depending on Facebook. My main traffic source was advertisement. did not put anything into brand building or anything at all. My reach in the Facebook communities was going down because Facebook would decide which of my community me members can see my content and overall it was just I had built up so much operational depth that I was drowning in. I had multiple portals, multiple groups, people in the groups that did not pay but we couldn't get them out because we couldn't identify them from the email address. I had spent over $56,000 in tax due diligence because I've been growing so quickly and I had an accountant who was not familiar with online business to that extent. So when I realized that he is not as savvy as I wanted to, we had to hire an international firm and you know clean up all the tax swings that school just takes care of. And I had multiple people supporting me in those Facebook communities. But basically it was like a ticketing system and everything would funnel up to me. I had so many cooks, so many hands and no real help. So I was really, really, really drowning. And the how I felt, I put this little sticker here. I felt like a fish who had fallen out of the ocean and I was trapped in a puddle and the sun was shining and I knew my time is running out and I need to do something. I need to jump back otherwise I'm going to die here. And that's when I saw Alex with the hat and the school games and I decided to give it a shot. And to be honest, it was purely out of desperation at that time. I just knew I have to do this, but I didn't know why because I was like, you have so many problems that you need to fix in your business. Why are you doing this? But something really really pulled me to it. And in the beginning, I didn't want to like school because liking school would mean that I have to redo all of my content and I have to close down my most profitable program which won me a two comma club award, right? Who wants to do that? But I also knew if I want to keep helping people, I also have to find the best solution and I want to validate and challenge schools. So I came in, you know, like with the biggest chest possible and be like, I'll see how they do. And then I completely completely fell in love with it. And the the first reason for that was actually the community because I was in the school community and I was asking a question I think and I was tagging Kirby and of course I didn't get a response because that was not how the school games community worked. But that's how my communities worked, right? When somebody tagged me, I was in there and I was giving response immediately. But because he didn't give a response, other members would give a response and I would thank them and I would start to like their post and they would start to like mine and suddenly I was making friends there and I was like that's nice. Okay. And so I really started to get used to it and then I just started to love the simplicity of it and more and more the need to have my team members involved start to go down and I was learning so many things around how to set up my group and I I realized that it's a second chance because what I had built in my previous business was a ticketing system right in a Facebook group but for sure not a community and so I fell in love with school I had was so much more independent I needed much lower team cost. It was so easy to set up communities and play with it. And so my my team cost went down significantly. My churn went down significantly. And I knew that I can now have the space to build something better long-term. Not only because it's feasible with the platform, but also because I really deeply enjoy it. At in the end of 2023, I wanted to burn down my business. I was thinking of can I sell this? If not, what else could I do with my life? I really wanted to run away from it all. And with school, I feel like I can and want to do this for the rest of my life. So now I just I can just keep swimming because all of that pressure is off. And just to really show you the the scope of this, December 2023, I was spending 52,000 on Facebook ads and December 2024, €3,800. Right? Right. So, it makes a massive difference and revenue is not everything. Same with churn. I've done, you know, I've done pretty well compared to um other players in in my niche, but I was never able to get it below 11% churn consistently. Now, on school, we have 2.27% free 77% and 0% churn. So, I basically went from being a method selling ticket answer machine trapped in a buggy Facebook group to being able to get paid to do what I love to experiment and to be, you know, just do every day what I'm what I enjoy and what I'm best at. and my my communities. I started with the offer builders, you know, again like method focused, outcome focused and eventually school and the way everyone was showing up was giving me permission to just create something that feels sustainable and that feels like myself. So now my main community is grow with Evelyn. And here you can see all of the members on the map. We have over 2,300 people in that community. What they do is they just grow with Evelyn. So there's no pressure on me to do anything else but be myself, share what I'm doing to grow and give them feedback on the things that they do to grow. So also that that whole like you know outcome focus is gone. They're just enjoying being in my inner circle. And the same goes for my community scale with Evelyn when we were playing the 100. I remember Kirby was like what is the outcome of the community? And I was like I kind of don't want to say that. like I just want them to be like you can have more access to me and we can work more closely together on making that happen and you know now we have 58 members in here as well and every there's like this quote that they said on school Evelyn overdelivers again but for me it's much more easier to overd deliver in this way because the expectations are set right right you just have proximity to me and that's what I'm selling these days so when When I was in school, I I've always been a nerd and I've been bullied a lot for it and I also have been bored out of my mind. I had the second best grades with the most hours missing in school. With this school, I finally enjoy it and I can sit with the cool kids. So, and I don't just mean, you know, the ones on the picture. I genuinely mean all of you that are building something outstanding and that are making an impact and that are doing something super interesting with their lives. When I first saw school's mission and Andrew's post here about bringing community to 1 billion members, I was thinking, okay, you know, whatever. I really didn't care. And it wasn't until I found community myself that I understood that it's exactly what the internet and maybe even the world needs. And I don't know that for sure, but one one thing that I know for sure is that I will be forever grateful that this place exists and that I found it. Okay, so let's bring more community to more people. Here's exactly how I do it. Right now, I am growing my school. Basically, I went all the way back to the basics and I'm still using my Facebook lead generation campaigns with the instant form. So, basically, I invite people to my workshop that is almost evergreen. So, this ad has no date on it. It's just saying to them, opt in for my workshop. You get access to the replay of the last one and I invite you to the next one. And the workshop is about ads because that's one of the things that my members particularly enjoy about the community. So, I just keep running this ad already with my face because that really helps me also with the brand building. Then they get into this welcome email that gives them the replay to the last workshop and an invite to the next one. And then I just send them almost, you know, four times a week a nurture email just reporting on what I do. I have a really simple process for that. I just record everything that happens on a given day that I do to grow with Loom and then I take the transcript and I let ChatBt turn it into an email and from there I will link back to one of my YouTube videos. So you saw my ad spend went down significantly and it is because ads for me have been a double-edged sword. I'm really really good at it and that led me to never invest in my personal brand properly, right? And so with meta um ads always getting more and more expensive over time and me not wanting to rely only on the platform, I I knew I need to build in a way that I'm growing my brand more. And my my decision was to really focus on YouTube. So I'm sending people back to YouTube to have that long form content and really be nurtured when I then have my monthly workshop. With the monthly workshop, I open the doors to my membership um and people can join with a 7-day free trial. And I offer a few limited spots to book a one-to-one uh session with me, which is $333. And I have about 30 to 50% conversion rate into my mastermind from those calls. Now, lowering churn, here are the things that are currently working the best for me. So, one is the YouTube videos. I initially created the YouTube videos to have this nurturing element, right? So, when you're running Facebook ads and you're picking the lead generation campaign objective over the sales campaign objective, you're basically getting cheaper eyeballs for the fact that you have to do your own nurturing, right? So, leads are in market for your solution, but not as close to purchasing as people in the sales bucket. So, you need to put in that nurture and that's why you get a discount on the eyeball and that's basically how you arbitrage into your business. Now because I knew I need to nurture more effectively and build my brand with the YouTube videos, I had more YouTube videos and the surprising effect that I saw was that it actually is the best for bringing people back into my community to do the work because our communities can become especially when we grow overwhelming, right? So people will fall off doing the work because motivation only, you know, lasts for so long and then they're hanging out on YouTube, right? Looking for inspiration. Then they run into your video, then they see you're still doing the work, you're still making progress, and then they come back into the communities and say, "I saw this in the video. Do we have this in the community? Where can I find this?" So it really brings them back to doing the work. So it would that's one thing that was a huge huge game changer. And for a lot of them, some of those more superficial like more catchier edited YouTube videos, it's what they needed to understand how to receive the community content in context. Now the second uh surprisingly um effective thing was to comp combine the free trial with a carrot event. So after the workshop, they have the opportunity to join with the free trial and after the free trial ends, we have an implementation event that doubles down on one of the things that they learned in the workshop. And so that really makes people that lowers the risk of them joining your community, but because there's something to gain at the end, they're also checking it out properly. And that really helped with the churn because although while the carrot event already increased the conversion, it also lowered churn because the free trial made them make a educated buying decision, right? So they knew the community when they stayed and so with that the churn is lower because they knew exactly what they're getting into. And the carrot event gives them relatively quickly a quick win after they joined. So there's a lot of excitement. They're really checking out the community. they're looking forward to that event and then after the event they immediately have a tangible quick win. So that was really good. And one last thing and I'm not sure if we will not change this when school adds more functionality but right now it's it's working really well for us. We reversed the dynamic and we have a weight list model. So we want to treat our communities like a club, right? So I told you the main thing I'm selling right now is proximity to me. And so like a you know higherend brand would have it. We have people queuing before the store before they can come in. And if you are interested in in finding out exactly how we do it, we did a full video with my team where we break it down because we're also using that as basically a front-loaded onboarding. So on school and this is a really me unique mechanism that we're only able to do on school when people request to join the community we can start to send them a DM right and so we can start say hey you know you you requested to join the community what are you looking for and basically with that when they respond we start to onboard them before they have joined. we already give them resources from the community. They can already have a result before even paying a scent. And that of course also works really well when it comes to not only the conversion but then after the retention. All right. Thank you. Thank you Evelyn. Super grateful to have you on the platform. Next up we have Josh Mador. He's the number one in the tech category for MR. And if you don't know, tech is a super competitive category. So, please give a warm welcome to Josh Mador. Okay. So, I'll just do like a a bit of a background about myself so you have some context. Um, if you don't know what the community is, it's called Cyber Range. And the whole premise, I guess, or goal is to take people, whatever, normal people, and then get them jobs in cyber security. because there's a huge catch 22 in our industry um where you kind of need experience to get experience and it's it's really hard to do. Yeah. So that's like the whole thing. But uh basically in the beginning to give context, I like dropped out of high school when I was 15. Um cuz my family moved and I just wasn't having it and I didn't want to like transfer schools and go through all that cuz I'm I'm really introverted and it's just like a lot of energy. Even like being here is like a lot of energy, right? So thanks for dealing with that. Um, I I eventually got really tired of being poor. Um, I was like living with my family and we're like, you know, we're in America, so our platform or whatever is not too bad, but I still couldn't get anything I wanted. And I I really wanted a WRX back in the day. I was like really young. And I was like, "All right, I'm going to go into computer science and like get some money so I can get this car." So, I I moved to like a big city to Seattle and I registered a community college for computer science. And it was like too hard for me at the I I didn't know what I was doing, so I like dropped out of that as well and I just went into general IT. Um, it's pretty funny now cuz ironically like I don't even have a car. I don't have anything at all. My staff has better laptops than me. But see, this was I was around 21 and then 23 I finally after like a 2 years of like hard studying, I finally got my first IT job. Um, I went from being like zero, like completely poor, to having like maybe 50k a year or something. And this was like really life-changing money for me. Like I could I almost didn't have to worry about the price of groceries and all that stuff. Um, that was like a really profound thing for me. So, I was like really terrified of not having money again, like if I got fired or something. Um, that really terrified me. So, I was like, I'm going to do my best to make sure I can always get a job. So I I just studied a lot basically for the next 15 years. I ended up getting like a double bachelors and a masters and like a whole bunch of IT certifications and I grinded coding so much I could successfully interview at like Google and Amazon. I didn't work at those places but I got like pretty good at coding. And um this kind of ties back into um where Sam is. Um he was talking about like uh hi that you're talking about stacking skills and stuff. um that's like really really really important and it's like a really good avenue to make a lot of money um which I'll kind of get to later but I basically studied a lot like a lot of stuff for 15 years and basically from ages I'm 40 now but from 23 to 38 I had a whole bunch of different jobs like I went from normal IT into cyber security and then I ended up doing software engineering and then YouTube and stuff eventually so I learned like sales and marketing and content and all of that stuff. Um, I always tried really hard in all of my jobs I had over those years. Um, I tried to learn as much as I could because basically like the the more you've done, the more you're going to be able to do in the future. I I've come to find. So, I I tried to like just get as good as I could at a lot of different things. Oh, this is like kind of key to my uh community. Um, I did a lot of job hopping. I don't know if I have some like mental problem or like ADHD or what, but like staying at one job for more than a year is a real like accomplishment for me. So, I would I would do a lot of job hopping. And the result of that is I got like really good at learning what employers wanted and like how to like interview and like all that stuff. I'm like pretty good at it. Um, which is what's incorporated in my community. But um beginning of the end of my corporate career, like fast forward to like pre- pandemic, um I I ended up having two separate jobs. Um not because I tried to do overemployment, but I was like um working at one job and then I got like poached from a local government and I was like, well, can I just I want to keep my current job. Can I just work both? And both of them were fine with it. So I had two jobs. Um, but the pandemic hit and I'm like really like empathetic and I think like too much and that just like did a number on my mental health basically. Um, and I got like crippling anxiety out of nowhere. I remember I was like talking about security frameworks with one of my co-workers and I was like, "Oh, I can't breathe suddenly." And I I just I couldn't work. I literally like couldn't work anymore. and I just like quit working at Microsoft immediately because I I I couldn't produce work. Um so I I had another job. It was like a local government job and like government job is like kind of easy compared to corporate. Um so I kept that job and then I started YouTube in 2020 to kind of help people get into tech. Uh just cuz I noticed like a lot of my friends around me I could kind of easily help them get jobs and a lot of people would ask me and like damn I should just like scale this on YouTube. So I did that. Um, but I was like quite miserable like through the next two years like living in the pandemic just because I I my autonomy is like reduced and I can't travel and like do all that stuff. So, it was like it was a pretty bad time uh for me and well for everyone really. But um and this next one, this is kind of like bleak and as I'm like reading this in front of people, I realize like I'm quite messed up I think. So sorry. Um, but basically like by the end of 2021, my my mental health was like so bad. I was like, I'm gonna like check out of this. I'm like done. It's like not even worth existing anymore. Um, but I was pretty worried about like the impact that that would have on my my wife at the time and my mom as well and obviously like everyone else. So I I thought like uh I can either like unsubscribe from life or I can like just do something else and it will possibly have like a not as bad impact. Um so I ended up just like selling the house and I separated from my wife and we got divorced eventually. Um nothing's wrong with her. She's like good person. I just like I don't know what happened to me. Um but anyway, we separated and I ended up like living in my car for six months and I would like shoot videos in my car. Um I was Yeah, I would shoot videos in my car and basically just like shower in uh Planet Fitness, right? Um but my my mental health like healed almost immediately after I started living in my car. It's like quite good memory for me actually. It was like really like lowkey and nice. I also had like a really smart therapist at the time just to kind of like normalize mental health and stuff. Um, they helped me and that was really really nice. I set up a ring light and just like record videos in my car and I like made this like little cutout from egg crate foam whatever in the Tesla and I put them on the mirrors so I could or the windows so I could sleep in there and like not have people like look in. It's quite good memory. It's like really feel weird. I shouldn't even be saying this to a group of people, but I ended up like um quitting my government job and I got hired back at Microsoft again as a contractor. So, I would like shoot uh YouTube and meeting rooms. I would like schedule a solo meeting and just like use the meeting room to shoot videos and I would like shower uh inside Microsoft's like whatever employee shower. That was like really convenient cuz um there's like towels in there and everything versus Planet Fitness where everything's like broken and like messed up and really dirty. So that was like really nice. And there's like free drinks in Microsoft. So that's good. Yeah. So Entrepreneurship Arc. So, I I basically like um I decided to get like serious about YouTube and business and I just got really tired of working those corp corporate jobs because you don't really have control if you're like a a cog in the you know the machine or however you want to think about that and I'm like the type of person who want to put forth a lot of effort into what I'm doing and it's really hard to move the needle inside of a corporation when you're like a non senior leadership and I was like I'm just going to like make my own company. So I this is like really important I think for entrepreneurship is like um if you can like not burn a bridge in the sense of like you know piss off your employer or something but I made a rule in my head like I'm not allowed to make money from like normal jobs anymore. I just I'm not allowed to do it. So that really helped me. Um so I basically got really serious about YouTube. Um, I uploaded a lot like how to get into IT, like how to get IT jobs and stuff and my viewers were like, "You should make a course." Like, "You should make a course." So, I was like, "All right." So, I started making a course and then I got approached by the um somebody who knew the CEO of course careers. I don't know if anyone who knows what that is, but I ended up partnering with Course Careers. And I released my course and it made 9K the first month and I was like, "Oh, like normal work is like a waste of time at this point." Um, so I just like quit my job immediately. And then ever since then, this particular course has made about like a4 million dollars a year with like kind of minimal effort. Um, I put effort, right? I have to do stuff, but it's less effort than like a normal corporate job. And it's like way more money. So I was like, all right, entrepreneurship is like where where it's at, I think. And basically, this is my 2022 earnings from my YouTube. Um, these are like all my revenue revenue streams, but I launched the course in like October here. Um, this is not related to school, by the way. It's just like background. And you can kind of see it. There's like a big spike. And when I saw that, I was like, "All right, I should just like d take all my corporate job energy and like dump them into YouTube or into entrepreneur stuff." And basically, when people get jobs in the course, I would just interview them on my channel and be really uh authentic about it. And I wouldn't frame it in a way that's like like this guy went through my course like he got a job like you have to go through the course. I would like I would like say that but I would ask them like what else did you do you know on top of the course because you know you must have done other stuff because people have this like fallacy. I don't know what it's called, but they'll do like ABCD E F G H and then they'll meet their goal and they'll be like, "Oh, like all the other stuff was like useless, but H is the thing that got me a job, right?" But it's actually like a like accumulation of everything you did. So, I would try to like, you know, get the person I'm interviewing to say like everything they did on top of the course. Um, and that kind of builds uh I don't know what the word is, like trust, I guess, for the audience because I'm being transparent and all that. But eventually uh people started asking for a cyber security course because I I had some like cyber security content. Um so I paired with like another company and I I released that. Um and this course did an additional like 500k the first year and then 284K the following year. So I'll show like I think there's a graph here. Um that's basically when I launched the cyber course that like big spike and then um it I suddenly had like a ton of members and I was like oh I can't like make videos anymore cuz I have to deal with all these people and then it you know it that course was like a onetime thing versus or a one-time payment right versus school where it's kind of a ongoing subscription where you provide ongoing value. So the the revenue is like weird with those like one-time sale courses but that's what that looked like. And in what is this 2024, I basically discovered school in 2024 and I stopped like actively hard selling my previous onetime purchase course like around May and I started building the cyber range like which is my which is my school community from May. So I stopped I stopped actively selling the course like people were still buying it because I had content out right. Um but I I started building like the back end of the cyber range which I'll talk about um in June or in May or so. And basically um when I decided I was going to launch the school community um I stopped selling on purpose cuz like um by the way when I say stuff don't it's just like my opinion. I'm not saying like it as fact or something. So just like register in your brain as something I said. But um I I kind of have this feeling or this belief or whatever like whenever you like sell something it kind of like decreases your when you tell people like I'm I'm selling something like buy it. It kind of like decreases goodwill like a bit or something. I don't know how to articulate that but um I I stopped like selling stuff uh right like at this time and I tried to collect um like emails and stuff so I could like prepare to launch the course when I or the school community when I was done with it. So I basically like made these like practice question decks um for like it exams. I used like ANI and I used a chat GPT API and I like automated all of those and I collected a bunch of emails. Um I would like give the deck away. This would cost money normally. This would be like a $100 or like 50 or $100 like if you buy from some like random site, but I would just give those away and collect a bunch of emails. I collected like 10k emails in that sixmonth period um before the school community launch and I had another like 2,000 emails for my previous courses. So, I was like giving a lot of goodwill and then um collecting emails at the same time. Uh and then in December of 24, uh me and my staff like went through and like individually, this is like a I'm I might get judged for this, but um we like individually emailed all the people on those like 12,000 lists and kind of just like invited them to join the free community as well as the cyber range. And a bunch of people joined. Um let's see. Yeah, a bunch of people joined. I also released like a single long form video on YouTube. And this is how how I kind of like launched the community. I didn't do all this like all at once cuz I don't want like an influx of people uh cuz it's like hard to deal with when that happens. But yeah, and after launching the school community, um I did some like a few live streams and released like a few pieces of content. I think it was like a total of Okay, so just some context like I don't buy like paid ads or anything like this. I just mostly do YouTube and then some email marketing. But I I released like a few videos. I think it got like total of like probably 77 or like 70 to 80,000 views. Um and that resulted in I guess the M MRR that I have now. And then getting into turn reduction. And by the way, like um I don't know if anyone like cares what I'm saying, but you can always like DM me on school or like come up to me and ask me like any questions that you want. I'll just like literally like tell you everything. But churn reduction. Um oh, these are my numbers as of yesterday. I was talking to like Christian and a few other people and I I didn't actually like look at this cuz I got like so burnt out of like looking at this analytics. So I was like surprised that it like went down to 10%. But um for turn reduction I I think something the the biggest thing for me I think is like the the back end of the the cyber range. So basically my community is I have to give context so I'm sorry I'm going to explain but when people join the community um they will like automatically get access to a like a realistic work environment as if you were at work. and it's built inside of Microsoft Azure and there's like a lot of enterprise security tools in there that I licensed and I have courses on how to use all of those and the environments is live and it's like actively being attacked by bad actors like even now it gets breached sometimes um and that's by design so that that backend thing is is worth so my community is like $97 a month but it's it's worth more than that it's worth like a a lot more than that and I know because I've seen like similar products are like more shitty than mine and it's like way more expensive. So, basically like the number one thing is like this is like really obvious and it sounds dumb to say, but if you if you make something like so so good it doesn't make sense for the user to cancel um that will like make your churn low. But on top of the backend thing, and by the way, if people are interested in this, I'll I can like literally give you all the source code and like everything. But um on top of the the actual offer on the back end, I have like one to two staff that are dedicated to responding to like every single post. Like when somebody posts like anything, um they'll like it and respond to it. And that's like their job to do that because there's like a lot of activity. And I'm trying to like increase engagement to, you know, increase discovery and all of that. and also like let people be heard, right? Um, I'll do like a personal introduction message to every person who joins. So, if they join, I'll like reach out to them and DM them and I'll I'll just give them like a a breakdown of the community and I'll tell them that they can like DM me anytime and I'll respond. And I I do I do do this. That's really that really is effective, but it's like really mentally taxing um because I have to like kind of keep track of like hundred conversations. It's like quite hard, but it's effective. Um, we do like a weekly two-hour call. Um, it's really unstructured. It's just like a Q&A, but it goes really well because people have like a lot of questions, and I discovered some like really really intelligent people um in that Q&A. I didn't develop them for my community. They're just like a unicorn automatically, but it's it's really nice to have the weekly call. Um, it's a lot of energy, especially for me, but if you're not doing it, um, people tend to like it, so you might want to try it out. Um, I have like a single time unlock course. Uh, and the when the cyber range gets breached, like a hacker like gets in and starts doing stuff inside of our network, I'll like make a post about it and then the members can actually like go and threat hunt and do the security operations and then figure out what exactly the hacker is doing. They can go through like the whole cyber kill chain. Well, that's too really technical, but um, yeah. Uh, I post wins whenever someone has has wins. like it's one of my employees jobs to like scour both both communities like the free community and the paid one to find people who like get jobs and stuff. So we um you know we post wins for those people to give them some recognition and stuff and we uh regularly rotate pin posts like all the all this stuff is like relatively basic. Um, for me, I think the the main thing is like the the high quality offer, like the actual cyber range. Um, but the rest of the stuff is it's kind of basic churn reduction things, but that's those are the numbers that we got with doing this stuff if that makes sense. Yeah. And this is probably don't make sense to look at very much, but I'll just do like a brief explanation. Like basically people join school um and I everything is like managed automatically. I have like a bunch of custom Python. Um like this this thing this uh this is like the cyber range in Azure. It's like the back end and it costs money. This is about like uh currently with 100k members this costs about $10,000 a month to run. So I have to like sorry. So I have to like um when people turn out I have to like remove their access to this otherwise they'll I'll just like be paying for free people. So um basically um churn if member churn turn if a member churns they automatically have their access removed. If somebody joins they automatically get access and then they can like uh use the courses in the cyber range to like learn all this stuff and and do the cool stuff in there and I do have some staff just to give context. Um, basically, um, I won't talk about this like too much, but I I can probably I have 12 staff totally total. Um, I have too many editors, but I actually have like a second YouTube channel, so they they work on that, too. But I can probably do what I'm doing with probably me and like three or four other people if I wanted to. Um, I have 12 people, but they're doing like other stuff that's not related to the cyber range. So, just to give like context to that, I don't want people to think I'm like doing everything like by myself cuz it's like literally impossible. And getting into some like business hardships. Um, this is just this is just my personal experience. So, don't like listen to what I'm saying and implement it. It's just something that I said. But, um, I would just be really careful who you decide to go into business with. Um, I have some like really I've been like freaking robbed. not Rob, but you know, I've had my partners like steal from me and do some like weird stuff. It's people in business are really really weird. Um, if you're really curious, I can tell you in person, but I won't like say it here. Like act anyway. It's really bad. Just be careful who you go into into business with. And if I were to go back in time, I just wouldn't have partners like at all until I did business by myself first and then I would like maybe consider partners. And then for my partners, I would only partner with people who I think are like much better than me. and then I would try really hard to like not disappoint them. That's like um you know that's what I would have done, but here we are. And then hiring friends, it's kind of a double-edged sword. Um I'm basically like really introverted and antisocial and I I almost don't have any friends, especially after like seeing success in business. Um cuz like a lot of my friends would like, you know, doing weird stuff and like wasting my time. It was like really troublesome. So, um I basically would hire some of my friends, but if you do that for me, um you just kind of have to be prepared to like e either lose your friendship or lose a bunch of money cuz if you don't choose one of those, you're probably going to lose like both of them, right? So, I just um I had a lot of like some trouble with this, but I chose to like lose money and just try to work with a friend. And now everything's like better, but it's like a lot of mental burden um is quite bad. And like having the talk with people, like if somebody is like not performing well and even if it's a random person, it feels bad. Especially for me, I'm like really heavy empath. So I feel really bad. And it's like way worse when it's your friend or somebody who like you knew beforehand. So you know, that's just my experience with that. That's like really huge like burden for me. And tax and the IRS. Um, Evelyn talk about this a bit, like accounting is like can be troublesome in business. And I went through two CPA firms um just cuz they don't know like how to deal with what I'm doing. And I had like some really huge surprise tax bills uh cuz apparently in like Washington state, you have to pay 1.5% on your revenue every month regardless of net profit. And I didn't know about that. And I wasn't paying that tax for like a year or more or something. And I suddenly had to pay like 20 $22,000. And I asked my CPA about it and they're like, "Well, that's your responsibility to know that." And I'm like, "Dog, I hired you. You're a CPA." And I fired them. I was offended. I was offended by that. Seriously. But there's also like a lot of haters. Um, like the better you're doing, there's just going to be like random people who just hate you for like no reason. And I I try to like I'm I'm really heavy empathy and it makes existence like really hard in general. So I seriously try to like treat everyone really well at least how I want to be treated cuz I get like we all get slighted by big business right by advertising and like Facebook and like you know everything's like calculated to like take advantage of human psychology and like all this So, I try to treat people really well and and make good content and in spite of all of that effort like people will like on you or, you know, on me. Um, and it's really it really makes me like feel bad to be honest. Um, I know like you know we're if you're doing YouTube and stuff you're you're going to be in front of a bunch of people and it's like inevitable, but it still don't feel good. I'm not anyone who's like, "Oh, it doesn't phase me." It must phase you at least like 01% at least. me it's more than that. But yeah, even though I'm making a lot of money, it still hurts. There's nothing I can do about it. Yeah, I can't do anything. I'm going to quit doing business or YouTube because of this. But um yeah, this is like a big thing for me. This happens a lot in the especially YouTube comments. It's like quite troublesome. Uh but yeah, I think that's all. Is that all? I thought I put something else, but maybe maybe I didn't. Oh, good to go. I think that's all. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much, Josh. What a presentation. Next up, we have Tyler Cen. He came second, and third in the sports category with his basketball groups, but he's also involved in the pickle ball school, who came first in sports. So, he kind of came first, second, and third in the sports category. Let's welcome Tyler. All right. So, you guys have been sitting for a little while and uh my background and my partner Kyle's background is in running camps and having fun. Sam said we're supposed to have fun. So, you guys willing to do a little exercise where you stand up and have a little fun. All right, beautiful. Everybody stand up real quick. I'm going to set this down. All right, this is a game. Everybody stand up. Uh when you lose, you'll sit down and the winner will get a pickle ball school membership. And if you don't like pickle ball, then you can regift it at Christmas. Um everybody put your hands together just like this. Just start rubbing your hands together. Beautiful. When I clap, you clap. I thought there were some musical people in here. When I clap, you clap. Good. I'll rub it again. Good. And again. Nice. Now, if I don't clap and you do clap, you have to sit down. If I do clap and you don't clap, you have to sit down. We'll start out slow. We're rubbing. There we go. A lot of people are sitting down right now. Go ahead and grab a seat. Go ahead and grab a seat if you lost. If you're still up, you're still up. All right. But because we're all new friends, everybody gets a second chance. Go and stand up again. Stand up again. Stand up again. Everybody loves pickle ball. We're back. Here we go. We're rubbing our hands. We're rubbing our hands. Beautiful. And good. I think I got somebody there. Good. All right. No second chances. You're back down. You're back down. All right. If you're still in, you can start rubbing your hands. Good. Nice. Get a little rhythm going. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Uh-oh. Who is left? Who is left? We have a couple people left. All right. Here we go. Oh no. Everyone wants to win. We're all winners here. Here we go. Nice. Oh, if you touched, you're down. I think we have two winners. We're going to go with two winners. What's your name? One is one winner and Eric. Eric is the other winner. So, you can talk to Kyle. Kyle, wave your hand right there. You can talk to Kyle. He'll get you to the pick school at the break. Thank you guys for standing up and playing a game. Uh, just give yourself some snaps that in our communities, we give snaps when we're online for celebrations. Um, so as you heard, my name is Tyler and before we go any further, I do want to recognize my partners. Um, that's Kyle Kazuda. Kyle, you want to stand up real quick? He is the face and the brains behind that pickle ball school. We give him some snaps or claps. Beautiful. Um, Kyle and I have a long history. Very, very close friends. Um, we haven't stolen money from each other yet. We just kind of give each other money. Um, and I think he's out giving me right now. And this is Jason Flam. Jason, if you want to stand up, wave your hand. Jason does all the marketing for all three of our communities um, as well. So, I want to kind of do this one a little bit different. Uh, maybe even than I had intended because I agree with what Sam said. Like a lot of the value in this experience is going to be us sharing ideas. And so I'm going to be asking you some different questions throughout this presentation, sharing some of what we do, but I want to give you even more of a structured chance to kind of interact with each other, but we are going to have a rule for this. So I come from a basketball background. I played collegiately, played professionally, coached collegiately, uh ran camps all across the country, have trained professional basketball players. So I'm a coach. All right? So if I coach you, I apologize. Just uh drop and give me 10 push-ups. That was a joke. Thank you. Okay. So, um, the the rule in basketball coaching, so Rick Patino is a legendary basketball coach and he had a rule for his assistant coaches in practice. He said the only way that you can talk to players in practice is if you speak in 7second sound bites. He's like, if you can't say or communicate your thought within 7 seconds, you actually haven't thought about it long enough. And so, you're just like verbally working through your thought. So when I ask you to share something with someone near you or with uh someone around you as we continue to try to mix it up here, try to articulate it in seven seconds or less. It's going to be a challenge. We'll have fun. Um but we have limited time here so we can't be talking a whole lot. So um I want to start with this thought. So you can see um up above here we have these three communities. We have that pickleball school. I've got my coaching community where I coach coaches and that is Savvy Coaching. And then I have my athlete community for basketball where I coach athletes and that's our Savvy Academy. So those are three communities and we've really applied the same playbook to all three and it all really starts with uh what Sam said about passion is it starts with your why. And so your first challenge in 7 seconds or less is going to be to turn to someone near you and share with them your why. Why are you here? Why do you build your community? Why do you do what you do in 7 seconds or less? I'm going to say go. Then you're going to say go. And we'll clap twice. And that's how we go. We'll get a little energy in the room. I say go, you say go. We clap twice. You guys ready to do this? Go. Seven seconds or less. Go ahead. Share. If you haven't switched, make sure you switch. All right. And time. I gave you a little bit more than seven seconds because uh this is probably new for you and um you know, I'm not Rick Patino. So, I'll share a little bit of my why through my journey. So, like I said, I'm a basketball coach and Kyle and I actually met um on a basketball court. We rang basketball camps together for over 10 years all across the country. Um and my basketball journey actually informs my entrepreneurial journey and why we built this school community. So, as an eighth grader, I love basketball. I want to be a professional basketball player. Anybody else dream of being a professional athlete at any point? Okay, nice. I mean, it's just it's a childhood dream, right? So, I want to be a professional basketball player. And my eighth grade basketball coach at the end of the season said, "Tyler, you're never going to even make varsity. You should probably give up on your dream," which which broke my heart, right? And I'm like, "Oh man, like you're supposed to be my coach. You're supposed to be telling me how to achieve my dream. Like, why why are you telling me this?" But that just caused me to commit to my journey even further to do everything I absolutely could. As a sophomore in high school, I I got pretty good. and our head coach told me, "Tyler, you've gotten better, but you'll never be a starter. You'll probably just be a backup your entire career." I was like, "Oh man, I've been doing all this work." And so, I transferred schools and I went to another high school and ended up winning a state championship and being one of the best players in the state. And at the end of my high school career, uh, the college coaches I wanted to play for told me, "Tyler, you'll just never be a division one basketball player. You're not athletic enough." Right? And so, I kind of battled. and I worked my way up through different colleges to eventually uh to get to a really good place. But through my college career, every single practice instead of being like the best part of my day was the worst part of my day because I feel like basketball for me was my creative outlet. It's how I got into a flow state and like when I was in that pocket like everything felt good. I'm sure you feel that way about your passion. In fact, if you've ever been in a flow state in your passion, just raise your hand for me real quick. Yes. Like that's what juices us up, right? And I felt like my coaches were always providing barriers to that feeling as opposed to providing access to that feeling. And in fact, all of my basketball experiences, my organized team experiences where I won state championships and competed for national championships, they were like the most frustrating and debilitating experiences that left me angry. Whereas like when I just got to go play pickup basketball in the parks or in open gyms, those are the most fulfilling ones. And so as I got out of playing and got into coaching and coached college basketball, my commitment and my passion was to be the opposite of every coach that I had. And so that led to the passion of me first coaching athletes for nearly 15 years as I got to take over 30,000 athletes through camp and educational experiences because I wanted to be the coach that I never had. And week after week I'd have 120 to 180 athletes that would be sitting like this and I get to teach them and I would be trying to encourage them and teach them how to achieve their dreams as opposed to telling them why they would never achieve their dreams. And then that parlayed into okay I don't want to just coach the athletes I want to coach the coaches. And so my passion and my why for savvy coaching is I want to revolutionize the game is taught and played so it can provide access to that creativity and flow state and be the best part of young people's day and not the worst. And so that's my why. And that was a lot longer than seven seconds but you can tell I hope that I've like deeply thought about it. And so I just communicate that over and over and over again and then it attracts like-minded coaches or like-minded players. And we can talk even more about the pickle ball school one as well. But I think that the the number one thing that I want to share that I believe has led to some success and people joining our communities is people know how to find their people. And when you access your why and you communicate your why and you're vulnerable and you share your successes like both of the other presenters already have and your failures, that's what actually like gives you grit. And grit grit's a a term and there's there's a really good book by Angela Duckworth as well. I'm sure many of you have read it. But one aspect of grit that I would just um encourage each of you to maybe lean into a little bit more because I think we really lean into it and I'll celebrate my partner Kyle in this is grit. When you go through tough things and you get scars and you get some some rough edges and you get some nicks taken out of you, like that provides texture to who you are. And when you share those that texture, it provides something for your community or those people with you to hold on to when things get slippery or when things get tough. And so one thing uh Kyle's entire journey into pickle ball was he left basketball and he publicly shared he's going to go from having never played pickle ball before to being a pro in 15 months. That's his whole journey. And that's how he we can clap for that, right? Because except that he failed. No, I'm just joking. He achieved he achieved it, right? He achieved it, right? And so like he just documented the whole journey publicly. And we were talking the other day um I don't remember exactly the timeline but like at one point he had 500 followers um early on the journey and now he has hundreds of thousands of followers all across his platforms just by being vulnerable sharing his why and his mission. He's like I did it and I want to teach you how to do it too. Which is what we're hearing over and over and over again. And so like we when we talk about like these three communities in one playbook, it's just being really really open and vulnerable vulnerable about the why so people can find their people. And you know we provide all this value. You know you have courses, you have coaching like all the things that they get. Yeah. I don't think that's really what make people come or what make people stay. I think they come and they stay because they deeply connect with a why. And so the more that we can all lean into that, I think we're all going to get what we really want out of this, which is impact, right? More deep impact for more people all across the board. So, uh, let's talk a little bit more about this. My background is is in coaching. And so, as I was thinking about this, I'm like, okay, what can my maybe unique experience as we have like so much wonderful experience across so many different, you know, communities and different areas. What can my unique experience add value to these really successful people here? and my background is in coaching. And so I just want to share three questions in coaching that any player will ask themselves before they follow a coach. I think any participant in your community, if you think about your community as a team and you're the head coach of your team and you're going to win, whatever winning means to you, I think everyone's going to continually ask themselves these three questions. Do you care about me? Can you help me? and can I trust you? Right? Do you care about me? Can you help me? And can I trust you? And so, I'm just going to pause for a moment. We're get our second seven second sound bite right here because one of my favorite poets has a line uh and he says this. He says, "Thoughts entangle themselves when they pass through lips and fingertips, right? When we speak our thoughts or write them as many of you are, like we get more clarity." So, that's why we provide these little opportunities here. So, here's the 7-second soundbite. If you can turn to someone else in your area and just answer this of these three questions, which one of these do you feel most confident that your community would say yes? All right, I'm going to say three. You'll echo three. We'll clap twice and then you'll share your answer with somebody new. Three. We're getting better at that. Go ahead. We're getting better at that. All right, I'm gonna pause you right there, but don't worry, you're going to get to talk again in a moment. Which one of these three do you think you have the greatest opportunity for growth as a leader or as a head coach of your team? Go ahead and share again. All right, I'll go ahead and pause you there. I'll try to give you a couple of really actionable and specific tools that maybe you can apply to this and translate from my context, which is coaching basketball or now coaching pickle ball, to your context, which is coaching whatever it is that you coach. Um, two specific things I think that we do really well in the do you care about me standpoint. I was recently running a training session, a basketball training session. I was working with this uh aspiring college athlete. It was a small group training. They did really well. It was their first time training with me. And at the end, we do a little recap, a debrief. We call it an autopsy. We do an autopsy to identify what did we actually get better at. And I mean, I was giving this player amazing things on their shot, on their technique. We got them more explosive. They learned a whole new move. And I'm like, man, I really helped this player. And so at the end, we're doing the autopsy. The girl's name is Macy. I said, Macy, what was the what was the thing that you got out of this training session? She's like, when you told me you thought that I was good. I'm like, what? I just I like I just completely transformed your shot. I just said, I think you're good and that's what you remember, right? And then like she's leaving with it. And so like the do you care about me piece, what I found is like players remember what you celebrate, not what you correct. And I think it's the same with people as well. And one thing that I think that we have brought into the culture of our communities really well is a culture of celebration. Like I we've talked about it with like wins, but like if we do a live training, we start off with celebrations where we'll celebrate individuals. They'll celebrate their progress. Whenever uh someone asks a question, we'll celebrate the depth of the question. We'll celebrate their courage for posting the question. And so I think that really shows care is by starting with celebration. And so a recent study showed that if someone in their life receives 3:1 like positives to negative in their life, like three positives to one negative, they're actually clinically depressed. And so we set like a target for our communities of a 6:1 ratio. Like we wanted to give six pieces of celebration before we give one piece of coaching or correction. So that would be just one specific way maybe that you could implement in your own context how you can make people feel like you care about them a little bit more. Okay, here's a second one and again this comes from coaching and over two decades in coaching I found that this communicates care very deeply and it's it's a statement if you are taking notes you might want to write it down otherwise you just lock it in. I see in you. I see in you. I see in you an incredible entrepreneur. I see in you a powerful leader. I see in you uh an excellent musician or whatever it is like speaking to the future self of people as opposed to when you look at where someone's at right now, what we normally see are what deficiencies, right? Like opportunities. But the future is full of opportunity, right? So, I think I see in you, in speaking to the future self, like when you spend a year with me, when you spend a year with Kyle, when you spend a year with us, at the end of this 30-day challenge, I'm going to see you as a 4.0 player, which is a level in pickle ball, right? So, instead of speaking to where they're at, speak to their future selves. And that just shows a lot of care for them as well. Okay, let's go uh to the next one real quick. And hopefully I can continue to give you just some things that might add context. Um, can you help me? Okay, my dad is a professional golfer. He played on the PGA Tour for many, many years, majors, etc., etc., has his own golf academy. Um, I've had the opportunity to, like I said, be around him a ton. And what's continually amazed me about my dad, who's never had a job, has never worked for anybody in his life, like he's an entrepreneur in in the sports space, is anytime we're at a golf course and we're walking up and down a range, anybody in here golf? Yeah, I'm a recovering golfer, so respect. Um, I switched to pickle ball and that's my father won't talk to me anymore. Um, but whenever my dad walks, Kyle's laughing because it's true. Okay. Um, anytime my dad walks up and down a golf range, he cannot help himself. He sees someone and goes up to them and says, "I can help you." He can't help himself because he has such a deep belief that he knows that what he has can help. He's not selling. He's just like, "Oh, I can make them so much better." Right? And and I think like that's the authenticity of I think what we're doing is like we're building this because we believe it can help people. So we don't have to sell them. We don't have to convince them. Like we just actually do it, right? I can help you with that. And another thing uh that we do a lot in coaching is and it's it's why our miss it's what our mission is to revolutionize coaching. Um raise your hand if you've ever had a coach, an athletic coach or coach in anything had a coach. Okay, beautiful. Um, go ahead and just turn to the person next to you real quick and share with them what has been your biggest frustration with a past coach that you've had. Just share real quick. What's been your biggest frustration? All right, I'm going to cut you off before this turns into full-blown uh tears and therapy and uh things of that nature. So, let's just go. We'll stop it there. Um, I'll I'll share a quick story. I I run. So you saw one of the communities out of the academy there. Um I just built that locally in Phoenix for players. My daughters got into basketball and uh so we we moved that into school as well. So we were at a local uh youth basketball tournament recently and there was a group of eighth grade boys. An eighth grade boys team just came off the court and they lost. They lost a close game and the head coach put them right behind the bench against the wall and then just started screaming at them telling them how they don't want it, how soft they were, how embarrassed their entire family should be, how they should think about quitting the sport. Just like screaming expletives in front of like family and friends, just embarrassing these these young boys, right? And then he said, "Bring it in family." Right? They broke it out, right? It was crazy. and and like and I'm like, "Oh, like that is why I'm doing what I'm doing is coaching." Like that's what I really hate about coaching is it's yelling and telling. It's like a drill sergeant, right? It's like do this or else. It's fear. It's uh shame. It's like the common motivators. And so one of the things that we're on a mission with Savvy is to revolutionize the way the game is taught and played by actually not leading with yelling and telling, but instead by leading with questions. And I think that would be like the second tool um that would be an opportunity for can I help you. A lot of times we'll go into like a webinar or a live training or uh we'll provide a course or a resource and we'll be like here let me tell you how to do it. And one thing that I think that we've implemented fairly well and want to lean into even further is actually starting with questions, you know, like so whether it be in our posts, whether it be in our webinars or whatnot, like how can I help you? What are you struggling with right now? And that's how people feel really seen and connected. So that'd be the the other idea about the second one there. Let's just jump to the third move quickly. Um, can I trust you? And what we found in coaching is that trust is directly related to culture. All right? So trust is related to culture. And culture is how people on a team or in a community interact with each other. And if we don't establish and hold high standards on a team, then the culture becomes toxic. Well, if we're looking at all of our school communities as a team, every one of the communities represented in this room has a culture and it's probably unique to you. But my question would be, and we'll go ahead and do this with a response for the last time here, is what would be one standard of your culture in your community? And my my good friend, he's a college head coach, his name's T.J. Rosine. Kyle knows him really well also. Um he says that the hardest part of being a leader or a coach is actually holding your standards. So on his desk he's got a plaque to remind him. It says fight for your culture every day. And my question to you that I'll ask you to share here in a moment is what standard of the culture in your community are you willing to go in there and fight for every single day? How people act, how they talk, what they talk about, how they interact with you, all those things. Uh, go ahead and turn to a new person hopefully and share what's one standard of your culture. Go ahead. All right. Hopefully these conversations can continue throughout the day. I really appreciate you guys engaging in these conversations. Um, you're just like basketball coaches. You can't get basketball coaches to stop talking either. But I I love it. This is good stuff. Um, I want I want to I just want to share one example, then we'll move on quickly and uh just go and give me a wave when I'm at like 5 minutes and I need to start wrapping it up. Thumbs up means start wrapping up. Okay, got it. Okay, good. Um, so anybody raise your hand if you're familiar with uh Duke University. They have a basketball team, Duke. They were recently in the final four. Okay, so it's it's a very um wellestablished, wellrespected program. one of the best in the basketball world. Uh, a number of years ago, um, there was a legendary basketball coach, Coach K, Coach Shashevski, who uh, led Duke University for many, many years and established it as like the pen ultimate uh, school for basketball. So, I got to actually go and watch him coach in one of his uh, later years. So, I went into the gym and I showed up about 20 minutes early and one of the Duke managers met me outside the gym and he said, "Come on in." And I walked in and then there were these curtains before you went down into the gym and it said closed practice Duke basketball. And as I walked up to the curtain 20 minutes before practice started, I just had like noise hit me come through the curtain like there was clapping and cheering and like the squeaking of shoes on the floor and I paused. I'm like, "Am I late? Like I thought I was early. Has it already started?" And the manager said, "No, it hasn't started. The coaches aren't on the floor yet." And so I walk in, I go kind of sit down. He hands me a a practice plan. And every player on the Duke basketball team was on the floor in a full sweat, self-organized by their positions, training, sweating, encouraging each other, giving great focused intent and effort. And that was when I knew something special's going on here. Like the gym was popping. And many of my coaching mentors throughout the years, like when I was running a gym or running a practice, they said, "I can know within the first minute if you're a good coach because I walk into your environment and there's standards, it's popping, there's intent, there's focus." And so we have attempted to have that same immediate feel test like when someone opens up our community, right? Like what what's the level of engagement, right? like how quickly can our our lead trainers or community managers respond, right? Like how quickly are they responding to each other? What's it feel like to be a part of your community? And I would just encourage you like that should be associated if you don't have a standard that describes what it feels like to be in your community. That might be an opportunity for you as well. And that's how you know that they can trust you. They can trust you to hold the standard. Right? if if you let so- and so show up late to a team and so and so to take bad shots on a team, right? Then then you lose trust with the people that you're leading. But when you hold a high standard, that's how you build trust even if it hurts in a moment. And so in applying these uh these sports and coaching things, this is kind of what we built over the last uh over the three months of the um of the last school games, which thank you for opening it up to a sports uh category. Uh but you can see uh we what we did with about pickle ball school um with our savvy coaching and locally with our savvy academy just athletes that were training. Um we're really really proud of our churn numbers across the board and I think that I believe that um what we've attempted to do with those three questions is directly related to the churn numbers. And so hopefully there's something that you can take away from that as well. Um we're uh we're very excited about what's coming next. Um as well as we are really in the infancy stages. Um but these are a couple of our standards that we hold in our community and some of the things that we're doing and just like the other presenters have shared like um I mean Kyle and Jason can answer all of these questions for you as well as everything that we do um we do together. And so um we are committed to be highly relational with people. We know people's names. We know their stories. um when we jump on a live training or or a webinar like the first 8 to 10 minutes is like asking people about their personal lives and whatnot. So I think it's very highly highly relational. Um we hold as a team weekly mapping sessions where we map out what the flow of content is going to be for the week and the month and the quarter and we touch in on that every single week and then we just build in public like we share with our community. Here's what we did. We um we were in a co-working space just this week and we just recorded a quick video right from that co-working space like, "Hey, we're working right now on your next content. Here's what's coming." You know, and they all weighed in on it and they're like, "Thank you so much for working hard for us." Right? So, just letting them know what's coming. Um we do have a designated community manager who's next on the line for the community to make sure that every question gets answered and everyone gets responded to and every reply gets replied to as well. So people feel very very very seen. Um and then last they already kind of shared about this like our standards we've attempted to create sticky language around it and that language then informs the culture and like we know that uh we have a strong culture in the community when the members are using our unique language to talk to each other. So for example we created something in the pickle ball school called the TPS shot scale. How to rate the decision making on a certain shot in pickle ball. And so now when members are talking to each other, they're saying that's a five on the shot scale. And when they're using our language with each other, that's when we know we've established a culture. And so my question to you is like, okay, what's your unique and sticky language? Um, how can they talk to each other that way? So then when they're our pickle ball school members are out at a pickle ball tournament, they're meeting up and they're being like, "Don't hit fives," you know, and it creates a culture as opposed to saying the same thing that everyone else in the industry is saying. Uh let me see. I think we have one final thought here. Um I think even in I don't want to repeat what has already been shared because I think like these playbooks are everyone's running the same playbook and we're just trying to get it a little bit better. um we're doing all these things and I actually don't think there's a lot of value in me talking about these things um because the the art is in the execution and implementation. Instead, I do want to just leave you this one last thought. And honestly, if you want to talk about these things, you should talk to Kyle and Jason because that's their expertise. It's not my expertise. I just say, "You guys are awesome. Do it." And um and then they tell me what they did. I'm like, "Wow, that was amazing." I do want to just leave you with this one thought. Let me see if I can get to it. There we go. Um, I'm going to give you this this one thought. This is how I, as a coach, would approach going to a coaching clinic. So, in in coach development, there's these coaching clinics. You listen to a whole bunch of presenters kind of like we're doing here. And then you have like a whole notebook full of notes and then you go home and don't do anything different. Okay? That's that's how it works for for most coaches. And I I don't want that to happen for me from this experience. Um, and this is the tool that I've used. It's called plus one. It's called plus one. So instead of trying to implement everything, instead we just try to implement one thing and then scaffold it. Um, but we make sure we measure it. Let me tell you a quick story to kind of hammer this home. So I've got a 9-year-old daughter. Her name is Charlie. She wants to be an amazing basketball player. Part of our morning routine is we do push-ups. And so for three months, every morning she would go and do her 10 push-ups every morning for three months. Pretty good job for for a nine-year-old. Um, I don't know how many of us could do 10 push-ups. in the row right now. We won't test it. But then one day she came down to do her push-ups and I had a whiteboard up and after she did her 10 push-ups, I just wrote the number 10 on the whiteboard. She's like, she's like, "Dad, why did you do that?" I said, "Well, that's how many push-ups you did." Next morning, she comes down, she sees the number 10. Anybody care to guess how many push-ups she did? 11. 11. Exactly. Right. You get it. So, I wiped 10. I wrote 11. Guess what she did the next morning? 12. She actually did 13 because she's overachiever, right? But once we started measuring it, instant growth when we just checked the box, yes or no, right? It stayed the same. And so I would say from an implementation standpoint coming out of this, it's like, okay, plus one, what's one thing that you can measure a little bit better frequently so that you actually see improvement? you know, so we don't just leave with ideas and no execution because that's what happens a lot in basketball. Um, if you want to uh talk to to me or Kyle or Jason, we'd love it. I'm looking forward to learning from each and every one of you. Uh, thank you so much to the school team for putting this on and thanks for listening. All right, we got one final speaker and it's last but not least. It's Jack Dumalin from the School of Hard Knocks going viral everywhere. Let's welcome him on stage. Thank you, Kirby. Schoolers, what's up? How we doing? All right. Yeah, give a round of applause. Let's go, you guys. Uh big accomplishment coming to the school games. So, for everybody here, can I get a raise of hands for everybody that's from the US? US. A lot of us over here. Okay. And if you're not from the US, raise your hands. Wow. Okay. Big accomplishment. We got a worldwide group here. This is awesome. Okay. I was talking to some guys from Europe and I was like, man, everybody's coming far for this. This is awesome. So, who am I? My name is Jack Dwin. I'm one of the co-founders of the School of Hard Knocks and the School of Mentors Community. And today I want to talk to you guys a little bit about how we grew our community to 100k a month without ads. Our journey started uh myself, my brother James and our good friend Joshua Smith. We all grew up in the DC area. We are all kind of pursuing our own entrepreneurial ventures. I was doing spreadsheets and database building for companies. James had his own personal brand on Tik Tok and then Josh was doing a digital marketing company. Most of the people in our hometown, they did not want to pursue their own thing. They wanted to go get a safe federal corporate job up with the government in DC. And so we all kind of bonded over the fact that we wanted to think outside the box, do our own thing. So because we saw James had so much success on Tik Tok, was able to get a few brand deals, we were like, you know, we should do something in the creator economy. you know, creators are able to earn a living on Tik Tok, on Instagram, on Facebook, on YouTube. Why don't we decide to do something there? And so, what were we all passionate about? Entrepreneurship. So, we started a channel called the School of Hard Knocks. So, when we started creating the content, originally it was just the three of us talking about our experiences about business. We would talk about how we got a client or a great motivational quote that we saw on uh on social media. But what we quickly realized was that most people didn't want to hear about business from young guys in their 20s that hadn't built a massive company yet. And so even though we saw some initial success with the content that we were posting, grew to about 20 25,000 followers on TikTok, we ended up making a gradual pivot to going out and interviewing people that had 20, 30, 40 years of experience in business. And once we started doing that, every interview we posted started to skyrocket. It was like 100k, 100k, 100. And we were like, "Guys, I don't think people want to hear from us anymore. I think they want to hear from the entrepreneurs that have built massive companies." And so once we made a full pivot to doing interviews, the channel absolutely skyrocketed. And so, some of you may have seen our videos. Uh, we are the guys that go up to people and we ask crazy questions like, "Have you ever been broke before? What do you do for a living?" you might catch us going up to a crazy car, uh a yacht, a jet, and uh we just uh wanted to spring upon people and see like, hey, how did you how are you able to afford this item? How are you able to build this massive company? And so what we would literally do is we would go to wealthy areas and cities all across the country and we would go to the financial districts, the tech districts, and we would just try to go up and have a conversation with people. We would just walk up and spring up on them and be like, "Hey, what do you do for a living? Have you ever been broke before? How did you make your first million? And the SP responses we got were crazy. So crazy that we actually ended up on Fox News talking about the impact of our interviews. Along the way, we've been able to interview some amazing legends and entrepreneurs like Shaquille O'Neal, Mark Cuban, Gary Vee, Kendra Scott. We've interviewed uh hundreds of executives as well as CEOs at Fortune 500 companies, 15 billionaires and over a thousand millionaires over the 3 to four years that we've been running the channel. We created this channel, we grew it. Today it's around 13 million followers total across social. And then so how did the community come about? Well, when we were making this content, we always had the thought of how do we provide as much value to the person watching our content? And so for us, we always had that framework of wanting to just make the content the best as possible. And so we stayed patient. We didn't know exactly what we wanted to do and give to our audience, but we knew that we just wanted to provide the most impact possible. See, when we first started the School of Hard Knocks channel, we had two really missions in mind. And the reason why we all came together on making a channel about business. For one, we didn't necessarily like the way that financial literacy and things uh like entrepreneurship were taught in schools and the traditional school system. And so we wanted to go get answers for people and bring that on a world scale. The other thing too was we had a lot of great mentors growing up. James, Josh, and I were surrounded by a lot of great leaders and a lot of our peers didn't have that. And so we wanted to convey that same impact through our interviews. What we did is we allowed the channel to grow for a few years. Got to around 56 million followers socialwide and then we were like, okay, I think it's time to launch something for our commu for our this audience, this community that we've built. And so the best way that we thought we could do that is like, man, we don't we don't know what to actually launch. We don't know what to bring this audience that we've built. And so we could have tried a bunch of different things, but ultimately we asked the audience. We asked them what that they wanted. And we found out something interesting. Just like in the beginning of the days when people were watching our content when it was us, they didn't really care about wanting to hear from us about business, they wanted to co-hear from industry experts and leaders. And so what we found out from doing all that research with our audience is that majority of the people that follow us, they follow us because they want to get connected and learn more from the entrepreneurs that we interview on our channel. And so the school of mentors was born. Our community is a way for all the people in our audience to be able to hear directly from the people that we interview. So we offer weekly live calls. We do Q&A sessions with uh the millionaire and billionaire entrepreneurs that we interview on the channel. We have a bunch of on demand content that we filmed with those millionaires and billionaires. And then we allow a lot of the like-minded entrepreneurs to be able to network with one another in the group. Some of the key accomplishments that we've had since we started the School of Mentors is we've been able to achieve 100K a month uh in monthly revenue without running a single dollar on advertising. We have 4,000 active community members today. We've been able to accomplish 11 an 11% turn rate and this is our second time winning the school games. So, how did we grow this amazing community? Well, for us, the biggest thing was we always wanted to keep the content the main thing. We didn't want to make a full pivot and just uh start selling this community to our audience. We wanted to make sure that like, hey, what brought people here was the amazing quality content that we delivered to them since we started this from day one. And so, the mission has always been to keep delivering that impact and allowing entrepreneurs to get connected to people that have built successful companies. And so we wanted to keep our top of funnel the same way where we are able to just create quality content day in and day out. From doing that, our leads have not stopped growing. We do about 200 to 250 million views per month. And our customer base has scaled to about 13 million since we launched the community where we were at about 5 to 6 million. So I'm going to go into a couple of the ways that we're able to drive members from our audience and into our community. The first is literally using the videos that we post on our channel. What we do is at the end of our short form videos, we do call to actions and a lot of times we'll queue up questions in the interview specifically in order to deliver a really great call to action. We use a tool called ManyHat. Many of you are probably familiar with that. And so what we'll do is we'll ask the audience to if they want to, you know, connect with other members, if they want to get mentored, if they want to learn new skills, we will tailor the interview some of the questions to that topic and then we'll have people comment a keyword either on the video or ask them to DM us and then Minihat will take them through a sequence. Another great platform that we use is YouTube. And so YouTube has been a key development point for us because we're it allows us to not compromise the content too much, but we're able to do integrations within the videos themselves to where we can explain a little bit more about the community and the benefits of joining and how they connect with other like-minded entrepreneurs in their space. Another way too is that we do want to take advantage of opportunities where we can actually talk to our audience about the community without compromising the content. So we have James who's the face of the channel, my brother, he he's the one that does the interviews. And so for him, we'll actually have him go live before our live calls to create urgency, uh, be able to explain a little bit about the community and do Q&As with the audience to build a more of a connection with the people that watch our videos. And so we'll use many chat for that as well as well as we're able to directly sell and give more information about the community on our stories. And then we have a great front-end team of setters that are able to go into the Instagram DMs and work with a lot of the people in the DMs to be able to be like if they seemed interested with the many chat then we'll have them get them over the finish line. Another great tool ever since uh school launched the free trials is that we've turned free trials on and has it has had great impact for us. What we do is it it just it allows the members who were on the fence about joining it allows them to join risk-free as well as whenever there's a holiday or there's uh any reason to celebrate or there's something uh that's coming up that we want to do a special offer for doing price drops and offers for people to get excited about the community. we will do it every single time and that has helped us have tremendous growth by doing this approach. So when we first came to the school games you know our audience is really broad. We've built a massive following and so we were trying to market to everybody but originally we realized that what we figured out from that first school games is that we had to pick a lane. We had to not just try to market to everybody in our audience. We had to really hone in on who is our target avatar. And so for us, we realized most of the people following us are starter entrepreneurs. And so we honed in on that. One thing I want to say real quick is if you are a niche creator, this works too. Clearly building a big audience, that is a daunting task. That is something that is not easy. And I'm fully aware of that. I also realize that for niche creators, sometimes that actually might be better for your community because you know exactly who you're selling to and you know the exact product to give them. And so I think building a niche following works just as well. Building a big following, it takes many years and a lot of patience for what we had to do in order to build the school of mentors. So we built this community. How are we able to keep people engaged and staying as a member in the school of mentors? Well, at one of the events here in school, I want to give a shout out to Ted Carr. He actually gave a recommendation on a book called Retention Point by Robert Scro. And so I had everybody on our team read this book. And so basically what Robert Scrob mentions in this book is that you want to try to get the members of your online platform to the retention point as quick as possible. One of the clear ways you can do that is by providing clarity and limiting the amount of confusion that people have when they join your group. So, in order to run our school, we have a great front-end team, and I've told you a little bit about that from the marketing standpoint, but this our back-end team is extremely important. So, we obviously have an operator that sort of oversees a lot of the operations in the community. That's sort of my role. And then we have a community manager that we hired from within the community. They were a go-giver. They were always providing value to other members in the community. And so, we figured we should have this person join our team. And so we hired them as our first community manager. They worked their way up to actually helping more so with the product and the strategy with from within the community and then we hired more community managers under them. And then we also hired uh customer service reps to be able to handle with refunds, cancellations, welcome DMs and everything of that sort. And so what one of the frameworks that Robert Scro talks about is getting people to the retention point. And so we figured that for us an onboarding call was the retention point that got people the most excited about the community because it was able to actually explain to them, hey, here's all the value that we have here. And so what we would do is school has a great feature where they auto welcomed DM people into the group. And so we just want to make it very clear to them what their next steps are when they join the community. So, the first one being uh the welcome DM. We want them to actually go and book their welcome call and then we'll also take them to the welcome post because one of the biggest things I've realized about online communities, not everybody wants to be the extroverted, hop on a call, deal with deal with an onboarding manager, things like that. They like to lurk and so we sort of provide both options for people within our community. When they come in, they book the onboarding call. On that call, we have our community community managers walk through the community top to bottom. And more so, one of the big takeaways we got from Robert Scro's retention point is it's not about what you're offering them, it's how you make them feel. And so for us, we're wanting to basically motivate them and set them up for success on these calls and showing them exactly where the value in the community is. If they decide not to book a welcome call, then we also have the welcome posts pinned to the top of our school community. That way, every time a new member joins, they know exactly where to go and the steps to take in order to achieve success in the community. All of this leads them directly to the welcome course where we're able to pretty much just break down for the lurkers in the community. Hey, here's how you can get the value. Here's exactly everything going on in the community that's going to want to get you excited and be a part of it. And so, just a little bit about what we include in the welcome course. Again, it's how you make them feel, not exactly what you're offering. So, we want to give a welcome from the founding team, set them up for success and motivate them. We do a full community walkthrough for those lurkers that didn't hop on the onboarding call that uh so they didn't get a full chance to check out where all the value is in the community because we just want to provide as much clarity on that as possible. And so, we try to get some of the stragglers that didn't book off the DM, we tell them to book a welcome call because we truly believe that that is a retention point for people if they're able to get on and really get engaged and excited and connect with other members. And then we introduced the pathways. The biggest my favorite part about the retention point from Robert Scro is him literally laying out that you have to have a sequential pathway for people in the community in order for them not to get confused, for them to have really clear uh a really clear idea on what they're supposed to do next. And so for us, our pathways when we first went to the first school games, we had a big buffet of content in our classroom. it was, you know, learn motivation and learn uh sales and learn marketing. And so for us, a lot of the people that joined, they're just like, man, this is great, but I don't know where to start. So, we took all the content that was in our classroom and we put it into a pathway format so that anybody that joins, they know exactly where to start and what content is going to be the most suitable for them. This has had a tremendous impact on us lowering our churn because many members when they reach out, we're like, "Hey, do you need help finding everything?" getting there. No, I know exactly where to go. The pathways are very straightforward. So, the other thing too, it's not just about the content in the community. It's it's also about the connection that you're able to bridge between the members that are in the community. So, if any of you watch the All-In podcast, you might be familiar with Shamoth from uh who was an executive at Facebook. And so, he had coined the phrase uh seven friends in 10 days. If people at Facebook when they joined, if they were able to make seven friends in 10 days, then they ended up being a user for life. And so even though this is a paid group and Facebook was a free platform to join, we still wanted to have that same framework of like how do we make these people friends? How do we actually bridge connections and help them find the people that are going to help support them on their entrepreneurial journey? And so by establishing that, we try to have as many opportunities as possible for members to actually build real-time connection with other members on our calls. So we have networking calls. We on all of our onboarding calls, we always start them with a little bit of an icebreaker for members to connect, go into breakout rooms, introduce themselves. We when we have the live calls, we'll invite a billionaire or a millionaire that we interview on our channel and we'll do a live call with them. And then after the fact, we'll hold a discussion so that members can actually connect with one another. And then one of the uh cool tools that school has obviously is the leaderboard. And so anybody that reaches level six, we invite them to a private chat for what we call the A players for them to join and connect with other top members in the community. And so, you know, we have these communities and it's good and but a lot of people what they might do is they might put the community together and they might just put the content and they might do a live call every now and then and then that's it. They don't do anything else and they just sort of let it rest. But for us, we always want to make sure that in order to keep members coming back, we always want to surprise them with new content, always leveling up the game, and make it worthwhile to be a part of the School of Mentors. And so what we do is we invite on a new mentor every single week for a live call. You guys might do something a little bit different for your way to keep people excited, but for us, it's always having a new guest speaker every single week in our community. Uh we have monthly workshops in order for people. One of the feedback things that we got was that it's like, hey, it's cool to learn from the people on your channel that have achieved massive success, but I they're too far away from me. How do I get uh in how do I get a couple steps ahead? And so, we started offering these tactical workshops where people can come on and learn an actual skill that can help them move a couple steps ahead. And then also, we always try to keep things exciting by offering new material in the classroom. So ultimately what we try to do is every single month make it their worthwhile to want to stay by building connection by having new content in the classroom and just ultimately wanting to level up how they feel as an entrepreneur. So all right I'll see you guys in the school mentors. Thanks for watching. Let's go. What a presentation. I see school of hard knocks everywhere by the way. So, whatever you guys are doing, it's working. All right, that was the last presentation. We'll have 5 to 10 minute break and then we'll do award ceremony with the trophies. As a reminder, everyone for winning gets one of these trophies. They'll be getting sent to you. I know a lot of you guys have flown in so to get it big box. It's a bit of work. So, these will be shipped to you, but we'll take a picture with these over there. So, 5 10 minute break. The restrooms are there or over there. Then we'll do photos and then we'll be having lunch. Sound good? Let's go. like this anomaly. Okay.