Community builders say they want to grow, but when it actually comes down to it, they’re hesitant to scale. Because growth changes things.

When your community gets bigger, the culture shifts. The way you serve people has to evolve. And the systems that worked at 50 members will not work at 500.

In this episode, I break down what it really takes to scale your community without losing the sense of belonging that makes it work in the first place.

I walk through four key strategies we use with our clients to grow memberships while protecting culture. From creating advanced pathways for long-term members to encouraging sub-communities, designing small group experiences, and evolving your team structure.

If you’ve been feeling capped or unsure how to grow without breaking what you’ve built, this episode will give you a new way to think about it.

Want help with your scale strategy? Book a discovery call here

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A lot of people are actually scared to scale their community.

And before you're like, well, that's not me, hear me out.

So a lot of people are worried about what's going to happen when they're with their community, when more people join, when they go from 50 members to 200 members, when they go from 900 members to 2,000 members.

What happens when we scale, especially when we scale rapidly, is culture changes.

And the most important thing that drives community is the culture.

Culture that people feel belonging, that they feel like they're part of a community that understands them, that they're safe in.

They have that psychological safety.

And when we have these like huge growth spurts that can really impact a culture, the culture shifts and what the community feels like.

And so rightfully so, a lot of community builders are just scared of this growth.

And they worry also about how can I serve more people, especially my people that are like, in that 25 to 50 to 75 member range, that are like, well, if I double my membership size, I can't actually serve people the way I have been serving people.

And this absolutely happens in the thousands of members too.

This is kind of like the.

I did an episode recently about like plateauing and like hitting plateaus in your growth.

This is kind of like that where it's like you hit these different plateaus of member numbers and then when you scale to the next level, you have to readjust, you have to revisit your foundations so that you can restructure things, so that, so that we really allow for the belonging to happen, for people to be supported.

And that means that we need organizational changes, we need potential team updates, we need all kinds of things.

So I want to talk a little bit today about what are the things we do in order to scale while also maintaining and protecting culture.

So in our seven figure connected community model, our framework, we have three stages.

Architect, Activate and Amplify.

Architect is all about your foundations.

Activate is all about engagement and programming and Amplify is our scale stage.

This is where I like to think about something we call advanced pathways.

So advanced pathways are supporting people at different stages of their growth.

And when we have a community with really large numbers, there's going to be totally different tracks.

Right?

And I talk a lot about member journey.

We want to think about these member journeys being totally different and scalable, especially over time.

Like, let's say we're five years into a membership, the people that join in year one that are still around, probably that basic like stage one stuff isn't relevant.

For them anymore.

And we need to start thinking about what these advanced pathways look like for people that have been around.

And we always want to, you know, improve retention and have people around for a long time.

And that means like evolving what you're offering as they grow, like you grow with them.

So a really fun way to think about this is creating spaces or experiences for people to graduate to if they have accomplished their goals, if they have hit a certain plateau, if they've hit a certain level and now they're sort of ready for the next thing.

You need to be very attuned to those stages and to their needs and evolving like this next stage of growth that they're going through so that you can continue to serve them.

I'll give you an example.

My client Sepi, who runs, she hit refresh.

She has a community where she helps women over 30 move abroad.

Really incredible community where women are deciding what visa they're going to pursue, what job they're going to get, where they're going to move, plan their move and actually move.

And once they've actually moved, now she has members because she's had her membership for a while, now she has members that have actually moved.

And so, okay, this is a pivotal moment in time where it's like, okay, now where do they graduate to?

What is their next experience?

Because now they are a new a person, a United States citizen, living abroad, and in a totally different uncomfortable experience that they haven't had before.

Yes, they're excited, but there's also so much that they're like new problems are arising.

Right?

And so when we think about these different stages or milestones in their journey, we can start to design for that and design these like advanced pathways for people that reach there.

Now you don't need to over engineer this before you have people at that stage.

So this is why I focus so much on onboarding and early stage member journey.

But as people get further along and as you grow, your members grow with you, then you need to start designing these advanced pathways as you understand what they need and what they're working toward.

Okay, so that was the first way I want you to think about scaling culture.

Scaling memberships is creating spaces for people to graduate to.

The second thing is I want you to allow sub communities to thrive.

A lot of people get scared of what's happening in their community when people start to meet up outside of the community.

So for example, like the CEO of this company that we work with came to me and he was like, we need to do something.

People have organized their own WhatsApp chat.

And I was like, like that's awesome.

And he was really upset at me.

He was like what do you mean that's awesome?

That's not good.

We can't moderate it.

Blah blah, blah blah blah.

And I was like, well we don't need to moderate it.

Like these people connected and we have curated spaces for them and experiences for them and they're having such a great experience that they've made friends that they want to take to their their phone and be able to text them.

And we don't need to over engineer or over control that experience.

And I think community builders get so stuck on like how do we control every aspect of how are connecting?

And the reality is you can't.

A lot of what we're doing here is designing for serendipity.

So what I want you to do is allow and encourage these sub communities to become a thing.

Allow them to thrive, allow people to connect.

I'll give you an example from my own life.

So I joined J Claus's membership in oh geez, I don't know like four years ago.

I was one of the first members and I made friends that, that next spring.

I was, I was still working at Boss Babe at the time and I spok at Creator Economy Expo was the name of it.

I think they changed the conference to Content Entrepreneur Expo and now it's not even a conference anymore.

But anyways I was a speaker and I was hanging out with a bunch of lab members while I was there.

We became friends and then we decided to like self organize a mastermind and this was before Jay was running masterminds within the community.

But we self organized a mastermind that I still meet with.

We meet every single month.

We meet up once a year in person.

This is a few years later which is totally crazy.

We, but none of us have canceled our lab membership.

It doesn't mean that we no longer need the lab.

It's just a fun thing to say like oh, we, we came together because we were all members of the lab, right?

And so this is an example of a sub community thriving which does has no impact on retention.

Except that we're all raving about the experience that we were a part of.

You can allow sub communities to thrive by letting your members organize their own local chapters, by allowing them to organize their own meetups, by encouraging them to get people together to even do their own run their own event series like in the lab.

Actually somebody started like a co working Friday and it's like an event that's inside the lab, but it's member run and it's somebody you know in the community that runs that.

So letting this stuff happen like this is the serendipity of community.

This is what we don't want to over control, allow that stuff to thrive.

All right, that was two.

I have four of these for you.

So the third thing is when we're talking about scaling and planning for culture shifts, I want you to curate experiences for smaller groups once your group gets too big.

So let's say you're serving people in one open container.

You're maybe bringing people into one group call, but it's starting to feel too large.

People aren't getting their questions answered.

The Q&As are going too long.

This is when you start thinking about small group sessions or like grouping people together, maybe creating some, some sort of like small group mastermind program.

And this takes a lot more sussing out.

So I'm just going to speak about this one broadly.

But I want you to think about how you can create experiences for small groups to come together where they really are aligned.

Because once you have a larger community, it kind of goes back to what we were talking about before with sub communities.

It's like now you have your large community and then there's these sort of subgroups or categories or Personas that you can identify.

Okay, now can you group them together so that there can be small group sessions specific to what they're goals are?

Think a lot more about your programming and how you can curate these experiences for people to connect in small groups.

Because that's where the power of community is.

It's not in a room with 200 people on a live zoom call.

Right.

It's like when you can really get them into small pods.

So think about how to develop like a small pod session, mastermind, whatever you want to call it, strategy.

Okay, last one.

And this one's kind of obvious, but a lot of people don't do it.

Soon enough is you need to change your organizational team structure.

If you are scaling and you're adding a ton more members, you probably need more team members to support them.

So a lot of our clients end up adding coaches like co coaches in or a coaching team.

We have a community where we have a team of coaches and then those coaches actually facilitate masterminds within the community.

Also like programs that have scaled, you know, past 50 members, me like high ticket programs and we're starting to think like, ooh, we can't really serve people at that one to one Level we used to, okay, well can you add on other coaches to support them and then can we still do do like the same program but with more team members?

There are always ways to scale.

I think we get really stuck on like, especially for creator led brands or educators, it's like, well, I'm the main educator, I have to do the educating.

And yes, to an extent, but you could do like the core main lesson with a broader group and then have coaches that work with smaller groups in between.

So you can start to be a little bit more creative with how you organize your team structure to support the service level and success of your customers.

More members usually means more work, but that also means more money and it means more impact.

Right.

And so if you are bringing in more people, you need to adjust how you're serving them and you need to think about how do we protect the culture here by creating these small, intimate experiences by, by like really making sure that they can still be successful and connect with other members the way they could have if it was less, if there were less people in the group.

And so that's what I want you to take away today.

Re, like, look at your strategy and think about, okay, well, maybe I actually could go from 600 to a thousand members, even though I feel really capped right now.

We just need to adjust our strategy.

If you want help thinking about your skill strategy for your community, what it means to go hit that next plateau or, or move on to the next level of membership or program numbers, I want you to reach out to me.

There's a L link in the show Notes to book a call.

It's a free call.

We'll just chat about your community and talk about what's possible.

And I'll likely recommend that you do a strategy with us so that we can define exactly what this looks like, exactly what your scale plan is, and exactly how we can take you from where you're at today and where you want to be with your membership growth.

Okay.

Hope you enjoyed this one.

Sorry it was a little bit longer.

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Okay, talk to you next time.