Episode 43 Transcript

Hey everyone, it is me, Lisa, and welcome back to another episode of the Other 99%. Today I just wanted to chat with you just for a quick minute or two about building community in your business. Now, this is one thing that I sort of giggle at because people say that since COVID and a lot of stuff has gone online that community is lacking. And I want to disagree because I feel like you can build community in so many different ways and it’s nice to do community. It’s nice to build community face to face, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be built face to face. Now since COVID, I want to say that, I mean, I’ve expanded my network of people that I work with, probably like, I would say at least doubled. if not tripled. Now, I’m talking to people, I’m working with people in my business that I honestly would have never met if it were not for having the virtual option. So I think in our businesses, community is like a huge piece of the puzzle.

Now I’m talking about community in a number of different ways. This could be building your customer community, it could be building a team community. It could be building a networking community. And I think it’s so, so important that we find our community where we are comfortable. Now, if you’re comfortable meeting face-to-face, I totally get that. I believe that it’s gonna build strong connections and so forth. But I also feel that if you just focus on building community face-to-face, you’re gonna…limit your connections that you can make with people across, like, who knows, like coast to coast, country to country, depending on where, like, where you can work, where you can work your business and so forth.

So I think the biggest part of what opened my eyes to building my community abroad was becoming a member of the Modern Direct Seller Academy. And if you don’t know about the Modern Direct Seller Academy, I’m going to put a link in the show notes and you could check it out. The code that I put in will give you a little bit of a discount, just full transparency. It is an affiliate link. So if you decide to join, I do get a little bit of compensation for introducing you to the Academy. I just always want to be transparent with you guys. But I mean, I’ve been in the Modern Direct Seller Academy I think like it’s been well over two, maybe close to three years. I’d have to go check, but I’ve been in there for a while. And I just wanna say that, you know, it started off slow, but when I utilized the academy for more than just, you know, training and learning, and I branched out, and I connected with like-minded people, because let’s face it, people who are in the academy. And they’re going to be people like us. They’re going to be people who want to build our business, who, you know, want to expand our network, who want to grow our businesses from coast to coast. And when you connect with these people, you’re going to see great things happen.

And I just want to give a shout out to the three other ladies that I work with that I met through the Academy on a number of different things. And you wanna know something? None of us are in the same country and they’re not even in the same state. So we’re all over the place, but we come together virtually and we make great things happen. So just a shout out to Sammy, Susan and Hillary. You ladies are amazing. And I have a lot to thank them for. Currently we’re working on a huge project that, I mean, it has a potential to introduce our businesses to thousands of thousands of people with a click of one button. We’re working together on building a holiday gift guide. We linked arms with a total of nine consultants. So that’s including me. And we’re introducing this holiday gift guide to all of our email list our communities that we have built separately. And then what we’re doing is those who interact and engage will then be those contacts will then be shared with amongst the people within the group. So I mean, we’re, we’re building our network and our business at the same time.

Now I’ve worked with these ladies for the past two holidays. So we’ve done two other events.prior to this one, and they were all on Facebook. We called them the Holiday Express. I’ll put a link in the show notes because I do have a Holiday Express toolkit that I have created because of that. And it was a great thing because we know that we each treat our customers the same. So this is the biggest thing. And I just have to interrupt what I’m saying by saying this. When you’re looking at building a community, you want to build a community of like-minded people. You want to build a community with people that you know, like and trust, and that you would happily introduce them to your customer base.

Now, the great thing about being introduced to someone else’s customer base, some other direct sellers customer base, let’s say, is they already like the direct sales side of things. You’re not going to get the response from these people. It’s like, ew, I won’t support an MLM or a direct sales company. These people already value that other consultant enough to shop with them. They’ve already built a know, like, and trust factor with them. And when this consultant says, hey, hey, everyone, I have some friends that I think you might be interested in their products. take a peek and see if their products can help you, can fit into your lifestyle. They’re more likely to take a look at these products because they, again, they’ve already built that connection with that existing consultant and they’re going to look at the other products with open, like, you know, they’re not going to have any hesitation. They’re just going to, they’re going to look at it. They’re going to shop. because again, they already know the direct sales model and they already support it. So, you know, make sure you pick somebody that you know, like and trust. But now again, sorry, I’m all over the place because I’m so excited. Like, I mean, community is like such a huge thing.

And I just want you to know that these ladies that I work with, none of them are in my company. Okay, they each have their own company. We work well together. this type of community building doesn’t work when you’re working with people from your company. Yes, it’s a very important to build community within your company. And I have another set of ladies that I work with constantly in Epicure. And I give a shout out to them too, Leslie Chantel, Trisha and Penny. We talk all the time, we have our own connection, but I would never do an event like this with them because it’s like competing. We’re competing for each other’s customers. It just doesn’t make sense.

So when I built this other community, we call ourselves the Core Four. We did all these great things. We’ve done a number of events. And like I was saying about the Holiday Express, that was all done on Facebook. And what we did, we went from each other’s groups. So we almost did like a, it’s almost like a vendor event, but it’s, you’re asking the customer to travel from group to group. So hop aboard the holiday express. And today’s stop is gonna be Cooking Made Easy with Lisa Duck. And then the next stop is gonna be, you know, Easy Style with Sammy for Color Street Nails. And then so forth. So we’re asking the customers to travel instead of asking the customers to come and join a group that basically becomes stagnant after our event.

So we’re building the community in that group. So it worked out so well. I think Susan was the only one who tracked it the first year. And I think her customer community grew by over a hundred people from this event. So, I mean, there are so many things that are so, like they’re possible. Like, I mean, it’s crazy the amount of growth that you could see from linking arms with other consultants. So I’m super excited for this upcoming event. We’ve called it Shop From Gnome This Holiday Season, and it’s a holiday gift guide. And I mean, I’m putting it together as we speak, the holiday gift guide part of it. And I am super excited to hit the, you know, the send button and have it go live because it’s beautiful. Like we’ve created such an amazing booklet that is gonna help a ton of people shop this holiday season. And-To top it off, I mean, we’re gonna grow our customer base authentically by doing something like this.

So I think it’s very, very important that you build a community for your, like not only your customers, but for your network, for your business. So think about who you can link arms with. Think about other direct sellers that you might shop with think about people in maybe other virtual vendor events or even in-person vendor events that you have grown to know, like and trust and see what else you guys can do. Link arms together. You don’t have to wait for someone else to create an event for you guys to go set up a table or create an event for you guys to post on social media. You could do it yourself. So not only did we do a holiday event, but we did a Mother’s Day event. And we have so many other ideas coming in our minds about this coming year.

So stay tuned because I’m sure when we have stuff ready, I’m gonna share. And I’m honestly thinking about putting together some sort of toolkit for this gift guide because it’s brilliant. I mean, just think about it. Even if you had somebody who…only had 100 people on your list, their email list, let’s say, and you had nine other consultants who each had 100 people or 10, let’s go 10 for an even number, who each had 100 people on their email list. That’s a potential of your information going out from not only 100 people from your original list, but to 1000 people. because every single person is gonna send it out to their list. So with one click of a button, you have now 10 times your exposure. And again, like I said, these people already know, like and trust this seller that’s recommending it and they will take a peek. They’re gonna take a look and see. And if your products suit what they’re like, suit something that they need that like fills a void in their life, like for example with Epicure, if they have holiday or they have stress with meal times or on the holiday, or even just like everyday meal stress, they’re gonna take a peek.

So think about ways that you can build a community. I highly recommend that you start now, look at getting a group of your core maybe. I would recommend no more than four people if you wanna do like a group, like a main group where you do all the brainstorming and think about ways to share events to do and stuff like that. Because the more people you have in, the more complex it is with everybody’s ideas. So grab like a small group of people where you work together and then bring in other sellers that you know, like, and trust to do the bigger events. But we do smaller events too with just the four of us. So I know that I rambled a lot in this episode, but I mean, the main thing about this episode is

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Think about your business and think about how you can grow your business. Um, and these ladies that I work with, we all work from the heart. So we, we know that we want to bring our customers the best value that we can bring them. Um, we never are in it to just make the extra buck. Um, I know, I know that I And this is funny because like I’m one of the only Canadians in the group and the others are US. So I know some companies can’t sell to Canada. So I’m like very, very big on ensuring that if there is a company who that consultant because they’re in the US cannot sell to the Canadian market, I make sure that they get a Canadian counterpart from their company and we put the link in for our Canadian shoppers. So like I said, I’m always in it for my customers. I’m always thinking about my customers and I want to make sure that they get the best value from anything that I do. So when you come from everything, come from the heart, make sure that you’re providing value to your customer base and you’re just going to see so much success.

So I’d love to hear from you if you have any questions about building a community or have any questions about anything that I said in this episode, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. You can find me at space it up with Lisa Duck on Instagram. You could go to my lisaduck.com website and find all my information there. And I’m happy to chat with you. And I hope, I just wanna wish you so much success in your business this holiday season. And I hope that you have big plans for 2025 because I think direct sales is changing, but there is gonna be like huge change and it’s gonna be so exciting. So make sure you just ride the wave and I’ll see you at the top. Hope you enjoyed this episode of The Other 99% and we will see you again next week. Take care.